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This article contains spoilers for the Agatha All Along premiere, which includes Episode 1, “Seekest Thou the Road,” and Episode 2, “Circle Sewn with Fate Unlock Thy Hidden Gate.” It’s time, witches. The coven has assembled and Agatha All Along is finally here.
I’ll be honest, I had some worries after the first few trailers, but the two-episode premiere of the latest Marvel show is off to a good start — even if the fake-out detective story overstays its welcome just a hair. For now, the show’s success is in how it’s setting up plenty of intrigue. (Half of the fun of these big, interconnected shows is theorizing, after all.
) Let’s dig into the biggest burning questions out of Agatha’s reintroduction to Westview, starting with the Head Witch in Charge herself, Wanda. There has been no moment since her sacrifice in Multiverse of Madness that I have believed that The Scarlet Witch could be killed by something as silly as a mountain falling on her. The MCU has had its hiccups lately, but we’re above the cliche of dropping proverbial houses on witches, one would think.
Still, part of what’s got me so engaged in these first two episodes of Agatha All Along is that they are both aggressively signaling that Wanda is alive and repeating that she is very dead. The specter of Wanda’s memory continues to haunt the residents of Westview but none so much as Agatha (Kathryn Hahn), who has multiple conversations implying that The Scarlet Witch is still alive. The first is with Herb (David A.
Payton) who, at the time, is playing a fellow cop in Agatha’s little detective show but later is just her neighbor. He notes that being crushed by that amount of force could kill anyone, with Agnes (still Agatha) offhandedly replying that she wouldn’t be so sure. The second is with Rio (Aubrey Plaza) — masquerading as an FBI agent at the time — who notes that there are two names on the body’s toe tag, helping Agatha realize who she is and implying that neither witch was actually dead, simply powerless.
Finally, there’s the fact that in Agatha’s little CSI episode, Wanda’s body being moved comes up multiple times. If the Scarlet Witch transported herself home to be closer to her and Vision’s would-be home, Westview’s residents would have found her. But that doesn’t eliminate the possibility of someone moving her there.
Perhaps the car with the bloody backseat Detective Agnes brings up is of more importance than it seems. The thing to know about Agatha Harkness is that most witches aren’t big fans. The whole power-stealing schtick doesn’t really sit with them well, and that’s before you consider that she stole the power of and killed her own mother and coven back in 1693 (as seen in WandaVision).
All that in mind, there seems to be something more between Agatha and Rio. Once the former is freed, the latter immediately attacks her and eventually sends the Salem Seven to deal with Harkness and her indiscretions. Still, Rio was an active participant in breaking Agatha out of Wanda’s spell.
Why help her only to kill her? If I hated someone with all of my being, then I’d be delighted to watch them toil away trapped in a spell that rendered them powerless and apparently insane,! There’s more going on here, but we’re going to have to wait to find out what that “more” may be with no comic history to reference on Rio. While Agatha is still under the Scarlet Witch’s spell, the lonely detective heads upstairs to look longingly into an empty bedroom that very clearly belonged to a child. Agatha Harkness having a kid isn’t news, but the child’s comics history isn’t as cheery as his mother’s, and alluding to him in this new series is of note.
In the comics, Agatha Harkness is one of the good guys (most of the time). Both she and her son have strong ties to the Fantastic Four but, while the mother works alongside them and helps rear the young Franklin Richards (Sue and Reed’s son), her own son — Nicholas Scratch — mostly just wreaks havoc as a villain. Right now, it seems as if Agatha All Along is simply implying Scratch’s existence rather than bringing him into the fold.
The hint of a child comes and goes after Agatha is freed from the spell but I’m not convinced that Scratch doesn’t have a larger role to play in the series. For starters, the Salem Seven are all Scratch’s children in the comics themselves. But whether or not they’re tied to the Harkness bloodline in the MCU remains to be seen.
The Salem Seven are made up of, you guessed it, seven witches. As mentioned, they’re all offspring of Nicholas Scratch in the comics. As of Agatha All Along’s premiere, we’re yet to understand what their role will be in the MCU itself.
