Even if she was dead and buried at the end of Agatha All Along Episode 8, it’s a very much alive and distressed Agatha Harkness we meet at the beginning of the series finale. And either way, she just can’t quit Rio Vidal. It’s 1750, and Agatha is going into labor. But while it’s agonizing enough to self-deliver your baby son while propped against a tree trunk, it’s worse to look up and see his fate beckoning to you from a distance. “It cannot be! Please, my love!” Agatha cries out to a green-cloaked Rio, who simply says that this is the way. Death will take him. But Rio does grant her lover an undetermined amount of time to be with her son, the boy made not from spells or incantations but “from scratch” – as in Nicholas – and six years later, he’s become an accomplice to his mother’s succubus hustle. Nicky (Abel Lysenko) questions why they spend their days destroying covens and taking power. But Agatha chalks it up to the Darwinism of witchcraft. With her “purple,” she can create illusions and control weak minds. But until Death returns for him, all they can do is survive. 

This is what Rio was referencing at the end of Agatha Episode 4. They loved each other, but her executive role in the department of death dealing demanded Rio take Nicholas and leave Agatha forever scarred. In the eighteenth century, as take your son to work day continues, Agatha uses Nicky to lure unsuspecting witches into her trap. She takes their power and the two of them live on, always while singing the song. “We carry on, always forever by your side; My blood, my tears, my bone; maiden mother crone.” But Rio’s allowance ends after six years. She appears in the night, lit by green torch flame, and Nicholas takes Death’s hand as they walk across the bridge to the afterlife.

Agatha’s love for her son is true. It might be the only truly valid thing that we know about her. But once he’s gone, she doesn’t miss an opportunity, and “The Witches’ Road” becomes central to the coven-building con she orchestrates across the arc of time. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, from the Roaring Twenties and onward through the Me Decade, Agatha repeats the fake coven gambit from her Westview basement. Witches gather and eventually turn their powers on her, only for Agatha to drink it in with all of the mirth a many-wigged Kahtryn Hahn can muster. Until we’re back to now, with Lilia and Jen and Alice and even Sharon Davis singing the song to open Witches’ Road portal. After doing this for years, for decades, for centuries, it’s no wonder Agatha was amazed when the addition of Billy Maximoff’s power made it actually work.

Which also validates what we learned at the end of Agatha Episode 8, when Billy realized it was himself as tarot’s Magician that constructed the Witches’ Road. And that’s where Episode 9 returns us to, when Billy turns around in his bedroom only to get ghosted by Agatha Harkness in her newest form. Yes, she was dead and buried. “But now I’m a ghost. Can you dig it?”

Billy can accept that he essentially conjured the Road into existence because he required the outlet. But it’s harder for him to process how his need led at least indirectly to the deaths of Mrs. Davis, Alice Wu-Gulliver, and Lilia Calderu. “My mind killed them,” he laments to Ghost Agatha, who not surprisingly is unsympathetic. Technically, she killed Alice. And Lilia chose to stay behind. But Billy decides enough is enough. Grabbing his spellbook, he prepares for her banishment. “Valia lucem, relinque terrum, Naliese fantasmo,” he intones, which translates as something like “Value the light, leave the land, and meet the ghost.” After her centuries of havoc, he wants no more chances for Agatha. “It’s time to go toward the light, or into Rio’s toxic embrace, or wherever you deserve to spend eternity. I don’t care anymore.” 

Vibe-wise, this is a repeat of how we felt when Agatha Harkness’s body was reclaimed by the earth in her Westview backyard. This can’t be the end, right? With Billy just spellcasting away this mischievous wonder of a character, who survived and thrived in spite of all her shit behavior and quadruple-crosses? Nah, not really. We have no guarantees on an Agatha All Along Season 2. But the mere fact that Hahn is just as approachably likable/hateable when she appears as Ghost Agatha means such a specter should probably stay with us. With Billy’s powers, and his sense of loss – in a way he’s a killer of covens, too, just like her – Agatha and he could make a great team. They could set out together to find what they both still want, meaning the actual manifestation of his twin Tommy Maximoff and probably another meeting of those witchy women, Agatha and Rio. 

“One door closes, another opens.” Billy seals the portal in Agatha’s Westview basement, and tops it with a tribute to the memory of Alice, Sharon, and Lilia. We catch a glimpse of Jennifer Kale, who crawls out of the soil at the Westview border and uses her newly unbound powers to fly away. And as Billy and Agatha move toward the light of another, newly opened portal, it’s with a sense of newfound determination and even partnership. “Let’s go find Tommy.” 

We hope that they do, in whatever form the future of the show and its (surviving) characters takes. Agatha All Along injected humor, unpredictability, and emotional heft into a television side of Marvel where all of that was sorely, sorely lacking. And if the powers that be want to give Aubrey Plaza her own spinoff in the MCU, that’s cool too. After all, Death becomes her.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.