Agatha All Along episode 8: hidden details explained

Agatha All Along episode 8, "Follow Me My Friend to Glory at the End," is packed with details I think are easy to miss: Death cutting through the real backdrop of the set, the truth about who bound Jen, and a closing sequence revealing that the whole Witches Road came out of Billy's bedroom. With VisionQuest now here, many people are revisiting this nine episode series two years later to rediscover the iconic moments that made up the second act of the WandaVision trilogy.

The series is Agatha All Along (2024), starring Kathryn Hahn, Joe Locke and Aubrey Plaza. In this piece I'm going through the episode scene by scene.

Why Agatha All Along's episode 8 title is a false promise

"Follow me my friend to glory at the end" are the normal ending lyrics of the Ballad of the Witches' Road, the sacred version. That's different from the new cover in episode 9, which ends with "wherever it may bend, I'll be there at the end." The original line is a false promise Agatha made to all the witches. She used the song to lure them into having their powers stolen. She was not friends with any of them, and there wasn't glory at the end for any of them.

The structure of these final two episodes is a similar misdirect. Agatha All Along provided no glorious ending with prizes the way many Marvel Disney Plus series have aimed to do, sometimes unsuccessfully. There are no fireworks. The series ends with a pre-finale that goes out with a bang, followed by an actual finale that feels more like an epilogue.

Alice Wu-Gulliver meets Rio Vidal as Death

We open back in Agatha's sleepover cabin from episode 5, where Alice Wu-Gulliver lies on the floor after Agatha drained her life force. Yet she appears healthy again in her Hot Topic clothes. The camera glides over her into an overhead angle as Rio's black-tipped fingers brush her cheek, then rolls so Alice looks upside down. Since Lilia was falling up into the sword ceiling in episode 7, this is the same pose she would have ended up in. It's especially creepy because Death's fingers come in from below, yet when the camera rolls over, no one is standing there.

Around Alice are torn pages from a book I couldn't identify, mentioning a Mr. Melu and a Sue. Since the episode 5 trial was an '80s sleepover, I'm going to assume this is from a teen paperback like Sweet Valley High or The Baby-Sitters Club. The music as Rio presents herself uses the same kind of instrumentation as the theme of Nickelodeon's Are You Afraid of the Dark? It's an act of kindness that Rio shows Alice a friendlier face rather than the skull she later shows Lilia, out of respect for a witch who went down fighting Agatha.

When Rio points, Alice sees her own drained corpse, which echoes the 1990 film Ghost, where the dead rise and turn back to see their bodies. Alice says, "This can't be the end. It has to be the beginning," another parallel to Lilia, whose death looped back to the beginning of her journey. They leave through the doors they came in rather than the exit stairs, into a green mist like the steam room in episode 3 and the smoke in Lorna Wu's dressing room. To answer a question some are asking: Lorna did not die from Agatha draining her. She died from the generational curse demon in the fire, and she thought the road could save her daughter.

The title card is delayed until after this prologue, as if it's Death beckoning Alice, reclaiming the phrase from Agatha's false promise as a genuine celebration of a witch who died protecting another.

Rio's green crown and Daniel Selon's costume

Jen pounds on the doors of the Iron Maiden, screaming for Lilia. Iron maidens are torture devices, and now Jen and Billy are being tortured with survivor's guilt. When Jen turns away, the doors transform off screen into tunnel dirt. Agatha finds Rio on the road, the dirt swirling around her feet as she seems to move it telekinetically.

Rio is back in her green crown, and the trailers removed it from these shots. I don't know what about a green crown would have been a spoiler, but I guess they didn't want to suggest Rio had a higher power status than the others. Costume designer Daniel Selon has explained that the costume is meant to look like a fungal mycelium network merged with her body, a cycle of blossom and decay, and he added a little pet spider on her shoulder. Give him the Emmy at this point. Agatha is framed in front of a tree with three branches, recreating the Three of Swords from Lilia's perspective in episode 7, because she is always mourning her son Nicholas.

Death calls Billy an abomination disrupting the sacred balance

Death realizes Agatha was distracting her from Billy all along. Back in episode 4, right before that hot mic moment, Agatha jumped to her feet when she realized Rio had been staring too long at Billy. Death calls Billy an abomination disrupting the sacred balance. Anytime someone in the MCU calls a matter of fate sacred, we have to consider the TVA's sacred timeline. Death is another cosmic force that dislikes Nexus disruptors.

Death mocks Agatha for walking another woman's son down a road that doesn't stop, and Agatha cuts her off before she can add that it doesn't exist. That suggests Agatha is still ashamed she made up the ballad and feels awkward being caught in a lie thanks to Billy's Scarlet Witch powers. Meanwhile, Jen explains that green craft is about growth and decay in constant flow, so it makes sense that Rio is Death. It also makes more sense that Loki, as God of Stories, is coded green and tends the branches of a tree representing all of time, constantly growing and decaying.

