Agatha All Along Eps. 4 & 5 unleash a big reveal.

And no, it's not the one you think.

The Short Take:

I would have been perfectly entertained with these “trial of the week” episodes on their own. What we got by the end of Episode 5 (and likely will get in the future) is icing on a bewitched cake!

[SPOILER WARNING: Down, down, down the road. Down the spoiler road. I’m playing a bit of catch up this week, discussing both Episode 4, “If I Can't Reach You / Let My Song Teach You,” and Episode 5, “Darkest Hour / Wake Thy Power.”]

Image Credit: Newsweek

The Long Take:

As much as I am a fan of the avant garde and the unusual, sometimes I just want narrative with a clean, clear arc that gets neatly resolved at the end. Especially with serialized storytelling, there’s something satisfying and comforting in an episode that has a self-contained resolution. That’s how Episode 4 of Agatha All Along made me feel. We had sufficiently teased Alice’s family curse in previous episodes, and to see that played out with the emotional revelation of why Lorna Wu wrote a Fleetwood Mac-esque arrangement of The Ballad of the Witches’ Road, along with another full musical number and dazzlingly glamorous 70s costumes — to see all that wrapped in a crisp narrative bow was like finishing a perfect meal. 

A perfect meal is still perfect even if you’ve eaten before. Even if you know every course that’s coming. Alice faced her tragic past, we all learned something new (and touching) about that past, and then she faces a literal manifestation of that trauma (the curse demon harpy thing), defeats it, and, in her own words, “feels lighter.” We did it! Slam dunk; we can all go home. 

Image Credit: Deadline

Agatha’s episode, in contrast, was more muddled in what it was actually getting at. She didn’t have a clear problem with a clear solution in her 80s slumber party trial house. I suspect that’s because the show’s creators want to preserve some of the mystery behind Agatha’s backstory to unravel more slowly in future episodes. It’s much easier for a supporting character like Alice to be one and done, but Agatha, as the title character, demands more storytelling. “Darkest Hour/Wake Thy Power” had a lot of provocative gesturing towards Agatha’s past — her mother’s clearly a peach, we learn that the Salem Seven are some kind of feral offspring of Agatha’s mother’s murdered coven, and, for a brief moment, we “meet” the spirit of Agatha’s son, Nicholas Scratch. 

Practically speaking, I am considering these two episodes because I missed the boat on my Episode 4 review and needed to keep up with the show as it airs. But the unique epiphany I had in lumping Episodes 4 and 5 together was that as a pair, these episodes offer a Tale of Two Mothers and generally bring the theme of motherhood much more to the fore for me. The big revelation I referred to earlier in Alice’s trial was that her mother wrote, recorded, and relentlessly performed her rendition of The Ballad of the Witches’ Road as a protection spell; the more famous she became, the more fans would sing her song, and the stronger the magic protecting her daughter from the curse would be. So instead of torturing adolescent Alice with inexplicable, mercurial behavior, we now see that she was just trying to protect her all this time. 

Image Credit: Forbes

At first, I wondered if this could be the case for Agatha as well, but then I realized that the whole point is likely that her relationship with her mother was very different. Instead of doing everything within her power to protect her daughter from harm, Agatha’s mother, Evanora, assumed too quickly that her daughter would be evil and spent her living days trying to protect the rest of the world from her. The brief conversations between or about Agatha and her mother in Episode 5 imply that this presumption of evil defined Agatha was before she could prove otherwise? (Or perhaps I am being too generous to our anti-hero because she’s so charismatic.)

These dueling mother/daughter stories — one of a mother who died protecting her daughter and another of a daughter who ultimately killed her own mother — immediately prompt me to draw a connection between them and the other contrasting pair of mothers and sons: Wanda Maximoff and Teen, who we now know is her son, and Agatha Harkness and Nicholas Scratch. The fake-out of hinting that Teen could be Agatha’s son but then Rio dropping the bomb that he is not invites me to compare Wanda to Agatha. Wanda, like Lorna, has gone to great lengths — placing a sigil on Teen, for example — to protect her children, while Agatha, like her own mother, allegedly pawned her kid for The Book of the Dead (or, more generally, more power). Will Teen be the path to redemption for Agatha, somehow? Or merely a foil for Nicholas?

Image Credit: Screen Rant

According to my light wikipedia surfing, Nicholas Scratch does have a connection to The Salem Seven in the comics. I won’t say what that connection is in case someone reading this doesn’t want to know. But go look it up. It’s all there. In the same way that the now-confirmed Teen/Wiccan/Billy is, according to Agatha, so much like his mother — noble, caring, but with a dark streak — perhaps little Nicky will be a chip off the old Agatha — a selfish, power-hungry survivalist who was never given a chance to be good. 

Or perhaps the series will play with our expectations once again and cast Wanda as the more complicated mother figure. Teen does say something about how he’s not looking for power at the end of The Road, but he is looking for something. Answers? And more specifically, answers about his mother? 

Image Credit: The Wrap

Whatever we learn, I have a feeling that Rio will be at the center of it all. There have been repeated oblique references to her collecting bodies and having something to do with the dead. And before we knew the Ouija board spirit was Nicky, he introduced himself as Death. Could Rio’s dead souls side hustle have something to do with Nicky, and that’s why she is so certain that Teen is not Agatha’s? Can’t wait to watch this week’s episode and see how newly crowned angsty Teen is going to shake things up.