Agatha All Along Episode 7: Rio Is Death and Lilia's Time Jumps Explained

Episode 7 of Agatha All Along revealed that Aubrey Plaza's Rio, described as the original green witch, is Death. It also explained what has been happening to Lilia all along: her mind has been jumping through time. The episode was called Death's Hand in Mine, so I did figure Death was going to be the big reveal, and it explains a lot of what happened earlier in the series.

The episode opened with Lilia falling, which is very important for how it ends. Then it cut back to where the last episode left off, with Billy and Agatha walking down the road. Agatha could sense Billy trying to read her mind and told him to stop, warning him he was going to get a nosebleed trying that hard. She probably sensed it because she seems to have a little power back after taking some from Alice. Sadly, it does kind of look like Alice is dead.

Agatha gives Billy a teasing answer about whether Wanda Maximoff is dead

Agatha won't answer when Billy asks where Rio is, since she knows Rio is Death. It's funny that she calls herself his former babysitter and his mom's ex best friend. Because of WandaVision, she technically did babysit the kids, and in the version of life Wanda created, Agatha was her best friend. That plays into their relationship in the comics, where Agatha is a mentor to the Scarlet Witch. When the Scarlet Witch originally goes down the Witches' Road in the comics, Agatha, who is a ghost at the time, helps her through it. That's not the story here, but it's interesting that the Scarlet Witch's son is going down the road with Agatha's help.

Billy says she's not his mom and that he has a mom, but he knows he's the reincarnated son of the Scarlet Witch, Billy Maximoff. Then he asks Agatha straight out whether Wanda Maximoff is really dead. I've got to hand it to Marvel: they're playing into what fans have been asking online since the ending of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. They still don't give a straightforward answer. Agatha first says yes, with an expression that makes her seem completely serious. Then she drops the straight look, says no with a big smile, and then says well, maybe.

Billy asks if she saw a body, and she says she did. But when he asks if anybody else did, she says it's hard to tell. She was still under the Scarlet Witch's spell when she saw the body, and she didn't get out of the spell until after Multiverse of Madness. When she did, she had no magic, so she probably couldn't sense the Scarlet Witch and probably doesn't know. Someone who would definitely know is her old ex lover, Death herself.

Perhaps we might get a reveal of that in the series, but I hadn't heard anything from the insiders about it. Most of them said there's really no mention of what's to come for the Scarlet Witch, so I said not to hold your breath for an answer in this series. Based on everything we knew at the time, the Scarlet Witch will return, will be a pretty big part of Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, and will eventually get her own solo movie. Kudos to Marvel for essentially trolling all of us with an answer that isn't really an answer. Agatha's line, "you want straight answers ask a straight lady," is a nod to her being with Death, and it puts the focus back on Rio.

I've been doubting whether Agatha has really walked the Witches' Road

Billy is beginning to doubt Agatha based on everything he has seen, and he questions whether she has actually been on the road. It has been said many times in the series that Agatha is pretty much the only known witch to have gone through the Witches' Road and made it out alive. When asked how many witches made it out the last time she went, she said one. This whole time, I've actually been doubting it myself.

There are signs that she has experience. She knew to take her shoes off before they walked on the road, and when the credits roll on this episode, we see a book with text telling readers to remove their shoes before touching the ground. That's sort of the show telling us why they took off their shoes, which was never really answered. But other moments throughout the series have made me question whether she's being truthful. With only two episodes left, I was sure we'd get an answer soon. Episodes 8 and 9 were set to drop on the same day, October 30, as a two episode finale.

The tarot trial turned Agatha into the Wicked Witch of the West

As in the other trials, Agatha and Billy's appearances and clothes change when they go in. Agatha becomes the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, and Billy becomes Maleficent. Disney owns the rights to Maleficent, and it looks like they can use the likeness of the Wicked Witch of the West too, since they made Return to Oz and by 1985 both The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz were in the public domain.

