I think Lilia's master and the Ancient One would/did get along...
Last time on Agatha All Along,
we got to know Teen, aka William Kaplan aka Billy Maximoff. Three years ago,
William was a normal young Jewish boy going through his Bar Mitzva. Day of he
met Lilia as a palm reader, who read his palm and learned that the kid was
going to have an… interesting life. She placed the Sigil on him to give him
some protection. His party ended early as in the nearby city of Westview,
something weird was going on with the ‘anomaly’ aka Wanda’s Hex. On the drive
back his mother was briefly distracted and the family got into a massive crash.
William was dead on impact but seemed to absorb the fading synthetic life of
Billy Maximoff. William woke up, but without any of his pre-crash memories and
his mannerism had changed completely. And he could read minds now. For the next
three years he played ‘getting better,’ and gathered information on the Hex and
what happened to him. He and his boyfriend Eddie tracked down Ralph Bohner, now
going by Randal, and learned about what happened in Westview, Wanda’s part in
it as well as Agatha Harkness. Billy then looked up Agatha Harkness and how to
use Magic to free her from the mind control spell Wanda stuck her in. He
eventually did so and then the rest of the show happened. In the present,
Agatha dragged herself out of the muck of the Witches Road and the two agreed
to work with each other to reach the end. Agatha claims to have clocked that
Teen was somehow Billy Maximoff early on and pieced together that the reason he
wants to reach the end is to somehow find out what happened to his twin, Tommy.
They headed off down the Road to their next trial.
Ep 7: Death’s Hand in Mine
We return to our story to find Lilia
waking up as she’s falling into space. She’s dressed in some royal finery as
she falls for some reason. We shift to Billy and Agatha walking down the Road. She
makes a crack to Billy about him getting a nosebleed if he keeps trying so hard
to read her mind. Billy pretends like he wasn’t doing just that and asks where
Rio is. Agatha says that question is off the table, but any other is still up
for grabs. She assumes that’s part of the reason that he sought her out, as his
former babysitter and Wanda’s ex-best friend, she knows a lot about her, if he
cares to ask. Billy coldly says he has a mom, and it isn’t Wanda, and he’ll get
what he wants at the end of the Road. A few minutes later he asks if Wanda is
actually dead. She says yes… no… maybe. She did see a body but isn’t sure if
anyone else did. She then scoffs and tells Billy if he wants straight answers
then he should ask a straight lady. They reach the site of the fourth trial, a
giant castle. Wanda tries to give cryptic insight, but Billy is done listening
to that sort of thing from her. He says that he thought her experience would be
the key to finishing the Road, but now he’s wondering if she’d ever walked it
at all. They enter the castle.
Inside they find themselves in the
garb of two of arguably the most well-known witches in Disney’s IP, Billy in
Maleficent and Agatha as the Wicked Witch of the West. Agatha claims that Elphaba
is based off of her, and Billy tells her to prove it. They find a table in the
middle of the room with their next trial. “Your path winds out of time,” is
their clue and there’s a tarot deck on the table. Billy grabs it, and when an
hourglass engages says he’ll do a reading for Agatha. She gets the “horse drawn
cart” as Billy puts it, aka the Chariot. It’s pretty clear that he hasn’t done
many tarot readings, or at least none that had the chariot in it. He places the
card, and a sword drops from the ceiling. Theres a few dozen others waiting up
there, waiting to drop. He plays the next card, Seven of Swords. It’s about
deception and betrayal, which matches her, but it’s reversed, so that implies
her being truthful. A sword drops, but this one is behind Billy. Agatha takes
the deck and shuffles, saying it’s her turn now and that tarot is a con like
any other. Billy insists it’s about intuition and interpretation. Agatha starts
throwing cards at random, causing swords to drop. Billy jumps out of the way
just in time to dodge one. Agatha insists that this is a numbers game that they
can beat if they just keep throwing cards to get the right combination of 5.
Billy says that’ll take too long, but Agatha insists they’ve time. Right before
the ceiling starts to drop. Billy says that he wishes Lilia was there.
