Agatha All Along finale: why is Agatha a ghost?

The two-part finale of Agatha All Along (2024), starring Kathryn Hahn, Aubrey Plaza and Joe Locke, does something I was sure Marvel wouldn't: it kills Alice, Lilia and Sharon permanently. It then reveals that the Witches' Road came from the mind of Billy Maximoff. Episodes 8 and 9 also show Agatha's deal with Death, give Tommy a new body and reveal the real story of Nicholas Scratch. Here's my breakdown of both episodes, along with the Easter eggs and theories that go with them.

Alice Wu-Gulliver's death in Agatha All Along Episode 8 is permanent

Episode 8, titled Follow Me My Friend to Glory at the End, opens with the soul of Alice Wu-Gulliver lying on the floor of the house from the third trial. When she comes to, she is greeted by Rio Vidal, also known as Death. Rio points to Alice's lifeless body, which was drained into a dried-out raisin after Alice tried to save Agatha. In disbelief, Alice asks, "that's it that's all the time I get". Death replies, "If I had a nickel for every time I heard that," implying most people react that way when they die. Agatha herself reacts that way in the finale, when she begs Death for more time with her son.

The nickel line also makes me feel this is a slight nod to Charon, the mythical ferryman of the dead, who usually demands a coin from those who have died before carrying them to the next life. Alice isn't ready, but she reluctantly follows Death to the afterlife anyway.

I was shocked that Marvel killed Alice, Lilia and Sharon permanently. I was sure some cheap magic would give this story a happily ever after where everyone lived. Instead, Agatha drained the life out of Alice before she had time to change her life in a meaningful way after her family curse was destroyed. Alice disappearing with Death into that heavy fog of green smoke was a haunting reminder that death doesn't care about anyone's future plans and can come for us at any moment.

Death says Billy Maximoff disrupts the sacred balance

The scene shifts to a distraught Jennifer Kale, shocked at the sacrifice of Lilia, her sister in the craft, as Billy comforts her. Agatha, meanwhile, runs into the original Green Witch on the green stretch of the road. Death says she is satisfied with all the bodies Agatha piled up in her latest Witches' Road scam. She is also frustrated that Agatha tried to keep Billy Maximoff's reincarnation secret from her by distracting her.

To Death, Billy's very existence is an abomination that disrupts what she calls the sacred balance. That refers to the overall cosmic balance between light and life, and darkness and death, which the cosmic entity Death is partly in charge of maintaining. Billy's soul was never supposed to exist on this plane of reality in the first place. When he shoved his wandering soul into the body of a dying Billy Kaplan, he prevented Billy Kaplan's corpse from returning to the ground and contributing to that balance.

Eternals (2021) showed how important this balance is in the MCU, because the energy of everyone who passes away is meant to feed the growth of the Celestial seed inside every life-abundant planet. So Death has a point, and Billy really shouldn't be existing outside the Hex at all. Death's motivations also mirror those of Thanos in the MCU, since he was all about balancing life as well.

The Witches' Road came from Billy's mind, and that feels in line with MCU afterlives

As Death keeps talking, she starts to reveal that the Witches' Road doesn't exist at all, before Agatha yells at her to stop. That was a nice piece of foreshadowing for Billy's realization at the end of the episode that he created this world from his own imagination.

That revelation feels in line with how afterlives seem to work in the MCU. Whether it's Asgard from Norse mythology, the Duat from Egyptian mythology, the Wakandan Ancestral Plane, or even the land of the infinite sky that Rocket and his Batch 89 friends believed in during their captivity, it seems enough believing minds can create entire extradimensional planes. If belief is strong enough, something that began as a story could become a new plane of reality.

Witches as powerful as Wanda and her son Billy can do this alone, using their own inner power to generate pocket realities they believe in the most, at will, through the power of their minds. That's just a little theory and observation of mine.

Death's special treatment of Agatha and the truth about Nicholas Scratch

Death says no one in history has received as much special treatment from her as Agatha. That is a big deal, considering Death has existed since the beginning of the cosmos. The line also sort of verifies that this version of Death has likely never formed a relationship with Thanos over his hundreds of years alive, as happened in the comics. Comic book Death gave Thanos so much special treatment that she was basically the one who made him the Mad Titan.

Death then asks why Agatha lets everyone believe she traded her son Nicholas Scratch for a copy of the Darkhold. Agatha says the truth was far too awful. My reaction: really, Agatha? The truth was that he died in his sleep next to you in the forest. How is that worse than everyone believing you sold your child to a demon for a magic book?

