Who doesn’t love a good con?
Recap

“Follow Me My Friend / To Glory at the End”
We see the end of episode five from a different perspective first as Alice “comes to” after her death and Rio is there to help her cross over. While Alice is dismayed over dying after breaking her family curse, Rio points out that she is a protection witch who died protecting someone. In the present, Jen is clawing at the door from the last trial, trying to get Lilia back. On the Road, Rio has a talk with Agatha, upset that she tried to hide Billy from her. Agatha realizes that Rio wants him because she views him as an abomination for taking over another’s body. But she can’t take him because he’d just reincarnate again—he needs to hand himself over. Agatha agrees to deliver him if Rio promises to leave her alone for a long, long life, and then not show her face when Agatha eventually dies. Rio agrees to the terms.
Billy and Jen join Agatha on the Road and they come upon their shoes again. The Road is a circle and Agatha has no idea how to get off, so she suggests just running it again. Billy decides that taking their shoes off out of respect for the Road was a mistake and puts his shoes on. The trio wake up in body bags in an empty room. The lights are going out slowly to time the final test. Jen is determined to save them, and Billy points out that she’s already saved lives on this journey without magic. It’s revealed that Agatha is the one who bound Jen; she didn’t know it was her, she was paid to do it by the doctors. Jen takes a lock of Agatha’s hair and does the unbinding ritual, denying Agatha’s power over her. Then Jen vanishes, having received what she wanted from the Road. The next is Billy: Agatha knows he wants his brother back, so they need to find Tommy a body to occupy, like Billy did for himself.
They sit together on the floor and Agatha encourages Billy to remember his life from before, at the moment they both “died,” and Agatha guides him to find a body for Tommy. They find a boy being drowned by his peers—it’s not in a good place, the boy has no family to love him, and Billy wants to know if he’s killing this boy so his brother can live. At the moment Tommy enters the body, Billy vanishes from the Road. Agatha assures the air that sometimes boys just die. She opens her locket containing a lock of her son’s hair and a seed. The lights are going out, but she suddenly has the idea to plant the seed in a crack in the floor using magic. When it grows, the lights come back and she rushes to the door insisting that she’s passed the trial. She emerges onto her lawn and Rio is there: Agatha didn’t bring her Billy, so she has to offer herself. They begin to fight, Agatha using Lilia’s advice to avoid a killing blow.
Before Rio can kill Agatha, Billy shows up to aid Agatha. He asks her not to take all of his power and begins siphoning it to her. Agatha takes a great deal of it, but does manage to stop before she kills Billy. Agatha tosses Billy away to fight Rio properly, but she’s losing. Billy rushes to Agatha’s side, but she insists that it should be her to die. Billy won’t allow it and offers himself up to Rio… just as Agatha promised. She turns to go, but Billy projects his voice into her mind and asks if this is how her son died. Agatha stops, turns back to Rio, and kisses her—Agatha dies. Billy drives home to worried parents and insists he’s fine. He heads into this room and realizes that all the components of the Road journey are in there. Billy is the one who created the Witches’ Road, and the signs were there all the way through (mainly in Agatha’s commentary). He hears a voice behind him, turns, and screams.

“Maiden Mother Crone”
Agatha Harkness is in the woods in 1750. She’s pregnant and about to give birth when Rio shows up. Agatha insists that Rio leave her child alone, which Rio cannot do—all she can do is give Agatha time. She won’t say how much time, however, and Agatha has Nicholas alone. She uses him to get sympathy from other witches so that she can take their power and continue on. Six years on, Nicholas is part of the gambit more actively; he leads the witches to his mother so she can siphon from them. He’s beginning to question the plan, however, wanting to know why they can’t stay with the witches and survive alongside them. Agatha insists that the witches would try to kill them instead. Nicholas begins to sing to a tune he invented about the wind-y road. The song transforms over time into the Witches Road song, which Nicholas sings in taverns for coin. One night they’re sleeping in their camp by the woods and Rio appears to the boy. When Agatha wakes, Nicholas is dead.
After Agatha buries him, a witch approaches asking if she knows how to get to the Witches’ Road because she heard her singing the song. Agatha realizes that she’s created the perfect con: She can tell witches that she’ll get them onto the Road; they can sing the song together. When the path doesn’t appear she can goad them into attacking her and steal their power, killing them all. She tried to do the same to the group with Billy, but his power created an actual Road. Back in the present, Agatha appears in Billy’s room as a ghost. He asks about the Road and Agatha explains that he’s the one who made it real. Billy panics because he believes this makes him a murderer. Agatha points out that she killed Alice, and Lilia made her own choice to face the Salem Seven, though she can’t say anything for Mrs. Davis. She adds that Billy did save one life, however: Jen is alive and well and has her power back.