We cut back on Lilia waking up. She
and Jen seem to be trapped in some kind of cage under the road. Lilia says that
she ‘was falling,’ to which Jen agrees that they both were. We learn that since
being stuck down there, Lilia was in a trance, telling Jen what to do. They
needed to follow a root system to look for shelving, and that Lilia told Jen
that ‘Teen’ was the son of the Scarlet Witch. Considering that her trances
usually only last seconds, this was a big one. Jen mentions that Lilia has been
both wispy and kookie since they’ve been down here. We then see some of her out
of context lines in context. She says “am I wispy or am I kookie” to Alice
during the third Trial in response to what Jen said. She then tries to warn
Alice to not “try and save Agatha,” but slipped back to the first trial where
she’d been talking to Agatha, and then jumping all the back to when she’d been
training as a little girl with her master in Sicily. Her master seems to have
expected this, saying that Lilia is ‘visiting.’ We swap her younger self for
the current one to not confuse the audience. Her master asks how long it’s
been, to which Lilia tells her it’s been Centuries. This was during her first
lesson about reading tea leaves. She says she was bad at tea leaves, but her
mast says she lies to herself then and now about that. She asks her what she
sees. Lilia looks into the leaves and comes back to the catacombs. Jen is unintentionally
condescending to Lilia, and she snaps at Jen. Jen asks her what she should
think when she looks at Lilia, instead of a doddering old lady. Lilia then
explains that the flow of time is an illusion, and when she was a child, she’d
experience moments out of sync with time. It’s getting worse all of a sudden
now, typing her off that maybe her life is drawing to a close. As she talks,
she shifts to a moment when she and Jen caught up to Billy and Agatha.
In the fourth trial Lilia is
dressed as Glenda the good witch and Jen as Snow White’s evil stepmother in
crone form. She had just been shoved out of the way of a falling sword by
Agatha. She gets up and grabs Billy, throwing him up against a wall. He says
that he thought they were cool, and Lilia says “No, we are not cool, Teenager!”
to which Jen comments “Damn, using his full name.” It got a chuckle out of me. Billy
starts responding to Lilia’s thoughts, apologizing for lashing out, saying he
didn’t know what sort of power he had, and that if he did, he’d saved Alice.
Jen pulls her aside and informs Lilia that they’ve moved past this. When Agatha
says that they did it on her request, Jen tells her to back off as Lilia is
having a day. She tells Lilia that, if things are happening to her out of sync,
then she needs to just trust Jen that they’ve moved on. Lilia starts coming to,
saying that she had been doing a reading for Billy before she spaced out again.
Billy asked if she put the sigil on him, and she says she did. She saw who he
was, who he’d become and knew he’d need more time. Swords started dropping on
them and Lilia freaks out, screaming “I hated this the first time,” which came
out during the third trial, and then screaming incoherently, which happened
when she first met Agatha and Billy in her shop.
She panics but comes out of it with
her master again. Her master asks her what her life is like now. She asks if
Lilia is in tune with nature, if she’s using her craft, or in a coven, to which
Lilia answers no on all counts. She claims that being in a coven never helped
her and that it’s better to be a hermit and fraud than anything. Her master
shakes her head at Lilia still being so fearful. She asks her master how to
control what’s happening to her, to which she says that Lilia’s duty isn’t to
control but to see.
Lilia shifts back to her and Jen in
the underground. She says that she’d hoped to skip the whole part in the
underground. They stop for a moment so Jen can rip her dress’s skirt to a more
reasonable walking length, and Lilia seems to find Billy’s spell book. Jen asks
why these mental visions stopped. Lilia says that she let them stop, she
ignored them until they went away. She says she did it because all she saw was
death. They hear Billy and Agatha arguing, and find the shelving they were
looking for, the back of a bookcase in the castle. They stumble in, and Lilia
tells Billy that they’re cool. She gets caught up on what’s happening, and
heads to the table. She says that her job is to see and asks who massacred the
tarot spread. She grabs the card and asks who the querent is, and Billy says
it’s him. They argue about the etiquette of the moment, as everyone is focused
on the swords coming down on them, but Lilia insists that Billy has to ask the
question, and it needs to be relevant to his journey. Billy blurts out “Am I
William or am I Billy?” The swords stop and Lilia explains the spread. It’s a five-card
layout, first card is Billy, the traveler, second is What’s missing, Path
behind, Path Ahead, Obstacles, and Windfall, the center is his destination. She
tells him to focus on his question and draw a card. He draws the first one,
it's the magician. She lays it but a sword drops. What’s Missing is the Sun,
and another sword falls. Agatha angrily shouts at the ceiling how can they get
this right when Tarot is completely subjective. Path Behind and a sword drops.