Death also says Billy's desire to save his brother Tommy's soul is a direct cosmic violation. Tommy isn't physically alive yet, she says, but soon would be. That shows the Green Witch appears to hold strong authority over time itself, much like Doctor Strange and the Ancient One peering into the future with the green Time Stone. Because Death foresaw this, it was her cosmic duty to stop Billy twisting the laws of the cosmos again to add another life to an already overpopulated cosmos.

Agatha's deal with Death could explain her ghost

Death apparently cannot take Billy by force, because he can move his soul from one body to the next at the moment of death. The only way he can die is by willingly letting Death take him. Agatha promises to get Billy to do just that. In exchange, Rio stops actively pursuing Agatha's death, with the added caveat that when Agatha dies, Rio won't be the one who comes to take her.

That promise could have influenced Agatha becoming a ghost when she died, since it shows Rio never collected her soul. It would also explain why Rio hates ghosts so much: ghosts are beings that refuse to go to the afterlife with her, much like Agatha did here.

At the end of the conversation, Rio pulls out her knife and tears open the background of the set to leave, an illustration of her tearing the fabric of reality at will. We saw something similar in the scene after the credits of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, when Clea used one of her knives to open a tear in reality and take herself and Strange to the Dark Dimension.

Jennifer Kale gets her powers back

Billy and Jennifer catch up with Agatha, and the three inexplicably return to the start of the road, where the coven left their shoes. Jennifer gets emotional over the shoes of Sharon, Alice and Lilia, and Billy defiantly puts his shoes back on, rejecting the road. The camera then pans underground to a morgue modeled after Agatha's basement, with the same pentagon shape on the floor that formed when the door to the road opened in Episode 2.

After they free themselves from their body bags, Jennifer's resolve to protect Agatha and Billy from sharing their friends' fate comes out in full force. That completes her journey from a con artist who only cares about herself to a witch dedicated to preserving life, a selfless take more in line with the comics version of Jennifer Kale.

She then discovers it was Agatha who bound her from using magic a hundred years earlier, when Jennifer was living and working in Boston in the 1920s. Jennifer rips off a chunk of Agatha's hair and performs an unbinding ritual, which requires the caster to repeatedly deny a curse's power until they are free. Her returning powers appear to manifest as pinkish purple energy, and she disappears from the road. We see her again in Episode 9 clawing out of the ground near Westview and flying away. I wouldn't be surprised if she joined Doctor Strange, Wong and the Masters of Kamar-Taj. We might even see her in a Midnight Sons project, since comics Jennifer has been part of that group.

Tommy Maximoff gets a new body, likely Thomas Shepherd

Agatha has Billy sit with her to find Tommy, or more specifically, another body for Tommy. The implication seems to be that Tommy has been inside Billy the whole time, their souls joined when the Westview Hex collapsed. To reach him, Agatha has Billy match Tommy's breathing from right before the Hex disappeared. She tells Billy he has been breathing for Tommy, carrying his essence, memories and feelings for three years, and that he can't keep his brother trapped any longer.

Billy uses his magic to locate a nearby boy being drowned by his friends in a prank gone wrong, with the implication that Billy placed Tommy's soul in that boy's body at the moment of his death. The boy is likely Thomas Shepherd, the name of the reincarnated Tommy in the comics. He wears a green top, like Tommy in WandaVision and the comics, and the design on his shoe almost looks like a yin yang symbol, possibly a nod to how the brothers' souls have been intertwined.

Billy disappears the second he succeeds, just as Jennifer did, before Agatha can reassure him he didn't help a group of bullies drown an innocent kid for his own benefit. Convenient for Agatha, though, is the dandelion seed hidden behind the lock of Nicky Scratch's hair in her brooch. She uses it to plant new life and free herself from the final trial.

Death fights Agatha in Westview and claims her with a kiss

Agatha emerges onto her front yard to find Death sitting on top of her house, furious that Agatha broke their deal. Death threatens her with death by a thousand cuts, a reference to lingchi, an ancient form of torture from imperial China in which someone was slowly cut with a knife until they died. As Death attacks, the sky over Westview glows green, matching the road, and Agatha's neighbors wonder if more witchcraft is about to happen like three years earlier.

Death fulfills Lilia's prophecy by calling Agatha a card, and Agatha follows Lilia's advice to hit the deck before Death throws the kitchen sink at her. Then Billy Maximoff arrives in his comic book accurate costume with full mastery of his magic. For some reason he refuels Agatha's power with his own, trusting her not to take it all, which, surprisingly, she doesn't. Death's gravity powers appear to be the same green magic Shang-Chi's mom and aunt used in the Shang-Chi movie. It looks like airbending, but I think it's gravity manipulation.