Billy heads back to Agatha’s house and tries to do a banishing spell for Agatha’s spirit over the door to the Road. Billy is using Agatha’s locket for the spell, and wants to know why she won’t just die. Agatha admits that she can’t face her son, and makes contact with the locket, taking it and keeping it on her person. Billy wonders if maybe it isn’t good for Agatha to be a ghost; Agatha thinks they might make a great team. They agree to be a coven of two while acknowledging that they both have a tendency to get their coven members killed. Billy closes the door he created to the Road and leaves the cement as a memorial to those they lost, and the duo leave together.
Commentary

Normally I’d be mad that Agatha died, but in this instance it was so clearly done as a way to keep her attached to Billy’s hip to cause maximum chaos in the future, that I’m not sure I’m bothered? It’s a pretty clever way to keep her as a mentor to him, the way she was to Wanda in the comics.
This finale is extremely weird in its pacing, and there have been rumors about a shuffle on the flashback stuff, so I’m curious as to whether or not that’s a part of it. That said, the show has won a personal award from me for being the only Marvel series not to end on an endless drag-out brawl that completely destroys the character and tone of everything that proceeded it. And, in fact, it resulted in far more emotional moments in episode eight than I was expecting, starting with Jen releasing herself from the binding Agatha (kinda unknowingly) put on her.
There’s a bit of a Labyrinth-esque “you have no power over me” aspect to the unbinding, but the choice to linger on the repetition, to move through the stages with Jen as she realizes this curse is ending, was incredibly powerful. Sasheer Zamata really dug in there with her heels and drove it home. And I do appreciate that if anyone was going to make it out of the venture relatively unscathed, it was her. (Even if I still can’t deal with the show completely glossing over how old Jen is and how different her experience of the world would have been even compared to women much older than her, living as a Black woman in the United States.)
That said, Billy’s journey to get Tommy back took things up a notch, and that’s largely down to the immediacy provided in the Road mechanics. (Which just twists that knife harder when you remember that it’s Billy making himself rush through this trial faster, according to his own imagined rules about how the Road should behave.) The result sees him leaving his brother in a comparative hell, nothing like the loving family that he received in taking over William Kaplan’s life. And because he did this retroactively, at the same time he took over William’s body, Tommy has now had years in that life with even less understanding of how he got there than Billy had.
Then we have Agatha, who, mercifully in all of this, doesn’t become an antihero in search of a better purpose. I fully admit to being a sucker for a redemption arc, but Agatha is delicious exactly as she’s presented: A lying, scheming, con artist slash serial killer who’s in love with Death. Does she clearly have a super tragic backstory that makes sense of her proclivities? If her dear old ghost mom was anything to go by, absolutely. But having her renounce all her evil ways doesn’t make her a better character. (Also, it’s still rare enough for women to get the fun villains. Let us keep her.)
There are so many things that are never explained, and I (mostly) like the fact that they don’t spell it all out. We have no idea how Agatha met Rio or why. We don’t know how she became pregnant or why she wanted a child. We never learn why Nicholas was marked for death ahead of time. We don’t find out much about Agatha’s power-draining abilities aside from what she insists and what we’re shown, so we have no way of knowing if there is (or was) any truth to her claim of not being able to control it. The thing I don’t like is that we get far less of Rio’s character once her identity is revealed, which feels like a mistake? The reveal doesn’t make her less interesting, but the show seems to think it does, or conversely seems to think that there’s no point in giving her much thought after that.
My biggest surprise for the entire show was being pleased at how they handled the backstory with Nicholas, even if the placement of the flashback was off: The series managed to make motherhood important for Agatha without making it the reason for the majority of her actions. He matters to her in a way that feels consistent and meaningful, but most of her behaviors are clearly informed by much earlier events. Where Multiverse of Madness ruined that for Wanda’s character in a big way, Agatha is a great example of how to use motherhood as a piece that makes up an entire human being, rather than focal point being used because some writers can’t think of any other reasons for women to have motivation.
