I’m usually waist-deep in a lengthy 2000s drama, and therefore late to the game with current shows, but I’m happy to say I’m right on time with Agatha. And I’m glad about that!
Nonetheless, I wish Marvel didn’t put me in the position to say ‘it’s really good… for Marvel.” But it’s really good! For Marvel. I liked so much of it, and the rest I chalk up to a brand issue rather than a problem with this particular show, so I’m deciding to focus on the best parts of it. And I think this show was at its best in the penultimate episode (we can sidebar about the actual ending, it took the wind out of this incredible reveal, imo).
108 picks up right where 107 left off, in the aftermath of Lilia’s really beautiful Tarot reading and sendoff. Agatha makes a deal with Rio, agreeing to convince Billy to willingly give himself to Rio and “restore the sacred balance”. The inevitability of death is a theme I really like in this show. Rio’s scoff at being called evil in the finale really drives that point home as she emphasizes that she’s the most “natural” thing there is. I don’t disagree.
Agatha, Billy, and surviving coven member Jen head off towards the last trial… and instead trip over the shoes they took off at the start of their journey. The Road is a circle, and they’re back where they started. Agatha, seeming to not know The Road as well as she should as the only person who’s ever done it before, insists that they do the whole thing again. Jen refuses out of fear, but more importantly, that just can’t be right.
Billy, seemingly hardened with his newly revealed power, is fed up with The Road. They walked it barefoot out of respect for its path, but he’s fresh out of respect. He pulls his boots back on and suddenly finds himself clawing his way out of a body bag in a metal room. Agatha and Jen are close behind. The room is illuminated with grow lights that go out one by one- another ticking clock.
Without a green witch at their disposal, Agatha and Billy turn to Jen as their last hope of growing something in this soil and water-less room. Instead, their conversation reveals that Agatha was in fact the one who bound Jen decades ago, preventing her from using her magic. Emotionally, Jen performs an unbinding ritual with Agatha and disappears as soon as it’s over. She got what she needed from The Road, and it released her. This leaves Agatha and Billy.
First, Agatha tries pleading with Billy to give her some of his power, the thing she sought on The Road. Billy refuses, not trusting her to not to take it all. Besides, if The Road spits her out, he’ll be alone in there. So, Agatha taps into her motherly side, the side that’s so shrouded in grief that she avoids it all costs. She holds Billy and guides him through his last memories with Tommy. She helps him hold Tommy’s life in his mind, and then helps him scour the world for a body to put him in, just as he did for himself with William Kaplan.
This really is selfless on Agatha’s part- she’s breaking her promise to Rio. Rio wanted him for the exact purpose of preventing him from defying her a second time by reincarnating Tommy. The lines are blurry, though, and Billy can’t tell if he’s simply capitalizing on a boy’s untimely death or causing it. His work complete, he leaves The Road just like Jen and doesn’t hear Agatha’s tender reassurance of “No, Billy… sometimes boys die.”
Left alone, Agatha is forced to confront her own emotional battle with life and death. She opens her locket containing a lock of Nicky’s hair and gently plants it in the dirt revealed by the cracks Billy’s magic created. She waters it with her tears, and up grows a dandelion, primed for a wish. She blows its leaves into the air, prompting the end of the final trial. The ceiling begins to dump rocks and dirt on her, and she escapes up some stairs in the nick of time. She didn’t find what she was looking for, but she completed all The Road’s trials and resurfaces in her yard in Westview.
She comes face to face with Rio, who plans to take Agatha instead now that she’s failed to deliver Billy. Just as she’s about to lose their subsequent battle, they’re interrupted by Billy, now fully transformed into Wiccan. He holds Rio at bay long enough to share some of his power with Agatha. Though she readily takes it, she spares Billy and tells him Death can’t be evaded. She offers to go with Rio, though when Billy selflessly offers himself in her place, Agatha turns on a dime. It seems this was her plan all along to fulfill her deal with Rio.
But in a final telepathic plea, Billy asks if this was how Nicky died, being offered to Death in her place. We still don’t know what exactly happened to Nicky, but this hits a nerve, and Agatha turns on her heel and offers Rio a passionate kiss on the lips. As she does, Death’s magic wraps around her, laying her down. As she sinks into the earth, a beautiful, colorful arrangement of fungi and flora spring up where her body once was. Another pretty indicator that Death isn’t a foil to beauty or nature, but rather a crucial element of both of those things.
Admittedly somewhat anticlimactic, Rio dismisses Billy, who just gets in his car and drives home. While he rejected the idea of embracing Wanda as his mom (“I already have a mom”), we don’t see any real bond between him and William Kaplan’s parents. They fuss over him, having been worried sick that he’s been missing for 24 hours, but he seems detached. I would’ve found it cool and interesting to see him hold more love for them, but I digress.
Billy walks into his bedroom almost as if seeing it for the first time. Clearly a fan of The Wizard of Oz, he suddenly notices uncanny parallels between his interests and his experience on The Road. He has a collection of shoe figurines, tons of Wizard of Oz memorabilia, a Ouija board, a Lorna Wu poster, the list goes on. The show’s homages to The Wizard of Oz don’t stop there, as Billy realizes that he’s already encountered everyone in their makeshift coven at some point in his life- just like fixtures of the Yellow Brick Road bear striking resemblance to people in Dorothy’s life in Kansas.
Yet unlike Dorothy’s awakening from a daze that makes her wonder if the world of Oz was a figment of a concussion-addled dream, Billy faces a much more horrific realization. While The Road was conjured in his mind, its existence, and the deaths that occurred within it, are very real indeed. Like mother like son.
In the series finale we learn that there was never a Road at all. Agatha made up the song with Nicky way back when, and as rumors about it spread, she used it to serve her life’s mission of killing witches and absorbing their power. Her ghost comforts Billy as he wrestles with the responsibility of inadvertently killing their allies in the hellscape his mind created (“I was gonna kill ‘em all on day one”).
A plot twist like this can feel gimmicky if it’s out of left field, thrown in for shock value alone. But this one felt like pieces falling into place, the new reality feeling even more true to the characters than what we thought was happening all along.
I have some less than positive thoughts on both the first and last episode. They really leaned into the detective trope in the pilot in a way that made it more confusing than anything else when they abandoned it ten minutes in. And Agatha returning as a literal classic floating translucent ghost in the finale felt gimmicky, cheapening the sacrifice she made by giving herself to Rio. Not to mention completely rejecting the obvious silver lining of the continuation of their romance in death… on the whole, the sapphic element of this show was highly teased, anticipated, and praised, yet, as I often find with mainstream queer content, anticlimactic and half-baked.
Nonetheless, this has gotta be the gayest Marvel content we’ve ever seen, the song is a banger (and it’s a good thing because they really got their money’s worth out of it), and The Road is chock full of symbolism and metaphor that I’ll be thinking about for days. What’d you think?
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