Inside, they realize it's a tarot reading, and the table says "your path winds out of time." This trial is clearly meant for Lilia, whose path, as we learn in this episode, does wind out of time. Billy and Agatha believe Lilia and Jen are dead, so they attempt the trial without her.

Lilia's mind, not her body, travels out of time

Meanwhile, Jen and Lilia sank through the mud and ended up in a tunnel system below the road, where Lilia finally explains what's been happening. We thought she was possessed, maybe by a spirit, but she was actually going inside her own mind. Her body doesn't go in and out of time. Even when we see her older body with her Maestra, which means teacher in Sicilian, that isn't what is actually happening.

The first time we see her with her Maestra, a Lilia hundreds of years younger is shown panting and confused to be back, since it's been centuries. The Maestra says she sees Lilia is visiting, because she knows Lilia's power to jump through different points in her own life. Lilia has lived for centuries, and her mind has traveled back into her younger body. Her body moves through time in a linear way, but her mind doesn't, and she tells Jen that time isn't linear.

I think Lilia's nonlinear time could be setting up Doctor Doom

I'm wondering if they had Kang in mind when they filmed this. It would be a brief connection to Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, where Kang says time isn't what you think, it's a trap, and when you break out of it you can basically control it. I'm sure this is going to set up Doom being able to travel through time and the multiverse, and it might even play a decent role in saving the multiverse at the end of it all, because traveling through time in a nonlinear way across the multiverse is pretty useful.

I think Doom is going to have that ability, since he's replacing Kang, who had it via his tech, and Doom uses magic and tech. In the comics, when Victor Von Doom and Reed Richards are in college together, Doom says he has viewed time as a different realm and that his experiments have shown time isn't what everybody thought. Reed says his experiments showed the same thing. I think this was originally setting up Kang, but now it's meant for Doom.

Lilia's first lesson reveals she has visited her past before

The Maestra explains this is actually their first lesson, which is interesting because it's about to be the end for Lilia, who dies at the end of the episode in a pretty epic way. Future Lilia says she was never good at tea leaves, and the Maestra answers: "this is a fiction you told yourself and tell yourself still." So although it's the first lesson in time, Lilia has traveled into her younger body before. Otherwise the Maestra wouldn't have known what she tells herself.

There's also a gap in Lilia's mind, as Jen mentions. When she jumps back or forward, her body in the present is still alive, talking and walking, and Lilia doesn't remember any of it. That's why she's so confused a lot of the time. She explains that she experienced her life out of sequence at the beginning, and now near the end it's happening again. There's a certain beauty to that.

Lilia put the sigil on Billy Kaplan to give him time

Lilia can also see into other people's futures, which explains what happened when she met Billy Kaplan at his bar mitzvah. She saw who he was, saw that he would die, and saw that he would become Billy Maximoff, which is what she meant by seeing who he would become. She basically says she put the sigil on him so he wouldn't find out right away, because he'd need time to process everything.

A brand new life when you don't remember your past is a lot to handle, and learning he was the Scarlet Witch's son would have been way too much. In her eyes and in her heart she was trying to help him. That's the full mystery of the sigil revealed, at least as far as we know.

Lilia was trying to warn Alice not to save Agatha

Knowing Lilia's mind jumps at random, we can go back to the moments we thought she was possessed, and one is really sad. In the second trial, a Lilia from the future sees Alice, realizes she has seen Alice die trying to save Agatha, and tries to tell her "Alice don't." Right after she says don't, her mind travels to the first trial, where we heard her say "try to save Agatha." Agatha said she liked this plan, but that was really Lilia being cut off by time travel she can't control while trying to warn Alice it would kill her.

She didn't get to say it, and since Lilia is dead now, I assume Alice is dead as well. We also never really saw Rio at the end of the last episode, so we're assuming she stayed behind to collect the body, as she said.

