Agatha All Along Episode 4: Why Rio Vidal Could Be Death Herself

Episode 4 of Agatha All Along, titled If I Can't Reach You / Let My Song Teach You, dug into the past of Alice Wu-Gulliver and her family's generational curse. It also handed me more reasons to believe Rio Vidal could actually be playing the cosmic entity Death herself. One disclaimer first: I wrote this breakdown before certain elements of the season were spoiled online through toy leaks. If any part of it seems to be about those leaks, that's a complete coincidence. I had no idea when I was writing it.

Agatha's wink over Sharon's body hints she saw real magic in her

The episode picks up right where episode 3 left off, with the group dealing with the sudden and tragic death of Sharon. As Agatha inspects Sharon's lifeless body, she tells the corpse she didn't know Sharon had it in her. When Teen asks what she meant, Agatha just winks at him, leaving the audience to figure it out. That was a rude thing to do, Agatha. It seems likely she was referring to Sharon's latent magic potential.

As Teen brought up in the last episode, anyone with the desire to learn magic can learn it. As I've brought up in my previous breakdowns, this is primarily because the cosmic energies of the Infinity Stones naturally live within every human being courtesy of the Big Bang. It seems Agatha saw a strong potential for wielding magic inside Sharon by analyzing her body after her death, subtly implying Sharon could possibly have made a decent witch if she ever traded her gardening tools for a Nimbus 2000.

When Alice kneels to pay her respects, we get a good look at the back of her jacket: a giant red flame under a big red moon, with the word burn written inside the flame. That foreshadows this red area of the Witches' Road, purposely designed around Alice's connection with her mother. It isn't the first blood moon in a magical Marvel Studios production either. One appeared in Multiverse of Madness when Doctor Strange and Christine arrived in Sinister Strange's universe, visible behind Sinister Strange's house when Strange reaches the base of his stairs. We then learn that Alice's mother, Lorna, didn't die on the road but on tour in a hotel fire, which would later fuel Alice's fear of approaching the house at the end of the Red Road.

As the witches bicker over who's to blame, Teen cuts them off, chastises them for not acting like a team and says he wishes they could go home. That's yet another of the show's allusions to The Wizard of Oz, since going home was Dorothy's main desire on the yellow brick road. When Teen then claims people can't just be replaced, Agatha answers, "Can't they?" That's hilarious, considering Agatha replaced her own son for the Darkhold.

I don't think Rio was joking about being in the neighborhood

All too eager to replace Sharon, Agatha has the group try to summon a backup witch, and they accidentally summon Rio Vidal herself, who seems to climb out of Sharon's grave and jokes that she was in the neighborhood. To be honest, I don't think Rio was joking at all. I think she might have legitimately been in the neighborhood courtesy of Sharon herself.

The reason lies in a later moment when Agatha goads Rio into revealing what she actually wants. Rio says she gets the pleasure of seeing Agatha do what she does best, kill all the witches around her, and then: "You get your power and I get my bodies." It looks like Rio is purposely allowing Agatha and her coven to live and go on this journey because she knows any witch who hangs around Agatha long enough is highly likely to die because of her. The very anticipation of all that carnage seems to entertain Rio and even excite her.

Why I think Rio Vidal could be the cosmic entity Death

Rio's excitement to collect the bodies of Agatha's coven definitely pushes me to believe she could be Death, because that's kind of how Death operates in Marvel Comics, especially in her extremely toxic relationship with Thanos. Back when Thanos first got acquainted with Death, he was basically her biggest admirer, senselessly slaughtering as many living beings across the cosmos as he could just to please her. In a similar vein, because Agatha spent so much of her life ending the lives of witch after witch, Death probably began to fall in love with Agatha as her greatest soldier on Earth.

It does seem like something must have changed between them after the mysterious death or disappearance of Agatha's son, Nicholas Scratch. If Rio is Death, Agatha could resent her for taking her son, which could be why Agatha gets so stern when she feels Rio is threatening Teen. She says no to Rio when they're both looking at Teen through a mirror's reflection, and later says "don't" as Teen is on the verge of dying from blood loss. That could be Agatha telling Death to stay away from Teen specifically, likely because she believes Teen could possibly be Nicholas coming back to her somehow. Of course, at the very end of the episode, Rio herself tells us that apparently isn't the case, which is super interesting.

Rio being Death would also explain the apparent skeleton form of Death we briefly saw in Lilia's vision in episode 3, and why Rio seemingly popped out of Sharon's grave: Sharon's death caused Rio to be in the neighborhood after all. As I've mentioned before, Rio Vidal translates from Spanish to River of Life, which sounds to me like it could be an allusion to the River Styx, the mythical river all souls were believed to cross on the way to Hades, realm of the dead. The Styx is often depicted in art as filled with the souls of the fallen, and one of the earliest examples I came across in childhood was Hades' river of souls in Disney's Hercules. The ferryman who carries souls across it is Charon, which is basically just Sharon with a C. That could also be why Rio symbolically emerged from Sharon's grave.