She has flashbacks to the previous episodes and comes back to her master. She
asks what she is missing. She asks why Lilia is on this journey. She says it’s to get her power back, but her
master denies it, saying that her power didn’t go anywhere. Lilia says she’s a
forgotten woman and her master challenges her to remember herself. Lilia gets
frustrated and asks what’s worth remembering, how she saw their coven die of
fever, that she told them and that didn’t change anything. Her master says that
Death comes for us all, and that it’s something they all have in common. Lilia
asks when it’ll come for her, and then remembers that she was falling, and
realizes that she WILL fall. And her master asks her what she’ll do with what
time she has left.
She comes too into the underground
with Jen. She explained what happened and that Billy is in the trial with Agatha,
and they need to get to them. They’re standing at a crossroads, one leads to
the real world, one takes them deeper into the Road. They hear the Salem Seven
approaching and duck into the root lined tunnel. She tells Jen that she’s going
to help the others and that she hopes Jen will join her. When Jen asks why, she
says because they’re sisters in the craft and they both start walking. Lilia
then realizes what she did wrong. She returns to the Trial, and does a reading
for herself. She is the Traveler; Queen of Cups, Three of Pentacles, Knight of
Wands, High Priestess, Three of Swords, Tower Reversed, and Death. She then
realizes that Rio is in fact an incarnation of Lady Death. She saw Rio as Death
when she first woke up in the underground and she proclaimed herself as such.
The path opens. She reveals that Rio is death to the others, which Agatha confirms.
They head for the exits, as they leave, she gives them all something. She tells
Agatha to hit the deck when ‘she’ hits her, she gives Billy his book back, and
tells Jen that she’s the path ahead before saying she loved being a Witch and
slamming the door on her face. She faces off against the Salem Seven in their
animal forms. She tells them that when a Witch completes a trial like she did,
it’s a bad idea to stick around as bad things tend to happen, like the Tower,
upright. She proves her point by switching the Tower to the upright position,
flipping the whole building upside down. The Seven fall on the swords, and then
so does Lilia.
We return to her first lesson with
her master saying, “let us begin.”
I like episodes like this one that
experiment a little. We were told this entire story out of sync, which can be a
pain for me to write about but a fun experience. It was extremely fun to see
all of Lilia’s time slip in the correct order, with every scream, cryptic
phrase or other senior moment making total sense in context. And it was cool to
see each of the cards that Lilia called out during their journey from her
perspective. They were all there, the three of swords were trees behind Agatha when
Billy was hurt, The tower was a painting behind Alice, Alice was in the same
stance as the Knight of Wands when she died, Jen was the High Priestess
standing before a trippy painting, she saw the Three of Pentacles on her card
when she wrote the coven list for Billy, and she was the Queen of Cups as a
child. Rio as Lady Death herself was not something I called early on but make
sense in context, as just about everything she says and does seemed to be
reacting to either Agatha or a comment about death. Really puts the implied
relationship between her and Agatha into context. Can’t think of anything that
would kill a relationship like having to claim the soul of your lover’s child. Wonder
how Nicholas Scratch feels about it… probably will hear about it later. The
final scene of Lilia’s first lesson was a nice way to end her personal story,
putting the whole thing in a loop. I’ll miss her as she was my favorite
character introduced in this show but thems the breaks. I would say I’d have
liked an answer on whether or not Billy is Billy or William, but I’m thinking
that’s going to be an unanswered question in this series. But who knows, we’ve
got two episodes left. We’ll have to see. See you next time.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/116925492/
Bluesky: @basicssuperhero.bsky.social
No comments:
Post a Comment