But the lineage of this series with WandaVision is a straight line, when you come right down to it. Both shows are treatises on different types of grief, and also the ways grief often makes itself into a generational talisman: Billy and Tommy were created out of Wanda Maximoff’s grief, and both carry that grief with them. Billy literally uses the same tools his mother used to try and work through his own pain… and to better overall results, in fact. (Progress!) Whether or not a family reunion ever occurs, Billy and Tommy’s entry into this story comes from a markedly different place than any other characters in the MCU. I hope they use them well going forward.
Tarot Readings and Witchy Thoughts

- Say it with me: It’s never Mephisto. (Yes, I will be pleased about this for a month.)
- I love that the Witches’ Road was a con, but I might love even more that Agatha’s abilities make her kind of like a vampire? The way she needs to be invited in, the way she drains people of their life-force. Also loved that they do the old-fashioned birthing method of just squatting up against a tree in the woods and bearing down onto a blanket.
- While I do enjoy Billy’s Labyrinth-y bedroom (Sarah’s bedroom also contains all the pieces of her adventure in the film, manifested from her imagination), the thing I enjoy most is that they’ve given Billy broad enough taste that I’m guessing some younger viewers might find new favorites by staring at his walls: Rocky Horror Picture Show, Buffy, Carrie, and so on. Also, they saw an opportunity to put up the largest Trans Lives Matter banner that they could, and went for it. Beats the random little pin in Multiverse of Madness by a stretch, I’ll say that.
- One thing I need to know: Does kissing Rio always lead to dying? Because… if so, that puts a very different spin on the moment earlier in the show where Agatha almost kisses her and Rio stops it from happening.
- They still went with the usual MCU Leather-and-Metal Special for Wiccan’s look, but I loved how bright his colors are? Maybe Wolverine’s yellow suit finally warmed the right people up.
And that’s a wrap! Thanks for walking the Road.
“We never learn why Nicholas was marked for death ahead of time.”
Do we need to? Infant mortality throughout most of human history has been extremely high. We often hear that average life expectancy back then was in the 30s or thereabouts, but that’s because so many babies died in infancy, cancelling out all the people who lived to their 70s or so. I just assumed that Nicholas was going to be stillborn from natural causes, but Agatha begged Death to let him be born alive.
I found the finale quite effective. I loved how the episode used the song throughout as an evolving, unifying element and a key part of the storytelling. The whole show’s done that, but never more so than here. My one problem with it is that Nicky’s voice sounded autotuned when he sang it in the tavern.
I also love the revelation that the witch paraphernalia we’ve been seeing in the end titles all season was actually in Billy’s room all along, a subtle clue that we didn’t have enough info to recognize. We thought it was just a stylish, symbolic montage, but it was actually part of the storytelling, and I appreciate the deftness of that.
I did find it oddly open-ended, though. Billy changing his mind about banishing Agatha seemed kind of abrupt. I guess they wanted to leave it open for a second season or something, but it felt a bit arbitrary. I was also a little surprised at what a small part Rio/Death played. Pivotal, sure, but brief and kind of anticlimactic.
Didn’t Agatha’s detective delusion in the first episode entail hunting a serial killer? Maybe that was a clue to her true nature. Another clue was the rumor that she was the only person ever to have come back alive from the Witches’ Road. Now we know where that rumor came from. In a way, this whole series really was a murder mystery.
And Agatha would’ve gotten away with it too, if not for that meddling kid…
I don’t think it’s meant to set up a second season. There are other possibilities. Supposedly, there are least three WandaVision spinoffs in development. The Vision TV show meant for 2026, and also a Wanda-centric movie that Jac Schaeffer is allegedly developing that would be made after the upcoming two Avengers films. And there’s also a new show recently announced by Marvel – we don’t yet know what its focus would be.
I did say “a second season or something,” encompassing the possibility of a sideways sequel like this was to WandaVision.
I absolutely love that the secret at the heart of Witches’ Road song is that it really was Agatha All Along.
How exactly do you name a series after a banger of a song, and then never play the song?
I have a lot respect for Jac Schaeffer and the Agatha writers. WandaVision showed us the possibilities of building a show around a main character processing grief, but Agatha pushes this to a whole new level. And I can now safely say, this turned out the best MCU/Disney+ show by far. And that’s because the higher-ups trusted the writers to do their thing and allow the show to be its own thing, while still being mindful of its place in the greater canvas of the MCU. A show so expressive and so nuanced in a way I didn’t think was possible.
Just the care they put on each scene to really hit those emotional beats. Even small stuff like Jen’s attempt at unbinding Agatha’s spell hits hard. You feel the pain of her character. Superbly acted.
