Agatha All Along finale: does Maiden Mother Crone work?

The Agatha All Along finale, Maiden Mother Crone, is the episode that finally explains who Nicholas Scratch was, how the Ballad of the Witches' Road was born, and why Agatha can't move on. Some impressions of this finale have been divided.

Agatha All Along (2024) is the Disney+ series starring Kathryn Hahn, Joe Locke and Aubrey Plaza. My answer to whether the finale cheapens the season comes at the end, and it's a firm one.

What Maiden Mother Crone means for Agatha

The title is obviously named after the triple goddess on Agatha's brooch, but it also represents the three stages of Agatha's life. The maiden is Agatha young, put on trial and presumably meeting Death for the first time, though the episode omitted that flashback. The mother is Agatha with Nicholas. The crone is all the years afterward, as she began to transition into the ghostly form she now takes.

We open in 1750, 57 years after Agatha's 1693 trial, as a pregnant Agatha runs into the woods. We know she's a fugitive who has angered most witches in New England, but here she's chased by female choir vocals that, to me, sound like the chanting voices of the witches who tried her, whom she tried to kill. She stops at a fog draped lakeside. I wonder if Marvel might have used the same lake it used for Tony Stark's home in Avengers: Endgame, in the Atlanta area. The fog recalls the green fog Death took Alice into, as though Death is setting the table to take baby Nicky.

Agatha slices a lemon to clench her teeth on during labor, and I love that Kathryn Hahn did this in the shot, slicing it against a tree and stuffing it in her mouth. Where would she get a lemon in 1750 New England? She's a witch; she can probably conjure fruit out of time and space.

Rio's ghost orchid and Death's green costume

Agatha looks over to see Rio already standing there. It's a creepy edit, but it's also sweet that Rio is holding a flower, the same one I believe she held on the rooftop during the battle in episode 8. We're pretty sure it's a ghost orchid. Orchids are often representative of death and chosen as funeral flowers to symbolize love persevering for the deceased, and while this one is more purplish than white, orchids range from white to purple.

Rio's cloak and dress are fully green. Jac Schaeffer told TheWrap that it was important to dress Death in a way that reflects the balance of life and death: not everything withering around her, but Death as the source of the decay from which everything green sprouts, showing that death isn't something to be feared so much as accepted.

Agatha recognizes Rio and tells her that if she takes Nicky, she'll hate her forever: "please let him live please my love please." Schaeffer also told TheWrap that Agatha and Rio were lovers before this, and that the writers considered showing the life they had together, like in a cottage, but wanted to focus on the Nicky story.

Death's gift of time and the question of Nicky's father

Death has pity and offers time, but doesn't specify how much. In a way, that uncertainty isn't a gift. It's the opposite of the clear certainty Lilia gains about her end in episode 7. If death comes for us all, it's arguably a gift to know when. For an ageless witch who lives hundreds of years afterward, a few years is a fraction of that life, weighing heavily on the rest of it. Was it worth it? It's a very deep question, and I honestly can't spend that much energy on it.

Agatha gives birth to baby Nicky, a baby who, speaking from experience, is not a newborn. I'd say at least three months, but very cute nonetheless. Agatha says she spoke no spell and no incantation, that he was made from scratch. There are many ways to read that, but it's very clear no magic was used in his conception. From scratch suggests the old fashioned way, and it's obviously the origin of his name, Nicholas Scratch. I'd think there must have been a father, unless from scratch means something like a recipe, the way Agatha used a tear and the dandelion seed in the morgue trial, though even that felt like magic.

Jac Schaeffer told Deadline there's a lot of story left and that they had lots of conversations about Nicky's father, but she felt that for this story it didn't matter. I've speculated on everyone from Old Scratch, to Mephisto (assuming Agatha didn't know it was him), to, I wish I was joking, John Adams, the second president of the United States. A profile of Agatha had also mentioned succubus powers. Many online want the father to be Death herself, pointing to similarities between Nicky and Aubrey Plaza's physicality. I think Schaeffer clearly didn't want a specified father.

The camera work breaks our hearts by focusing on Nicky's baby feet and pudgy fingers clutching Agatha's hair. Since Jen pulled strands of Agatha's hair out as a process of unbinding, I feel this could be baby Nicky instinctively binding to his mama. The camera then glides away across the lake through the fog, which feels like the inverse of the WandaVision post credits scene, where the camera glides toward the lake cabin of the witch who didn't have her sons.