Finally, Rio's green magic and her calling herself the Green Witch feel oddly similar to the MCU's other representative of death, Hela, who used a special green magic made from the Eternal Flame to reanimate the nervous systems of dead Asgardians and build her army of the dead. I would not be surprised if Rio could use her own green magic to reanimate corpses in a similar way. But this is all hypothesizing. Death has never really had a relationship with Agatha Harkness in the comics, so this possibility is kind of out there, though definitely still plausible in my opinion. Then again, so is Rio potentially being Mephisto's daughter Blackheart, as I brought up in a previous breakdown. We're just going to have to wait and see.

The fire trial was built around Alice's generational curse

After Rio's creepy arrival, which seems to leave both Jennifer and Alice a little flustered, the group walks to the house of the second trial, very much themed after fire to match this red area of the road. They see it at the front door, where the waxing moon design apparently indicates the moon's fire phase. Since Alice always wears red and appears to have red chaos energy powers inherited from a mother who died in a fire, this trial was definitely themed with Alice in mind, as a detailed representation of her fear of her generational curse.

Lorna tried to protect her from that curse by performing a special version of The Ballad of the Witches' Road on tour, essentially attempting to channel the natural cosmic Infinity energies living inside all her fans to summon the road and end the curse once and for all by herself. Unfortunately, all of Lorna's attempts failed. Inside the house, the witches' clothes change to match the 1970s, the same era Lorna did all her touring in. I have to say, Sharon choosing to die right before we got sent back to the 1970s is insanely rude, because it would have been super fun to see Debra Jo Rupp back in her Kitty Forman outfit from That '70s Show.

Lilia stares at a wall of art depicting witches tortured for their witchcraft: one boiled alive, one burned at the stake, one chained in prison and another tied up in a forest, much like Agatha was in Salem. Faint screams can be heard, which could either be Lilia remembering past witch friends who died in such cruel ways, or possibly her powers tapping into the final moments of these women through some kind of magical psychometry, much like Jedi such as Ahsoka use Force psychometry in Star Wars to discover the past just by being near an object.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Kale looks at a variety of Japanese Oni masks, designed after demons. It was thought that because these masks depicted scary demons, wearing or keeping one could repel evil spirits, which is fitting considering how much Lorna wanted to keep the evil spirit behind her curse away from her family. As Jennifer stares at a hairy Oni mask, a pair of real eyeballs briefly appears behind it before disappearing, possibly belonging to the curse spirit itself, stalking its prey from behind the walls.

A Fleetwood Mac flyer could hint at more magical concerts

Another wall holds two articles from a fictional music magazine, an ad for a fictional band that apparently played the fictional Black Cat Music Hall in New Orleans, with black cats and New Orleans both tightly associated with witchcraft. Next to those is a flyer for the very real Fleetwood Mac, specifically their show at the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum in Oakland, California, on May 7, 1977. That was a concert where they would perform The Chain, a personal favorite of Star-Lord's mother Meredith Quill, who included it on his Awesome Mix Volume 2.

Including Fleetwood Mac could be the show's way of insinuating they were just as secretly magical as Lorna Wu, possibly even using their concerts to turn their audience into one big coven quietly reciting protection spells. If that's somehow the case, it's kind of crazy to think Meredith Quill could have attended one of these magical concerts herself.

Lilia's outbursts could be a form of quantum entanglement

As Alice and Lilia discuss Lorna's concerts, Lilia has another senior moment, suddenly asking whether she's wispy or kooky. She then looks at Alice as if seeing her for the first time in a long time and begins telling her not to do something, before immediately regaining her lucidity. This has me wondering whether Lilia's mind randomly jumps through different points in her own timeline, causing her to blurt things that were supposed to be said in the past or future. If so, the wispy or kooky question could theoretically belong to another moment, and her words just come out too early or too late.

That would explain why Lilia seems surprised and happy to see Alice for a few seconds. Maybe a future consciousness of Lilia hasn't seen Alice in a while because of something tragic that could happen to Alice later in their adventure, causing Lilia to try to warn her. I'm not sure, but I feel like the possibility is strong. There might even be some MCU precedent: in Ant-Man and the Wasp, Scott Lang briefly had his mind taken over by Michelle Pfeiffer's Janet van Dyne while she was stuck in the Quantum Realm, through quantum entanglement, a phenomenon Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." It's when two subatomic particles are so tightly linked that the action of one motivates the other, no matter how far apart they are, even light years apart or separated by time.

