The following story contains spoilers for the ending of Agatha All Along.
AGATHA ALL ALONG was exactly what Marvel needed. After a rough couple years of projects that largely divided fans (and this past summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine, which made a ton of money but didn’t really push anything forward), Agatha All Along arrived with a ton to prove. The de facto sequel to 2021’s mega hit WandaVision, Agatha All Along promised to follow Kathryn Hahn’s mercurial witch Agatha Harkness in a whole new adventure, with an almost entirely new cast of characters played by Joe Locke, Aubrey Plaza, Sasheer Zamata, Patti Lupone, and more.
With Agatha, we didn’t particularly know what to expect. WandaVision was three and a half years ago, and continued into the 2022 Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness film—what could this new story even be about? As it turns out, quite a lot. Agatha was a ton of fun from the jump, but where the show really succeeded was in building characters who we learned to love and care about, and in showrunner Jac Schaeffer’s clever way of crafting story and using that to enrich the characters she’s brought to screen. She knows how to make the emotional stakes feel high.
Agatha All Along concluded with a two-episode finale that brought this particular story to a close, but also manages to set up a whole lot for the future (whether that’s in an Agatha All Along season 2, the upcoming Vision show, or something else entirely). But that doesn’t mean there weren’t a whole lot of surprises, twists, and turns along the way.
We know you were watching this whole series on the edge of your seat; we’re invested in Agatha and Billy now, too. If you’re looking for a little clarity about what, exactly, shook out in the finale and why it turned out that way, keep reading, because we’ve got you covered.
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What really happened with Billy/Wiccan and the Witches’ Road?
If you’re reading this story, we assume you’ve been watching along with Agatha All Along—and so we won’t waste time recapping the events of the entire series. But something funny starts happening about midway through the eighth episode of Agatha All Along, titled “Follow Me My Friend / To Glory at the End”: it feels like things are wrapping up. But… there’s an episode and a half still to go! It starts creating this sinking feeling that another shoe is about to drop—and, eventually it does.
The final trial on the Witches’ Road plays out at the start of the episode—Jen (Sasheer Zamata) regains her magic (when she was randomly bound by Agatha, a twist that didn’t really have a point other than further demonstrating Agatha’s troll nature). More importantly, Agatha helps Billy plant Tommy’s soul in a new body, and Agatha herself plants a dandelion in her basement. All three succeed, and the Witches’ Road trials end. But then we see Agatha back home in Westview, visited again by Death (Aubrey Plaza)—and she’s got a bill to collect. Death is taking either Agatha or Billy (who arrives to save the day in a very cool looking Wiccan costume)—and they’ve got to figure it out themselves. There’s no cheating death.
Agatha at first is willing to give up Billy, but she shows a bit of growth and ultimately sacrifices herself, allowing Billy to return home free. Things feel like they’re wrapping up when Billy arrives back at the Kaplan house, and returns to his room… but then we start getting a distinctly Usual Suspects feeling. Looking around the room, Billy sees all sorts of posters, items, and garb that remind him of the experience he and the coven just had on the Witches’ Road. And through all of that, it becomes clear—in the same way Wanda Maximoff created the Hex without intention or even realizing, Billy created the Witches’ Road without intention or even realizing. He hears Agatha arrive behind him, and episode 8 concludes.
In episode 9, Agatha—now a ghost!—lets Billy know a little bit more detail. He did create the Witches’ Road, much to her surprise. And to Billy’s horror, he realizes that means he’s actually responsible for the deaths of Alice, Sharon Davis, and Lilia. It’s all very sad, because Billy is a good kid. And he’s taking it tough.
But perhaps the most important takeaway of everything here is that it proves just how powerful Billy/Wiccan already really is. He can create and warp entire realities with his mind—as Agatha said earlier in the series, he really is so much like his mother.
Why did Agatha kill all those witches? What was her plan?
Episode 9 of Agatha All Along, titled “Maiden Mother Crone,” brings us back to 1750 for a The Witch-esque extended flashback to show Agatha’s early life with her much-mentioned but not-yet-seen son, Nicholas Scratch. And as it turns out, Nicholas almost died at birth—but Agatha got Death/Rio to give her some time, though Death promised she’d be back. Six years later, Nicholas is part of Agatha’s scheme to steal power from unknowing witches; they sing a little song (which would become known as “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road”), and Agatha steals magic from witches, keeping herself strong much like we saw her do with Alice a few episodes back.
But along their journey, Death eventually returns for Nicholas, and takes him. Agatha is heartbroken, and so she leans fully into becoming the sarcastic, amoral witch we know and love. Having gained the reputation of knowing how to get to the Witches’ Road, Agatha eventually and repeatedly convinces covens to join her, before trolling them into attacking her with magic; eventually, she turns the table, stealing all their magic and killing the entire covens.
In a fantastic sequence (set to “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road”), we see Agatha doing this same thing over and over through the years. This happens enough that by the time it reaches the coven we know from Agatha All Along, it makes full sense: Agatha never knew how to get to the Witches’ Road—she was just planning on stealing the power of these witches and killing them.
There was one wrinkle in her plan, though: Billy Maximoff. Billy’s Wanda-esque powers allowed him to conjure up a whole Witches’ road from his mind, much to Agatha’s shock. So Agatha obliged, and while Billy blamed himself for killing Lilia, Sharon, and Alice on the road, Agatha makes the point that if you want to get technical, he kind of saved Jen—because Agatha was going to kill all four of them initially anyway.
Let’s talk about something else really quickly: the fact that Marvel and Jac Schaeffer resisted putting Agatha on any sort of real redemption arc is commendable. It worked enough for Loki, sure, but it’s hard to put a villain at the center of a project and not turn them into a real protagonist. But here, in Agatha All Along, we see a woman who remains an unapologetic murderer, albeit one with a soft spot here and there—and who we understand a bit better by the end of the series. It helps, certainly, that Kathryn Hahn and Joe Locke are both so good bouncing off of each other.
Did Agatha really die? Why did she turn into a ghost?
While a lot of what we saw in Agatha All Along was ultimately conjured up by Billy Maximoff, all of the deaths were for real—including Agatha’s at the end of episode 8. But while Lilia, Sharon, and Alice remained dead—and were enshrined as a tribute to Billy’s Witches’ road—Agatha is now a white-haired ghost.
Why? Well, one reason is that she’s not ready for the afterlife, unable to face her son Nicholas Scratch. She’s not ready to move on. Billy almost banished her with a new spell, but once she admitted her vulnerable state stemming from her emotions about her son, he understood and let her stick around. There’s also the Marvel Comics history of it all. While Agatha has a lengthy comics history (including ties to the Fantastic Four), she has spent a significant time as a mentor to Wanda—and much of that time has been as a ghost (Marvel.com did a great breakdown of this history).
Agatha being dead, but still able to communicate and move as a ghost is also a fun (and kind of silly, in a good way) device to keep her around for future adventures. Clearly, Billy and Agatha’s next journey is to find Tommy’s soul in his new body, and explain to him what’s happened. When and where we’ll see that story play out is anyone’s guess, but after the success of Agatha All Along, it’s good to assume to guess we’ll see it sooner rather than later.