Greensleeves and the first coven Agatha drained

Agatha finds a coven of women singing Greensleeves, the Old English folk song whose melody is used for the Christmas hymn What Child Is This. Some believe the original lyrics are about a promiscuous young woman, since green sometimes had sexual connotations at the time. I think it's also a reflection of Rio's literal green clothes, and how, despite the time Agatha was given, the green is always following her. The lyrics they sing, beginning "alas my love you do me wrong," make it a breakup song, reflecting the breakup between Agatha and Rio.

Agatha seems to wear new clothes now, making me think some time has passed and she might have drained another witch in between. She uses Nicky to hide her brooch, likely knowing her reputation has gotten around. The witches accept her with a Latin phrase that, according to the Mad Latinist account on Twitter, means they welcome her to their circle, and that spell deactivates the security spell on the stones.

Agatha is offered tea but attacks, and the light on the trees shifts from gold to purple. Listen closely and one witch screams "stop, no," another shouts "who let you in," and the first says "sisters gather" before they all scream. Agatha probably attacked the least experienced witch, triggering the others to blast her defensively, which she then used to drain them all.

Young Nicky in 1756: the bell, Blanche DuBois and the goat

Six years later, in 1756, a six year old Nicky sits by a well, and the young actor does a great job. Historically, 1756 was the start of the Seven Years' War in North America, but none of it seems to affect this community. A friendly vendor notices how frail Nicky is, which again suggests Agatha sustains him only on magic drained from witches and might have kept him skinny to draw sympathy. That feels like child endangerment, but it's also possible Nicky was born with a metabolic illness that made normal food impossible. This kid is on borrowed time as it is.

Nicky steals a bell, the same bell Agatha chimes to begin the Ballad of the Witches' Road. He lures witches to Agatha, who drains them, and her line that one can always rely on the kindness of witches feels like a nod to Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire: "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers," spoken at the end as she's led away, cementing her detachment from reality.

Nicky pets a goat. In Robert Eggers' The Witch, the goat Black Phillip represented Satan, and goats have commonly represented demonic influence. I believe they chose a white and brown goat to avoid a Black Phillip comparison, but it's still a bit demonic, and its white pattern looks like a rune to me. Nicky asks whether they can live with witches instead of killing them. Agatha says no, but it's not only selfishness: she fears that if they stop keeping Death busy with bodies, Death would come for Nicky.

How the Ballad of the Witches' Road began as Nicky's walking song

The ballad begins as a sweet, innocent walking song, the kind that comes up all the time in Tolkien, from the song Gandalf hums approaching Hobbiton to Bilbo's "the road goes ever on and on." This is why Agatha thought the lyrics were "coven of two" rather than "coven true": her coven was always just her and Nicky.

Nicky begs for normal food and says use your purple, using purple as a tangible noun, which reminds me of Agatha telling Rio in episode one to let her get her purple back. Then comes a beautiful sequence of Agatha and Nicky running through nature, co composing the original words. For Nicky the song wasn't a trick. It was a celebration of traveling with someone you love, and a hope that this windy, not witchy, road could lead somewhere good. He blows a dandelion, the flower Agatha regrows in the earth trial, and I think one of those seeds won't land until a precise moment. It all plays like their last good day, making "tame your fears the door appears the time has come to go" feel like foreshadowing.

The ballad becomes a pub song Nicky performs for money, explaining his best vocals plaque in episode one. Agatha cases the pub using her three mile radius rule from episode two. Nicky looks paler, and his cough is probably real, since he's already decided not to let Agatha drain this witch: "I thank you but no, my mother needs me home." The redheaded witch plays with her own amulet, showing how witches everywhere have this representative flair.

Nicky's death, Rio's double kiss and the River of Life

Agatha sings "I stray not from the path, hold your hand in mine." The later lyric becomes "I hold death's hand in mine," changed because Nicky took Death's hand. Their good night, "my blood my tears my bone, Maiden mother Crone," reminds Nicky he's her blood, her flesh and her grief.

Nicky wakes to Rio with a green flame, beckoning. Again, Death doesn't take her skeletal form; she presents a friendly face. Rio points to Agatha, and Nicky gives Agatha two tiny kisses, perhaps one for him and one for Rio. I love the idea that Rio might have been part of this family, that Nicky could see her all along as a co parent, like the Peverell brother under the Invisibility Cloak who could see Death. This might have been a nightly ritual Agatha never knew about, Death using Nicky to kiss her love.

Death leads Nicky across a footbridge that didn't exist in earlier shots, a cosmic passage over a river of sticks Agatha can't cross. Now it's clear: Rio Vidal, River of Life. Nicky died by the creek, which might connect to Agatha's Mare of Easttown style hallucination inside Wanda's spell, where dead Wanda manifested herself to her. Jac Schaeffer said Marvel executives instructed her to reference Wanda Maximoff as gone, not dead. Make of that what you will.