I was expecting something more sinister in regards to how Agatha lost Nicholas Scratch – that she somehow sold him out. It turned out to be far simpler, but no less tragic. Imagine begging Death herself and Death giving us a longer glimpse of a life that could have been before snatching it away at a moment’s notice. No wonder Agatha ended up despising her. Those flashbacks to the 1750s were brutal. Just the scene of her very pregnant self all alone without anyone to help her. Agatha may be a self-serving survivalist, but even I felt sorry for her during that ordeal. Just killing other witches to keep that hope of a life that could have been. So complicated, and yet so human.
And what a superb job of casting. The actor playing Nicholas was not only capable of keeping up with Hahn, but also made Scratch a relatable kid who both treats their con like a fun game, while also conveying just how tired he is of doing the same thing. And I love that it doesn’t turn into some moral conflict between mother and son (akin to Morty’s rejection of Rick’s nihilism). He just wants to rest for a day.
And to top it off, we get one of the best twists in recent memory. Now we know just how powerful Billy could become, creating a lot of interesting possibilities in the future. I am more than looking forward to see the next chapter of this story. If jumping to Billy Caplan’s deceased car wrecked body was traumatic enough, imagine what it must be like for the drowning victim that Tommy is taking over. I’m hooked.
I tend to agree that Rio felt underused, but Plaza nailed the big scenes. The way she can be both sinister with that half-mask and also tender and caring at the moment of death itself. I’m just speechless.
The same can be said about that scene between Agatha and Billy where she modulates between that tenderness and frustration all at once. Talk about a complicated, messy, nuanced story. I’m just grateful. This show pretty much wiped clean my recent frustrations with the MCU’s TV side following the Secret Invasion debacle (Echo was also good – a sign that things were changing for the better behind the scenes).
Both of these shows are pretty good shows, with solid storylines and good to great acting. They’re getting splashed with the misogynist mewling that’s infested so much of fandom (I produce shows with heavy fight choreography and I was gobsmacked with all the inane rants about “terrible fights” in Echo).
Hand the show running over to folks who know what they’re doing. Let the characters travel their arc without trying to force them into a slot. Well get better stories and better shows.
We don’t know how she became pregnant or why she wanted a child.
It occurs to me that Agatha’s birthing of Nicholas allowed her to embody the traditional trinity of witches: Maiden, Mother, Crone. Whether this was to key to further power or as a natural extension to the power of witchcraft, I don’t know, and I don’t think it matters. It’s a cycle that’s written deep into human lore and it may just be a natural outgrowth of Agatha’s journey.
Back then, of course, pregnancy was just an unavoidable hazard of being sexually active (presuming Agatha is/was bi). Unless witches had some form of contraceptive spells or potions, pregnancy wouldn’t necessarily have been planned.
I got vibes that this was a pregnancy that didn’t include a man (the whole “made him from scratch” bit), Not sure how seriously to take that, of course….which was deliberately done, I think.
That was mainly to justify why his full name is Nicholas Scratch, I think. And she explicitly said that she didn’t conjure him with a spell or potion but made him from scratch — in other words, she grew him the natural way within her own body. Even if a father contributed a single sperm cell, she’s the one that did the rest of the work.
In the comics, Scratch was rumored to have a demonic father, which is presumably the source of his name (since “Old Nick” and “Mr. Scratch” are traditional nicknames for Satan).
The issue there becomes how they’re moving even further from the concept of Jennifer Kale. Jennifer Kale doesn’t have to be a blonde white woman but she does have to be a woman from the Florida Everglades and friend of Man-Thing.
Why does she “have to be” anything? They’ve already radically departed from the comics’ versions of Agatha, Nick, and others. Many MCU characters have little more than a name in common with their comics counterparts.
It’s still unclear how much, or how little, control Agatha has over her power draining ability. I think Alice’s fatality had more to do with the fact Agatha was fighting for her own existence against her mother’s shade when Alice attacked their merged form than any deliberate act of Agatha’s; she seemed honestly surprised at the way things turned out. Not particularly broken up or remorseful, but surprised.