Lilia and Janet appear to have one major thing in common: both seem to be quantum energy manipulators. When Agatha got Lilia riled up at the end of episode 2, sparks of yellow energy traveled along her fingers. As I've explained in an earlier breakdown on the real science of the Infinity Stones, yellow quantum energy in the MCU is the same energy found in the Mind Stone and represents reality at the level of tiny subatomic reactions, electricity being the most familiar. Because the human mind is a product of bioelectricity in our nervous systems, quantum energy can also be called mind energy. That's why the Ancient One says in the first Doctor Strange that the root of existence is where mind and matter meet.

It's also why Electro is yellow in the MCU instead of blue like in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, since his powers result from quantum reactions, unlike Ego the Living Planet or Thor's blue dark energy lightning. Thor is the god of thunder, not lightning, so his lightning doesn't glow yellow like Zeus's or Electro's. The point is, if Lilia's powers are rooted in quantum energy, quantum entanglement could theoretically be part of her power set. Combined with her failing memory at her age, her mind could accidentally become entangled with her past and future selves, letting her speak through them without the host body remembering, much like Scott Lang after Janet disconnected. It's essentially the same kind of thing that happened to Wolverine in X-Men: Days of Future Past. That's just my personal attempt at explaining her kookiness.

A backwards record unleashes the curse

In the studio booth, Agatha tricks Rio into revealing that she wants them all dead so she can collect their bodies. The group gets upset for about two seconds before a local teenager accidentally unleashes the curse by playing an old record of The Ballad of the Witches' Road from Lorna Wu and her choral group, with several other tracks listed on it. The backwards song playing is Lorna's ballad, which the group later plays forwards to destroy the curse.

Having a curse play through a reversed track is incredibly fitting for this heavy 1970s rock theme, because many religious groups in the 70s assumed bands like Led Zeppelin and The Beatles were hiding curses and demonic messages in their albums by singing them backwards, which is absolutely nuts. Also absolutely nuts was the notorious cult leader Charles Manson, who apparently has been cited as taking great inspiration from the supposed hidden backwards messages he heard in The Beatles' music. I had no idea about any of that until it was brought to my attention.

I believe Rio, not the curse, threw Teen into the glass

The curse sets Lilia and Jennifer ablaze, sending Alice the protection witch into action. Then Teen is launched into the air and thrown through the glass of the booth, with a shard fatally piercing his torso. Everyone assumed the curse was responsible, but I have super strong doubts, mostly because tossing people around with gusts of wind isn't how this curse operates. All it tends to do is set witches on fire, as it did with Lilia, Jennifer, Alice and Alice's mother. For this harpy-looking curse to switch up its whole technique just for Teen seems highly unlikely.

Personally, I believe Rio threw him, mostly because she was bored, impatient and really wanted someone to die immediately, and we saw her blow down Agatha's front door with similar windy magic near the end of the first episode. Most of all, I believe Rio was deeply curious how Agatha would react to Teen being fatally injured, to gauge how much she truly cares for him. It could also possibly have been motivated by a bit of jealousy, since it seems Rio wishes Agatha felt any genuine love for her again.

After the group sings the harpy into oblivion, Teen collapses and Agatha frantically asks Jennifer what she needs to heal him. That's a stark contrast to the start of the episode, when Agatha didn't care about Sharon's death or even learn her real name. Rio apparently notices, which would seem to tell her Agatha assumes this kid is Nicholas Scratch, an assumption Rio shatters at the end by telling Agatha that Teen is not her kid. Before that, Agatha checks on Teen but grows angry when he asks what happened to her son, and rejoins the women camping on the road.

The campfire scars point back to Agatha's son

As the women bond, Lilia reveals she was once bitten by a vampire, another reference to vampires in the MCU after Blade's appearance at the end of Eternals and the vampire Saracen in She-Hulk. Agatha reveals she once took a knitting needle to the elbow courtesy of the Daughters of Liberty, a secret group of female freedom fighters founded around the 18th century near the beginnings of the United States. Over the centuries they kept fighting in secret, recruiting heroes including Sharon Carter, Mockingbird, Echo, Spider-Woman, Misty Knight and Black Widow. Comic book Agatha was part of this group at one point and taught them magic, but it seems MCU Agatha wiped them out long ago when they dared to hurt her.

Rio then reveals a scar of her own: a human woman she once loved but had to hurt because it was her job, obviously referring to Agatha. We may not know exactly what Rio means, but I have a feeling it had to do with Nicholas Scratch, and that it could have been Rio's job to remove Nicholas from Agatha's life forever, another reason I believe Rio could be Death. If I had to guess, Nicholas may have actually died in the past, possibly through a rash decision the power-hungry Agatha made in exchange for the Darkhold. However he died, his death could be what motivates Agatha's hatred for Rio, because in her eyes Rio is selfishly keeping Nicholas from her, which could have caused this permanent rift. Only time will tell.

Which theory about Rio Vidal do you find more convincing: Death or Blackheart?