Saturday, November 30, 2024

Viewer Log: Agatha All Along ep 9

 A brief history of Agatha Harkness and the Witches Road. 

Last time on Agatha All Along, they reached the end of the Road. Which as it turns out is also the start, the Witches Road is one big circle. After a minor freakout from Agatha about doing the Road again to get the prize, Billy decides to say screw this and put his shoes back on. Putting one’s shoes on is what triggers the actual final trial, which takes place in Agatha’s basement. They figure out that the trial is to make something grow in the basement without ready access to water, soil, or seeds. While that sounds extremely hard even with magic powers, they find a loophole, in that if you get what you came to the Road for, you just get let out. They figure this out upon discovering the origin of Jen’s binding was in fact Agatha, who in the 1920s was doing mercenary magic work for banknotes, and using Agatha’s hair to unbind herself. Agatha offers to help Billy get what he wants, Tommy. She learned from Rio aka Death, that Tommy is not in fact running around right now, his spirit is more or less in limbo. Billy was able to find a recently vacated Vessel in the form of William Kaplan and Agatha coaches Billy to find another one for Tommy. She coaches him through the ritual in implanting Tommy in the body of a recent drowning victim. Billy asks if he’s killing the boy to save Tommy, and Agatha says no. She’s able to finish the trial herself by using a seed left her in locket with Nicholas Scratch’s hair and her tears. She faced off against Rio upon being freed, as she didn’t hand Billy over like they agreed. She’s almost killed, but Billy stops by to help her in his new Wiccan gear. They hold Rio off, Billy actually giving Agatha a good deal of his power in order to restore her own. Agatha admits that fighting death is an insane idea. Billy offers himself up to Death for Agatha and Agatha agrees to it. She tries to wash her hands of the whole situation but Billy reaches out to her telepathically and asks if this is how Nicky died. Agatha then kisses Death, surrendering herself to her and rapidly deteriorating to nothing. After getting home and washing up, Billy realized that somehow he’d made the road, as aspects of it could be seen all over his room before being scared by Agatha’s disembodied voice. Enough recapping. Let’s get to it.

 

Ep 9: Maiden Mother Crone

 

Okay, now for a brief history on Agatha Harkness, one of Marvel’s Magic head hitters. We begin in 1750 and Agatha running through the woods. I’m guessing some angry villagers are after her. She strips off her cloak revealing herself to just be in a thick shift and visibly pregnant. She cuts an orange and bites on it to get herself through a strong contraction. She sees Rio in the distance, and she approaches Agatha. Agatha tries to deny Rio and begs that her son get to live. Rio must care about Agatha a great deal because she doesn’t even really barter with her before agreeing to at least give them time. She disappears before answering how long. Agatha births her child, noting that she didn’t use magic to conceive her son, stating “you I made from Scratch,” hence his surname. Agatha cleans them up and continues their journey. As she wonders she comes across a coven of Witches performing a ritual of some kind. The witches invite her in, allowing Agatha to pass through their protective wards. There’s a sweet moment where they offer Agatha and Nicholas food, only for Agatha to smile evilly before smiting them all. Afterwards, Nicholas makes a happy cooing noise, and Agatha says that they’ll be very good at this.

 

Jump forward to 1756 and Nicholas Scratch is a child hanging out by a well. A Witch notices him and tries to talk to him, but Nicholas grabs a bell from her stand and runs. This lures the Witches to Agatha’s home. Nicky escapes out the back, and when the Witches follow Agatha inside to berate her parenting style, she kills then and steals their power. A very well constructed con they’ve got worked out. Later, Nicholas asks his mother why she kills Witches. She claims that it is to survive. He asks if they can’t just live with the Witches and survive with them. Agatha shuts that idea down, telling her son that if he wants to survive in this world he’ll have to get used to this feeling. We see the origin of the Witches Road ballad; it starts as a little song that Agatha and Nicholas sang together as they traveled. Later Nicholas asks for food and Agatha entertains him with a magic blast, her ‘purple’ as he calls it. She gets very sullen for a moment and lists off her powers, she can cast illusions, destroy things, move them with her mind, but she can’t protect him from what’s coming or divine when ‘she’ will come for him. He asks what that means but she doesn’t tell them. We see vignettes of Agatha and Nicholas walking the Road and writing their Ballad together.

 

Sometime later, Nicholas sings their song for an inn’s common room. Agatha pretends to be a bystander and pays him for the song. A witch comes to Nicholas and asks where he heard that song. Nicholas just coughs. She offers him a warm meal with her sisters, clearly another planned hit, but Nicky runs off saying that his mother needs him home. Agatha chases after him. They end up by a river, Nicholas telling her that they can kill more Witches tomorrow. They sing together and bed down for the night. In the night, Nicholas wakes up to see Rio waiting for him with a green burning Torch. She beckons for him, he gets up, but she beckons back at Agatha. Nicholas gives his mother a kiss before walking into the night with Rio. Agatha awakens beside Nicholas to find him cold and dead. She immediately starts sobbing and begging for more time. She buries her son and adds more verses to the Ballad. Her final lines get me a little choked up, “if one be gone, we carry on, but every mile I go, with every bend, beyond the end, your mother loves you so.” She places a bit of Nicholas’ hair into her locket but is interrupted by the Witch from the inn the previous night. She heard Agatha singing and assumes ‘she knows the way.’ See, the Ballad has taken on a life of its own beyond a simple song that Agatha Harkness and Nicholas Scratch would sing as they traveled. Now there are Witches that believe that it’s a real thing and are willing to deal with Agatha to get the prize at the end. She tells her that first, they must gather a Coven.