Billy's tarot reading pointed to Wiccan and a reunion

When Lilia and Jen reach the trial, Lilia's mind has already jumped ahead to a moment where she yelled at Billy, so she enters saying "don't worry we're cool." She starts Billy's reading, and the first card is the Magician. The red robe looks kind of like the one Wiccan, Billy Maximoff's superhero name, wears in the comics. She says he has enormous potential and the ability to turn his goals into reality, and in the comics he has reality shaping abilities much like his mother, who shaped her reality in WandaVision.

The next card, what's missing and the reason for the quest, is the Sun: good fortune, joy, reunion. Reunion is a reference to reuniting with his family. He has his brother Tommy in mind, but it's going to eventually lead to Vision, who comes back in Vision Quest, and then to the Scarlet Witch. Meanwhile, the ceiling of swords is slowly dropping, which I thought was pretty cool.

When she picks the path behind, a sword falls toward her and Agatha saves her. That explains her disappearances in earlier episodes. In the last trial she yelled "get off of me" at a future Agatha, then realized Agatha had saved her. In the first trial, her line about hating each other at first but now loving them seemed random, but she was coming from a future where she had grown to love everybody.

Lilia was the traveler, and her destination was Death

Back with her Maestra, Lilia explains that Death took her coven. She saw it coming and warned them, but a fever wiped them out, and she seems to have been the only survivor. Her Maestra says death comes for us all, which is both something everybody shares and a nod to the literal figure of Death, Rio. Lilia realizes she has seen her own fall, which hasn't happened yet but will. Back at the trial, she realizes it wasn't Billy on the quest. She is the traveler.

She is the Queen of Cups, empathetic and trustworthy. What's missing is the Three of Pentacles, collaboration and community, and her Maestra told her she needs a coven, which she now has. She recognizes each card from things she has seen. The Knight of Wands she saw when Alice tried to save Agatha, and it's really sad that it says full of fire, fights bravely, because Alice did, and it backfired. The path ahead, the High Priestess, she saw through Jen: immense spiritual power but unable to use it, and Jen is bound.

The obstacle is the Three of Swords, heartbreak, sorrow and grief, which she saw when Agatha tended to Billy thinking he would die. The windfall is the Tower reversed, from her reading for William Kaplan: disaster, but reversed, miraculous transformation. That's exactly what happened to Billy, who died and was transformed into Billy Maximoff. The destination card is Death, and Rio reveals herself to Lilia, because she is coming for her. The show doesn't explain much about Rio yet, but it hinted many times that she was Death. I'm sure in the next episode things are really going to escalate between her and Agatha.

Lilia's last instructions took down the Salem Seven

Lilia tells everyone to leave, and it's very sad she dies, because she's such a great spirit. To Agatha she says when she calls you a coward, hit the deck. I'm assuming she means Rio, who's probably going to throw that dagger. She gives Billy back his book, which must have sunk through the mud, tells Jen she's the path ahead, and locks the door behind her, because she has seen this future, so it has to happen.

The Salem Seven come in animal form, which is comic accurate, since they can shapeshift into animals in the comics. Lilia says nothing good happens if you stick around after a trial, then flips the Tower reversed card upright, and they all fall to the ceiling into the swords, killing the Salem Seven and, unfortunately, Lilia.

In the comics, Death is a cosmic entity also viewed as bringing balance

In the comics, Death is a cosmic entity. While she's often viewed as bad, she's also viewed as bringing balance to everything, since death is a part of life, there's a beginning and an end, and there couldn't be balance without death. She came from the cosmic entity Oblivion, which predates the multiverse, and was born with the Big Bang alongside her cosmic siblings Eternity, Infinity, Master Order and Lord Chaos.

She takes life when it's time, and she's necessary. The Beyonder, wanting to be a hero, once killed Death to stop anyone from ever dying again. It worked, but he realized Death was needed to maintain life throughout the universe and came to regret it, and eventually Death and balance were restored. How she'd be portrayed in the MCU, and whether Agatha was actually killing everybody for Death because she loved her, were the things I was looking forward to finding out in the finale.

Which reveal from this episode of Agatha All Along stood out most to you: Rio as Death, Lilia's time jumps, or the truth about the sigil?