It was a serious show all along...

On the eve of its finale, Agatha All Along episodes 6 and 7 sound ominous bells.

The Short Take: 

With episodes 6 and 7, the series has really kicked into another gear, with unprecedented emotional intensity and character-based stakes. 

[SPOILER WARNING: There is no spell to magically undo spoilers. Do not proceed unless you are prepared to hear about details from Episode 6, “Familiar By Thy Side,” or Episode 7, “Death’s Hand in Mine.”] 

Image Credit: Deadline

The Long Take: 

I don’t like to break the fourth wall in my reviews this often, but I really am having a busy fall semester and it’s paining me to fall behind on a show as fun as Agatha All Along. I want to assure everyone that my lack of timeliness with these reviews in no way reflects my level of enjoyment; I have been having a great time watching this show every week, and it feels like the perfect way to celebrate the Halloween season. Disney+ doesn’t always get the timing of its big releases right, but this has been perfect. 

While I have been having fun this entire time, the past two episodes have upgraded this show from a fun, cooky spooky time to emotionally compelling. Between Billy/William’s tragic backstory and Lilia’s time-hopping self-actualization turned self-sacrifice, I felt a strong “oh we’re getting serious now” pull towards higher narrative stakes. It was heartbreaking to see Billy having to perform as William for parents who do not even know their son is actually dead, and thrilling to watch Detective Billy investigate his own identity X-Files style, even if it was only for a (too) short while. Lilia’s episode doubles down on the heartbreaking thrills as it re-contextualizes her absent-minded eccentricities — which many other characters ageistly ascribe to her being a dotty old witch — as a very powerful and seemingly torturous ability to achieve prescience by experiencing her life non-linearly. Both journeys into the past achieve the same end: to help us appreciate the burden these characters carry so much more than we did before. 

Marvel Disney+ series, of course, have a long history of dropping a memory hammer right around this time in the season: In its eighth (and penultimate) episode titled “Previously On,” WandaVision featured both a flashback into Agatha’s past and a trip down memory lane for Wanda. Ms. Marvel took us to the 1947 India-Pakistan partition in Episode 5 (the penultimate episode), and the fifth episode (yes, that’s also the penultimate episode) of Moon Knight revealed the tragic childhood of Marc Spector. The main exception to this trend has been She-Hulk, which opens with its big flashback sequence; but that’s only because show runner Jessica Gao decided to move what was supposed to be Episode 8 (you guessed it — the penultimate episode) to Episode 1. Regardless, I think it’s safe to say that the 11th hour flashback wallop is a go-to move for Marvel series at this point. 

Image Credit: Screen Rant

Billy’s flashback, I could argue, is different, though, because of its connection to Lilia and the episode that follows. Witnessing the car crash and Billy having to live in William’s body is not merely inserted as a footnote about the character’s past trauma, implicitly explaining what may motivate him in the present timeline and then moving on with business as usual in the next episode. Rather, the series integrates Billy’s extended flashback into the current timeline’s plot as well. It’s not just any fortune teller who sees flashes of William’s death and Billy’s rebirth, and it’s not just any witch who places a sigil on him to, as she says, give him more time to find his footing before other witches learned that he had a famous, ultra powerful mom. It’s a member of his own coven, Lilia. Planting her at the bar mitzvah gives so much more grandeur to the story because it implies that what transpires in Agatha All Along was Lilia’s cosmic purpose, for lack of a better term, all along. Episode 7 portrays her as adrift, unsure how to control her time-hopping powers and disillusioned by her inability to save her entire coven for a plague she foresaw. By the time she saves the rest of the coven from a spikey death in the episode’s final scenes, she understands her place and purpose. What will her assist ultimately facilitate? What larger ripple effect will her active aid to Billy render? 

Once again, this is the luxury I am afforded looking at these two episodes together. Lilia is the common thread because she is the one who sees William’s future and places the sigil upon him. So Episode 6 does not merely answer the question of what’s the deal with Teen and where did he come from? Nor is it merely to shock us with major revelations, secrets from the past. It sets up a springboard to tell this other story about Lilia and lend a sense of gravitas to the Witches’ Road quest. 

Image Credit: Screen Rant

Maybe Lilia just needed to talk to Loki, who is the first Marvel character I think of when I scan the MCU canon for other magical time-jumpers. A lot of the loneliness and majesty I felt at the end of Loki Season 2 echoed in Lilia’s bittersweet story. He seemed to get groove down after, what, centuries? So I’m not sure how much help he would have been in speeding up her advancement. He would have offered some wise moral support, I’ll bet. 

The big questions, as we move into the finale tonight, is where do we go from here? And what will this all be for? And what will all this have to do with Agatha, whom I suspiciously haven’t needed to talk about at all this entire review?

WandaVision’s fumble back into the convention in its finale made the difference between it being a great show and a transcendent, all-timer of a show. While I would acknowledge that Agatha All Along hasn’t been as innovative and fresh in its style or approach to storytelling as WandaVision, it has the potential to follow through here in a way that WandaVision could not.