 

We then see how the Witches Road in fact became Agatha’s hunting pattern for the next few centuries. She’d gather Witches with the promise of showing them the way to and through the Road. When their summoning song didn’t work, she’d berate and insult the Witches until inevitably one lashed out at her, and she could drain their powers. The others reacted in kind and she’d harvest a whole Coven’s worth of power. Assumedly she killed and stole in other ways as well, I just assume that this was the easiest and her preferred method. After a montage of her draining Witches in the 1800s, 1920s and 80s, we return to this most recent trip down the Road. We see a bit more of Agatha’s face as the song ends and see the smirk as she starts the ‘you suck’ tirade to try to drain her new Coven, only for Sharon to note the pentagram in her floor. She checks the pentagram made of sand and looks truly befuddled when Billy runs down and screams about the Salem Seven.

 

We jump to Billy in his room, realizing the Road was made by him and Agatha cackling behind him. Agatha appears to him as a Ghost and seems to be enjoying herself. She makes it a point to tell him that she did NOT sacrifice herself for him, she took a calculated risk. And she’s still figuring out the rules of being a Ghost. She tries to slap him but her hand passes through his face. Billy asks her if he’s the one that made the Road. Agatha explains that, unlike Wanda, he did something interesting with his reality warping powers. He says she’s making fun of him, and this is another of her tricks. Agatha corrects him, saying that the Song was the trick. It didn’t mean anything, it never did, until HE made it real. Billy starts freaking out at realizing that he made the Road, and that by extension he killed the others. He lists off the dead, but Agatha does counter his points for 2/3rds of them. Alice? Agatha killed her. Lilia? Well, she chose to sacrifice herself. Sharon? Yeah, that one was on him if you want to be technical. She does say that if they’re keeping score he also saved a life. We cut to the outskirts of Westview where Jen Kale digs herself up out of the ground. She seems pissed and dirty but alive. After a moment catching her breath she takes off. Agatha then points out that she was going to kill them all on day one, so yeah. She gives him the same advice she gave to Nicky centuries ago, to get used to this feeling. Billy refuses, but she says that they’ll see.

 

Billy returns to Agatha’s house and goes into the basement. Agatha joins him as he stands before the entrance to the Road. Agatha knows he has her locket and demands he give it to her and that she’ll be on her way after. He ignores her and draws a counter circle to the Witches Road door. He calls his book to him and uses Agatha’s locket as a focus to try to banish Agatha. She tells him not to do it. She scoffs at this attempt but is clearly afraid as he keeps up the incantation and it starts to work. Billy asks why she’s still here, why won’t she just die, and Agatha screams back “Because I can’t face him!” and knocks her locket from his hand. She’s able to make herself solid enough to reclaim her broach and infuse it into her being. Billy tells her that he’s sure Nicky would forgive him for what she did, and she says that when he talks like that he reminds her of him. Agatha offers to work with Billy, but notes she tends to kill her Coven members. Billy points out that he does too. He uses his power to seal the gate to the Road, and engrave a memorial to Sharon Davis, Alice Wu-Gulliver, and Lilia Calderu. The two head out, Agatha saying that they’re going to go find Tommy.

 

Overall, this is one of the better post Endgame projects in my opinion. Kathryn Hahn and Joe Locke really carry this story, which has solid writing to it and some legitimately good twists. I like how, when you get down to it, the title is a lie. It’s not Agatha All Along, but Billy. Using the reality warping powers he inherited from his mother as the twist reveal of how the Witches Road was made is a solid twist. And the show highlights all the little bits of foreshadowing that it’s the case. Starting with the fact that the Witches Road in modern times seems to be all but common knowledge to be a lie Agatha uses to harvest power. There’s just enough rumor and mystery surrounding it for the others not to blow it off completely, but in the second episode everyone knew Agatha was trying to steal their power to save herself, it wasn’t until they saw the door that they started believing. I’ve no idea if this will be a one and done for Jen Kale or if she’ll return at some point to fill in a space in the Magic subsection of the MCU. I’d like to see Sasheer Zamata again, as she was a very solid performer throughout this show… I’m just not sure what they’d try to do with her going forward. Her being the High Priestess sounds cool… but could also be nothing. Guess I’ll just have to wait and see. I would say that the genuinely heartbreaking part of this story is seeing that Agatha truly, desperately loved her son. I guess I assumed that this was going to be a case of “I didn’t know what I had until it’s gone,” on Agatha’s part. Like she’d treat her son as a biproduct of some choice or deal, bring him along because it’s expected of her, but to not truly realize she loved him until after Rio claimed him. But from minute one, she loved that boy. She loved him fiercely and completely, so much so she wasn’t even mad when he decided not to attack that last Witch and instead spend what turned out to be his last night with his mommy. I don’t have kids, and my mother is still very much alive, but the moment where Agatha added her grieving lines to their song got me legit choked up. And revealing that ultimately, she chooses to linger as a ghost because she’s not ready to face Nicholas was a good stopping point for Agatha’s character arc. It leaves them open to having Agatha move on when Kathryn Hahn’s contract is up, but also declaw her enough so they can use the funny, mildly sadistic witch character without having to constantly explain why she’s not dropping magic users left and right to get her power back. I’m not sure what I’d like to see next with Billy and the formation of the Champions (Marvel recently revealed they’ll use this name instead of the Young Avengers because even their youngest cast member will be in their mid20s by the time they finish setting it up). Part of me would like to see Billy finding Tommy and getting him up to speed on the hero stuff… but another part would just like to see Wiccan, Speed (yes that is his actual codename), Hawkeye Bishop, Ms. Marvel and Stature (Cassie Lang) go do a hero thing together. It’d be neat. But we’ll have to wait and see. Have a good night, everyone. 

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Bluesky: basicssuperhero@blsk.social

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