Given the choice for one of them to die so the other can live, Agatha pulls a Black Widow and sacrifices herself for someone she cares about, through a kiss of death. Her body rapidly ages and decays, likely showing what her corpse would look like had she not extended her life with stolen life force. The green sky then opens to orange sunlight, the road's final phase. That completes the pattern of each part of the road following the order the Infinity Stones appeared in the MCU, with the real world as the orange Soul Stone. That makes sense, since Earth is where humanity's souls live and where untethered souls like Jennifer's, Tommy's and Agatha's can find new life. This episode was all about the unbinding of souls.

Death picks up Agatha's locket and gives Billy permission to leave now the balance is maintained, speaking in a true cosmic voice harmonized with a man's deep voice. That underscores that the entity can take any gender or form it deems necessary, as in the comics. Billy walks off while the neighbors stare in fear, pulling his hood over his face much like the Scarlet Witch did at the end of WandaVision.

Billy's bedroom inspired the Witches' Road

Billy gets home to find 24 hours have passed. He dodges his parents' questions, showers and goes to his room, where there's a Rocky Horror Picture Show poster next to a Buffy the Vampire Slayer poster for the musical episode, Season 6 Episode 7, Once More, with Feeling. Buffy was created by Joss Whedon, who also directed the first two Avengers movies, so it's weird that he now technically exists in the MCU. There's also a poster for 1986's Poltergeist II and one showing a woman and a demon flirting, a relationship reflecting Agatha and Rio's.

Billy realizes everything in his room seems to have inspired the road: his obsession with The Wizard of Oz, the multicolored leaves, his Ouija board. Agatha's earlier joke about bronzing the dead witches' shoes even references the bronze shoes on his shelf. Billy accidentally tapped his cosmic power to build a reality from the cinema that appealed to him, just as Wanda did in Westview with the media that resonated with her growing up. It also fits his namesake, William Shakespeare, who was big into theater. The episode ends with Billy frightened by Agatha's ghost, a form comics Agatha knows well, having been summoned from beyond the grave many times to help witches like Wanda.

Episode 9 Maiden Mother Crone reveals Agatha's past with Nicholas Scratch

Episode 9 opens with a maiden Agatha in 1750 about to become a mother. Death arrives in her fancy green dress to take Nicholas before he is even born. You can tell she doesn't want to, because she truly cares for Agatha. As the Green Witch, she has the authority to offer Nicholas more time, and Agatha uses every minute of it.

Days after his birth, Agatha meets a group of forest witches who invite her into their protective circle. Crossing their barrier of rocks appears to trigger its protective energy, almost a warning they shouldn't have let her in. Agatha drains them all. That explains her mention of a run-in with the Daughters of Liberty in Episode 4, since roaming 1750s America draining souls would make conflict with that group, founded during this period, pretty much inevitable.

Over the years, Agatha teaches Nicholas to lure people to her, which he doesn't vibe with; he'd rather live peacefully. Nicholas wrote the melody for The Ballad of the Witches' Road, and mother and son gradually changed the lyrics from "down the windy road" to "down the witches' road." A montage shows him blowing on a dandelion, explaining why a seed was found with his hair, meaning Nicholas accidentally saved his mother's life years earlier. Agatha makes him sing for money and to get into strangers' homes, which was foreshadowed in Episode 1 by his imaginary first place award for best vocals in children's concert choir.

Not wanting to kill any more people that day, Nicky decides to head home instead. Agatha quickly forgives him, and they sing before falling asleep on the ground together for the last time. Death comes like a thief in the night. As Agatha mourns, singing the ballad over his grave, a witch asks if she knows where the road is. That inspires her centuries-long scam of assembling covens and draining them, moving her from mother to crone, until the road manifested through Billy's belief.

Ghost Agatha and Billy form an unlikely coven

Back in Billy's room, ghost Agatha finally rocks the gray hair of her comic counterpart and looks her age. She can't touch the physical world, so it appears the only way Billy could hug her again is by astral projecting, as the Ancient One did for Doctor Strange and Strange did for Spider-Man. When Agatha confirms Billy created the road, he feels responsible for the deaths of Sharon Davis, Alice Wu-Gulliver and Lilia Calderu, which is technically true, but she reminds him he also saved Jennifer Kale.

Billy returns to Agatha's old basement and tries to banish her with her brooch. Before he finishes, Agatha admits she doesn't know how to face Nicholas again after using his song to kill countless witches. Billy assures her Nicky would forgive her, a comforting quality Agatha says he shares with her son. She then proposes staying as a ghost to help Billy master his powers and find Tommy, and the series ends with the two forming an unlikely coven. With them on their way to find a Tommy with a human body, the question still remains: where in the world is Tommy?