Jen theorizes that Agatha and Rio met over corpses. Jac Schaeffer told TheWrap that while a meet-cute flashback was never written, the idea they discussed was that they might have met in the aftermath of Agatha's trial, over the corpses of the Salemites. That missing scene could have also established the Salem Seven as the Salemites' daughters. Death says Billy stole William Kaplan's life and is about to do the same for Tommy, but she can't just take Billy because he'll reincarnate in another body. I believe that's because Billy was the Scarlet Witch's grief manifested, love persevering, and that magic will always persevere in whatever open vessel it can find.

Aubrey Plaza's practical exit through the Witches Road backdrop

Agatha offers to deliver Billy, and Death makes one of the coolest exits ever: Aubrey Plaza slices her dagger through the real backdrop of the set and slips through. I love this for at least four reasons. It's fully practical, proving the value of shooting the road on a real set, and it almost feels improvised, though it was carefully planned. Death exposing the road as a theatrical set hints that it's the manifested dollhouse reality of a teenager, and that she knows it. It creates a trippy Truman Show style visual where the distant background is the immediate foreground. And it's a 10 times cooler version of Doctor Strange and Clea tearing reality in the Multiverse of Madness postcredits scene, where there was obviously VFX.

Schaeffer confirmed this to TheWrap, explaining the road is practical because "Billy Maximoff is a baby witch and he can't be creating thousands and thousands of miles of forest." So he created a backdrop, forced perspective and models, and the knife moment is Rio acknowledging she knows Billy created this Witches' Road hex. Schaeffer added it was a nod to the WandaVision feel of moments like the jump cut, Vision's head being crushed and the beekeeper, because they had a short window to hint at the twist.

Empty shoes, a morgue in Agatha's basement and grow light clocks

Agatha, Billy and Jen stumble back upon the empty shoes they left at the start, making it a full circle, and the green tinted road abruptly turns blue again. Agatha snaps "that's it" at Billy, because she knows the road is his creation. When Jen looks at Sharon's, Lilia's and Alice's shoes and Billy looks down too, the question comes up of whether to have them bronzed, and Billy's bedroom later does have bronzed empty shoes. Billy putting his shoes back on is very Wizard of Oz, and Agatha references it inside: "There's no place like home."

The final trial is an Earth trial in a morgue made from Agatha's basement. That makes me think the morgue in episode 1, where Agnes found Rio clawing out of the spell, was probably Agatha's basement in real life. The purple overhead lights are grow lights. I previously speculated this trial might be a new moon with no natural light, and that seems to be the case down here, though it's a crescent moon outside. The room has five sides like the pentagon door, and Joe Locke has said in interviews that all the trial sets have a five sided base structure. The three are stripped down in medical gowns, Billy and Jen's piercings gone, and the grow lights form an analog clock, recalling Billy being unable to read one in episode 3.

Agatha bound Jennifer Kale in the 1920s

Jen realizes she didn't have a doctor take her powers but gave them up, and Agatha's reaction gives it away. Agatha bound her. "The patriarchy really shelled out to shush a lady," Agatha says. So Jennifer Kale wasn't bound by Boston's obstetrician society in the 1920s. She was a midwife who presumably offered better care, and doctors paid Agatha Harkness to silence her more effective methods.

It's a bit unfortunate that Jen's backstory had to be pieced together from two pieces of rushed dialogue, at the episode 4 campfire and here, when every other major player benefited from show don't tell with a spotlight episode. It's especially odd since Jen made it to the end and Lilia told her she was the path ahead. Other than identifying the grow lights, Jen doesn't contribute much, and we still don't know if the doctor drowning her in the kitchen sink happened or was a nightmare vision. I feel Jen was a victim of the episode structure, perhaps the budget. I wonder why the beach house kitchen couldn't have become a 1920s delivery room. My only thought is that maybe the writers planned to approach reproductive health in a way Disney thought was too hot button, but I don't have any evidence of that.

Jen rips out Agatha's hair and wraps it around their wrists for an unbinding ritual, and Agatha flirts by telling her to say it like she means it. "You hold nothing" is very much like Labyrinth's "You have no power over me." As her power returns, Kathryn Hahn's hair floats upward in a sealed room, which looks cool, a pink glow matches the potion in episode 3, and Jen disappears. Alice wasn't released after curing her curse in episode 4 because, in my interpretation, she also had to fulfill her calling as a protector witch, the Knight of Wands, which led to her death and helped Lilia connect the dots.

Billy finds Tommy a body in a drowning boy

Billy shouts liar in Agatha's face, turning the tables from episodes 1 and 6. Agatha guides him through meditation on his final moments in Westview, and we hear Vision and Wanda's goodbye from the WandaVision finale, including Wanda thanking the boys for choosing her to be their mom. Now that I'm a parent, I understand that's a sentiment all parents feel, but it holds cosmic truth for Billy and Tommy, disembodied souls choosing new bodies. We also hear Vision's line that they'll say hello again. Billy was upstairs for that, so he must be using telepathy to hear the minds of people he loves, and I'm still holding that as a promise that Wanda and Vision will reunite.