Moreover, Agatha’s ability to choose to stop draining Billy might have been due to the fact that she had already absorbed as much as she could hold. Remember Superman’s old enemy The Parasite? Their first encounter ended with Parasite trying to absorb all of Supe’s energy — with the result that he underwent an explosive meltdown, as no human body, even a mutated one like his, could contain a Kryptonian power level. (He resurrected later, which leads us to…)
…A possible rationale for Agatha’s (non-physical) survival: If the power derived from the Scarlet Witch is sufficient to allow walk-in reincarnation, then the amount she drained from BIlly might have let her stabilize herself without a physical form. That she is able to interact with the material plane sufficiently to reclaim her locket talisman certainly points to any number of story possibilities.
Pretty sure Rio’s kiss was fatal here because of Agatha’s deal with her to have Rio let her go once she delivered Billy… Which she did.
She no longer had any protection and now would/could die so her touch was fatal.
I missed out on most of the discussion in real time, but I will say, I’ve had this dang song stuck in my head for months. :)
This is definitely in my top tier of shows for sure, it just felt so fun and creative and had some really cool storytelling.
I agree that I am glad Agatha has stayed a villain! And make no mistake, she is. Yes, she has a tragic backstory. She has somebody she loves, and she has a strained relationship with her mother (although we really don’t know what drove her to say that – it’s possible she didn’t LITERALLY know she was evil from birth but just is saying that in retrospect) and has been treated poorly but that’s still not an excuse for luring (and selling out!) your fellow witches for centuries. Even when it was for her son, to buy him time, that’s not right either.
Honestly, in some ways it broke my heart to see Billy say “me too” when Agatha talks about killing her coven because they are NOT the same!
What I do wonder is if the Witches Road is permanently real now. Could other witches find it now? Does it exist outside of Billy’s magic? I know he did seal the door at the end so I’m not sure if that represents him ending that spell. But I loved the reveal that it was just a form of Wanda’s reality warping magic all along.
I really hope we see more of Jennifer. I really loved her on SNL so it was really fun to see her get a role like this.
And lastly, I can’t stop thinking about Tommy’s host body. :( That poor boy died alone. I actually wasn’t sure if they were implying he did it ‘retroactively’ as I thought he was perhaps carrying Tommy with him all this time, but I am not sure if that’s just my own misinterpretation.
As for Nicholas – I at least tend to take ‘making from scratch’ to mean she made him the ‘natural’ way. Even if sperm was involved as one of the ‘ingredients’, that’s still making from scratch. And if she DID create life on her own, that kinda seems to go against what she said in WandaVision where she was so astounded Wanda could create life. (Plus that would be one hell of a spell/incantation…). I don’t know that they are pulling an Acolyte here. ;) (Speaking of, I kinda love that we got witchy shows this year in both franchises…)
I had also turned to my husband afterwards and said I wasn’t sure if I felt this was another example of ‘motherhood makes you crazy’ the same way Multiverse of Madness was, but that overall I agreed it just felt different – it was handled in a much more interesting and fleshed out way. I think you have articulated that better. Especially as the story establishes Agatha was already a bit villainous before that….she’s just a villain who happens to be a mother.
Sorry if this is a bit disjointed, but I’m definitely pumped to go out and get the soundtrack (there were some great reprises of some of the WandaVision motifs) and excited for where the story will go next.
Things I liked:
Things I didn’t like:
Sigh. I get that these miniseries are part of a larger whole, but the end of WandaVision was hard, and this was harder.
However, I enjoyed the commentary. Thanks, Emmet! And everyone else!
I found the finale a bit underwhelming. I’m not sure why as the flashback material with Agatha, Nicky, and Rio worked for me. Part of it could be that among the most recent Marvel comics I’ve read is the 2015 Scarlet Witch series in which Agatha’s ghost is Wanda’s companion and they walk the Road together, so the status quo we’re left with felt kind-of ass backwards, although it’s not like the MCU isn’t known for (often quite smartly, occasionally to my considerable frustration) remixing its source material. I’m still disappointed over Agatha being cast as a villain, despite Kathryn Hahn’s fantastic performance, but that’s a years-old complaint and central to the show’s buy-in anyway. I was definitely confused that we were supposed to read William’s Usual Suspects epiphany as just that because it made perfect sense on its own that the whole gestalt of the Road would be tied to the perception of witchcraft over time, both the aspects that formed the basis of broader cultural representations that William had consciously or unconsciously collected and how that sort of corruption/permutation resonated with or through the travelers of the Road.
Just to clarify: I don’t mind that Billy created the Road and that it had been merely a scam of Agatha’s, um, all along — inadvertently at first, too; really it was quite cleverly presented — but it did not immediately occur to me when he was looking at the stuff around his room putting together the pieces for himself what his stupefaction even meant.