The members of the Seven are Brutacus, Gazelle, Hydron, Reptilla, Thornn, Vakume and Vertigo. Each of them transforms into something implied by their name (Brutacus is a lion, Gazelle a deer, Hydron a fish-man, etc.) like weird, witchy Eeveelutions, save for Vertigo.
The eldest of the Salem Seven needs no other form, but still does just as her name implies: she messes up your balance. Not for nothing, but Vakume just kind of transforms into a featureless purple humanoid thing who can create vacuums and fly by manipulating the air. Current assumption is that they will make him a touch less silly for the series.
It’s actually fully possible that we’ve already seen their new forms so far as the MCU is concerned. At first, I thought the animals Agatha was seeing were simply omens. But, given the Seven’s proclivity for transformations, we may have witnessed them in their animal forms in Episode 2 while Agatha and the Teen (Joe Locke) were assembling the coven.
We didn’t see them all, but there was a raven, a rat, and a wolf. Like Wanda being dead, there has never once been a moment that I believed the Teen was Wiccan, a.k.
a. Wanda’s son Billy (kinda, it’s really complicated). I know it’s a popular theory; I just can’t follow y’all down that road.
For what it’s worth, Agatha All Along really, really wants us to think that young man is Billy Maximoff (or Kaplan, or Kaplan-Altman). He can’t say his name or reveal his backstory, he’s gay, his name is conveniently omitted from the coven list despite having powers, his mom is dead (I know I’ve just contradicted the above, stick with me)..
. and it is for all of those reasons that my conviction has only grown stronger. That is not Billy.
Instead, it is my current belief that the young man bopping around with Agatha Harkness and acting the doting sidekick is none other than her own son, Nicholas Scratch. It’s the Teen’s answer to Agatha asking why he wants to find the road that has me so convinced. The boy says he’s looking for power, and I just don’t see that from the character who has canonically been offered literally ultimate power and turned it down to return to his human form (it’s a long story, but Wiccan becomes a god at one point).
Nicholas Scratch, on the other hand? He wants power real, real bad. If I’m being perfectly frank, I also just think that Wiccan (and his brother Speed) has too convoluted a comics origin for the MCU to do anything other than simply bring Julian Hilliard (the young actor who played Billy in WandaVision) back when he’s old enough or recast the character as an adult version from another timeline. In the comics it’s all “He’s Billy but he’s not Billy and they’re twins but they’re not really twins and they’re reincarnated or are they.
..?” Get out of here.
MCU fans barely have patience for Eternals’ “hand sticking out of the ocean” guy Tiamut going unacknowledged. At the same time, if the Teen ends up actually being Billy, it seems perfectly likely that his mother is dead and he wants to walk the road to bring her back. Or, even still, continuing down the path of her being alive but powerless, the “power” the Teen seeks could very well be Wanda’s power so that he may return it to her, not something he seeks to control on his own.
Part of why Agatha All Along works so far is that it has us guessing. It’s a feeling that’s been sorely missed since WandaVision, and I was concerned this show wasn’t going to be able to pull it off. I was wrong! (Still don’t think I’m wrong about Scratch, though.
) This is one of those burning questions that I simply don’t have an answer for yet. Lilia’s comic book counterpart has strong connections to the Book of Cagiliostro, which currently sits in Kamar-Taj’s library (as seen in the Doctor Strange movie). Perhaps the MCU’s version of the Patti LuPone character held the book for some time, and being separated from it for a prolonged period has caused the line between her visions and reality to blur.
If you want to know more about the character, read our full Lilia Calderu explainer while we wait for Episode 3! Agatha All Along draws a lot of attention to the witch’s broach in the first two episodes. It’s been a long time since WandaVision, but we learned the broach’s origins in Agatha’s flashback to her coven turning on her. The charge was led by her mother, who she saps of power and kills alongside the rest of her sisters.
As for the lock of hair inside — we don’t yet know. But I’m gonna bet another shiny penny that it belongs to young Nicholas. No.
So those are our biggest burning questions from the first two episodes of Agatha All Along. What has you scratching your head? Let’s discuss in the comments..
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