I have to say, the MCU doesn’t half love celebrating Halloween these days. I mean last year it was the Marvel Special Werewolf By Night and this year we get a two episode finale for Agatha All Along, the witch-tastic sequel to WandaVision. While I have to admit that I was a sucker for Katheryn Hahn’s portrayal of the power hungry spell caster, I was kind of confused that the character had managed to bag herself an entire series for herself; and yet for the past seven episodes the show has been constantly impressing me with its twists, turns and some really good characterization that’s elevated it week after work into being one of the MCU’s most consistent shows.
However, the end is nigh and Marvel tend to be a little hit and miss when it comes to end their TV shows, so can Agatha manage to overcome this over-familiar curse and land that broomstick that befits the sheer confidence if Marvel’s most conniving witch? It’s time to find out – but my money’s on Agatha.
With the latest trial finished, yet another member of the coven fallen and all the remaining secrets laid bare, it’s finally time to get the low down on the rather unnerving details that Rio is really Death incarnate. While we ponder what a relationship between Death herself and a terminally selfish witch could possibly be like (toxic as fuck, I’d imagine), the “green witch” lays out her plan to her ex. Simply put, the fact that Billy Maximoff is alive is understandably an abomination to someone who takes great interest in keeping the balance of all that is and Death wants Agatha to betray Billy and convince him to offer himself freely to her clutches.
Meanwhile, remaining members of the coven have discovered a very worrying fact about the Witches’ Road itself: it’s nothing but a big circle that’s ultimately led them right back to where they started from which proves to be a little worrying for Agatha, Billy and Jennifer. But after being transported to another trial yet more dirty secrets start leaking out when, purely by chance, Jennifer discovers that it was Agatha herself who casually bound her powers a hundred years earlier just to make a quick buck and then promptly forgot all about it.
In her rage, Jennifer manages to unbind her powers and escape leaving Agatha and Billy to their fate, but as time ticks down, Harkness decides to help her young companion achieve his goal and try to find a body to ensnare his brother Tommy’s essence just like what happened with him. However, once that’s taken care of, Billy also vanishes, leaving Agatha to finish the final task on her own – but even if she succeeds, she still need to regain her lost powers, escape back to the surface world and work out if she’s going to keep her word to either Billy or Death. But in the aftermath, a sacrifice will be made and some staggering revelations (yes, more) will come to light which flips everything that’s just occured upside down.
After watching both episodes (don’t worry, the review for the ninth instalment will be coming directly), it’s clear that episode 8 is the big finish while episode 9 is more of a quieter epilogue that let’s everything come to a more dignified stop – but while as I’ve no intention to spoil the ending just yet, it’s time to lay a critical eye on Agatha’s “big finish” episode and while there’s some stock MCU stuff going on here (zappy CGI powers, stunt people getting hurled about on wires, accurate super hero costume reveal), the show manages to keep focus well enough not to lose the best parts of itself in the rush.
For a start, the relationship between Agatha and Death may not be particularly clearly defined other than a long, bitter history and long, smoldering glares, but the fact that it’s Hahn and Aubrey Plaza’s delivering them means that their moments positively crackle. Do I wish that Plaza was given more free reign to go nuts like she did in Legion? Of course, but watching her cackle in front of a green, cloudy sky still works for me.
Elsewhere, we have to wrap up that whole trial thing that’s been taking up the bulk of the series and while this task is not exactly a complex sequence of events that takes the entire episode to solve, it does do a fine job of tying off quite a few important threads once and for all. For example, is it a huge shock that Agatha was somehow involved with Jennifer Kale having her powers bound for a century?
Not particularly, but even though the resolution is hardly epic stuff on a visual level, the acting involved in Kale literally taking her powers back means that it carries way more weight if it was a convoluted sequence of entwined flashbacks and special effects. Similarly, the riddle of Tommy Maximoff is also dealt with in a minimum of fuss that deals out maximum emotion as Billy tearfully weighs up the moral issues of putting his brother’s soul into the body of a drowning boy. Is doing this essentially murdering someone so that someone who never technically existed can finally live? Maybe Agatha isn’t exactly the right person to ask as she’s probably responsible for the deaths of more witches that torch waving religious types, but the deed gets done meaning that there’s now two young Maximoffs in the world tragically a year after their mother “died” battling Doctor Strange.
With all this taken care of, it’s down to the final act showdown and it shows just how far the series has come that a typical superpower smackdown proves to be the least interesting thing in the episode. I mean, we certainly get our money’s worth by seeing Billy show up in his comic accurate Wiccan look while the poor, put upon folks of Westview can’t believe they’re witnessing yet another witch fight virtually in their back yards. However, despite a typically spot of backstabbing by Agatha to serve up Billy to her grim reaper gal pal, the young Maximoff uses that nifty trick of mind reading to jog her memory of her son, Nicholas Scratch, to finally get her to drop that villain shtick, get selfless and take one for the team.
So as the dust settles, Agatha finally gives herself to death and ends multiple lifetimes of being a psychotic, murdering b-word – but before you roll your eyes at yet another Marvel villain seeing the error of their ways and “do a Loki” by pulling a 180, after everything we’ve witness here and in WandaVision, it genuinely feels like an earned moment as she expires and turns into a pile of flowers.
However, this isn’t even close to the end, because even though the whole matter of the Witches’ Road and the coven has ended, the episode sends us out with something of a Usual Suspects moment yo let us know that we’re not quite done yet. After relaxing back in his bedroom after everything has passed, Billy starts spotting things in his bedroom that start matching up uncomfortably with all of his experiences on the Road. A ouija board here, a model of the Wicked Witch of the West there, a poster of Saw? Has Billy been taking after his mother in more ways that we could possibly be imagining and has started creating shit out of thin air? A telling laugh in the dying seconds assures us that answers will be forthcoming, but until then, Agatha’s penultimate episode manages remembe the razzle when bringing the dazzle.
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