As their breathing syncs, an edit cuts from the left of Billy's head to his right profile, as if we're seeing Tommy sharing the space. Billy first sees black with interlocking, almost hexagonal red shapes, which must be the red tinted CMBR of the Hex. Agatha claims 120 bodies empty out every minute. Reportedly 106 people die on Earth every 60 seconds, so maybe the MCU's death rate is higher. Then we surface through lake water to a boy in a dark hat, gray tank, shorts and shoes, so he didn't come ready to swim. He was dragged in, probably a nonswimmer, pranked and held down. It looks like summer camp gone awry, perhaps a reference to Jason Voorhees at Camp Crystal Lake.

In the Young Avengers comics, Tommy Shepherd was reborn to Frank and Mary Shepherd, who divorced, leading to a rough childhood in and out of juvie. He vaporized his high school with his speed powers, implied to be an accident, and the government imprisoned and experimented on him. Whenever the MCU picks up Tommy's search, perhaps in VisionQuest, it's going to be dark. Because his origin here is a kid bullied nearly to death, Tommy's next story could be about youth bullying, and my hope is that becomes the predominant theme of Marvel's mutant saga after Secret Wars. I wonder if Tommy could have found a kid primed, maybe via a mutant gene, to be a speedster. When Billy asks if he's killing this boy so his brother can live, that speaks to his guilt over William, when he really took over a vessel already empty.

Agatha's dandelion, Death's attack and Wiccan's arrival

Billy exits the road, and Agatha says, "No, Billy. Sometimes boys die," talking about Nicholas. The lights tick down to three, recalling the Three of Swords and her triple goddess brooch. Beneath Nicky's hair in the locket is a dandelion seed she plants with her tear, saying out of death, life. Agatha is creating life without a spell, something she hasn't done since Nicholas, perhaps because things born without magic can be lost. Death is what gives life meaning, as true for those who die as for those who must keep going.

Agatha emerges in her backyard as Death cackles on the roof, very Wicked Witch of the West, and threatens death by a thousand cuts, the same death Kilgrave compels Jeri's wife, Wendy, to inflict in Jessica Jones season one. John Collins, Abilash Tandon and Harold Proctor see the green sky and assume another hex. Under the waxing crescent, the fire phase from Alice's trial, Agatha pours a salt ring. Death blows it away and calls her a coward, so she hits the deck as Lilia advised, dodging the kitchen sink. Roots slash her heel in some Pet Sematary violence I wasn't ready for, and she heals with hose water. A Latin expert on Twitter, citing the show's language expert, translated it as "wound be healed from the water." I assume it's Jen's moonlight and water charm from episode 4.

Blue and red laundry foretells Wiccan in his comic accurate form. Joe Locke told Deadline that Daniel Selon designed it as a patchwork: runes on the jumper, a Wanda crown, a Vision Mind Stone on each side of the 3D printed leather top, a knee patch matching the jeans he wore all season, and the jumper reddening from his episode 4 stab wound into the cape. Selon printed Scarlet Witch's Multiverse of Madness texture outside the cape and Vision's cape inside so Billy's parents would always be with him. I love that sentiment. An X in a circle on Billy's arm has to be an X-Men nod, fitting my theory that Billy and Tommy could next appear at Charles Xavier's school.

Agatha's kiss of death and the Witches Road reveal

Billy blasts Agatha in a pose like Wanda's in Infinity War, she holds the stream too long, and a two on one duel follows, like Harry blown back in Order of the Phoenix. When Billy volunteers, Agatha tells Death to take him and plant azaleas, a callback to Sharon. Then Billy invades her mind asking if this is how Nicky died. It's not exactly how, but letting Death take another innocent boy is too much, so Agatha gives herself the kiss of death. TheWrap's interviewer noted both their eyes are closed. Agatha decomposes into a mossy mound of flowers and mushrooms, her final breath puffing from the skull. Death's skull is a practical prosthetic, which I think was needed under warmer lights.

Billy walks through Westview raising his hood like Wanda did, and learns he's been gone only 24 hours. A low camera approaches his room, now the ghostly point of view of Agatha. His room shows fungi posters, Häxan, Rocky Horror, Buffy's Once More, with Feeling, Billie Eilish's album with "you should see me in a crown," Poltergeist II, Jennifer's Body and Evanescence. The reveal is edited like The Sixth Sense, Sharp Objects and most of all The Usual Suspects. I theorized this in my episode 6 breakdown, but I'm surprised the show leaned so hard into it.

Billy realizes he built the road from his surroundings: trees from his bar mitzvah centerpieces, the shifting colors maybe a rainbow expressing his queer identity, Jen's beach house from a poster, Alice's house from Lorna Wu and Fleetwood Mac posters, the sleepover's string lights and Ouija board, Lilia's castle from his tarot cards and Oz figurines. The hexenbesen was his idea, and he found every first clue. He was always the one pushing the others along, and now Agatha's ghost appears behind him just as she did on the road.