Agatha finds Nicky dead and shouts "I want more time," as she did growing his dandelion in the morgue. She buries him singing "I bury my own heart here with you my child" and places a lock of his hair in her brooch. Since there's a dandelion seed under that hair in the morgue, one of Nicky's blown seeds must have wafted into the brooch while Agatha was distracted, to stay with his mother forever.

The montage from the Titanic era to The Craft

A blonde witch asks the way to the road, showing Nicky's ballad had spread far and wide. In her hat she looks like Sharon Davis gardening, and Agatha drains the coven she assembles using the same routine she'll later use on Lilia, Jen, Alice and Sharon. The corpses match the Agnes of Westview opening credits in episode one.

The Victorian era is probably around when Agatha survived the Titanic, and now that we know Death wasn't with her, I shudder to think what she did. Did she drain witches on board, distracting the crew from the iceberg? Or drain women in a lifeboat and blame the gray corpses on the cold? I love how these witches' falls sync with the words Maiden Mother Crone. Next looks like the 1930s, and I think it's when Agatha survived the Hindenburg, making it 1937. Then the goth 1990s, which I wish we'd spent more time in, with Agatha made up like Fairuza Balk in The Craft. I rewatched The Craft and it's awesome; you can trace a straight line from The Craft to Charmed to Agatha All Along. Finally, Agatha breaks the fourth wall, like Wanda's creepy moment in Multiverse of Madness, pulling us back to the present.

Ghost Agatha, Billy and Jen's escape

Agatha takes a ghost form in James Robinson's 2016 Scarlet Witch run, the first storyline to introduce the Witches' Road, as a companion guide to Wanda, so it makes sense she plays that role for Wanda's son. She says she took a calculated risk, knowing Rio hates ghosts. When she tells Billy that, unlike Wanda, he did something interesting with his power, I read it as a meta line from a drama nerd who prefers practical sets and musical theater to sitcom homages. Billy feels guilt over Alice, Lilia and Mrs. Davis, and Agatha's "yes, the gardening lady" is disrespectful to Mrs. Davis to the end.

Jen's hand bursts out of the grass, recalling Brian De Palma's Carrie. Jen may never know the road wasn't real until Billy made it, but she flies away free past a red crescent moon. Blood moons get their color from the Earth's shadow, and you'd never see a red waxing crescent, so I choose to believe it's a sign the Scarlet Witch lives. Maybe it's pink for Jen's restored magic. I want it to be scarlet.

Agatha's door is boarded up, I think because Westview residents saw that green sky. I hope someone's caring for Mr. Scratchy; maybe Harold Proctor took the rabbit in. Billy draws a pentagram seemingly in one stroke, which might be the proper way to cast the hex. His summoned spell book zips through Agatha's ghostly chest, and the shelf holds Nicky's bell. The Mad Latinist account says his spell translates to go toward the light, leave the Earth, don't be a ghost, and that the Disney+ subtitle Latin is apparently gibberish.

Why Agatha can't face Nicky, and her new coven with Billy

Agatha says he can't banish her this way, and that it wasn't he who freed her from Wanda's spell, then backpedals. I think her freedom took Billy's spell, Wanda's death and Agatha clawing out with Death's encouragement. She refuses to depart because she can't face him, and that confession lets her touch the brooch, a nod to Ghost. She can't face Nicky knowing she used their ballad to do exactly what he asked her not to.

With the brooch on her ghostly form, Maiden Mother Crone becomes a purple glow. I read it as Agatha completing the triple goddess's phases and reaching spectral enlightenment; I've compared her to Gandalf the White. When Billy says Nicholas would forgive her, she says it's when he says things like that that he reminds her of him. Agatha didn't transfer from Nicky to Billy because they're witch obsessed boys of a certain age, but because they give complicated villains the benefit of the doubt.

Billy sees the ghost as the spirit witch of the coven, a new coven of two, turning the doors into a memorial for Sharon, Alice and Lilia before heading out to find Tommy. Lilia's episode 5 rule says emotion ties ghosts to this plane, and Agatha's unfinished business is balancing the scales. The blinding white light is every color of the season's color coded coven merged, the coven united in harmony.

So does the song being a trick, ending in a teen's pocket reality, cheapen Lilia's and Alice's sacrifices? Absolutely not, in my opinion. Billy and Wanda's magic made the road real, and to quote another famous wielder of magic, in a white glow much like this final shot: "of course it's happening inside your head."