Agatha All Along Episode 9 has brought Agatha Harkness and Billy Maximoff’s (or is it Kaplan) adventure on the Witches’ Road to an end.
Unlike other Marvel shows, however, this wasn’t a bombastic action-packed finale complete with gratuitous cameos that set up the next 52 chapters in the ever-expanding MCU.
Instead, it was something far more intimate, and showrunner Jac Schaeffer used the finale to reveal more of Agatha’s backstory, shedding some light on who she was before she became the wicked witch of Westview. As you might expect, Agatha spent a lot of her younger days stealing the magic of other witches, but the episode’s big surprise was how devoted a mother Agatha was to her son Nicholas Scratch, aka Nicky.
We’d been led to believe that Agatah was a cruel mother who traded her son to Mephisto for the power of the Darkhold, but the truth behind Nicky’s death was more heartbreaking than we expected, and it gave us the best scene in the show’s run.
Nicholas Scratch
But before we get to that, we need to understand some context around Nicholas’s birth. It turns out that poor little Nicky wasn’t really meant for this world and was supposed to die during childbirth. Rio (Mistress Death to you and me), however, out of the love she felt for Agatha, allowed the child to live.
Agatha and Nicky spend the next six years or so traveling around America, murdering witches, raising goats, and composing an absolute banger of a song (down, down, down, we go!). Basically, a good time is had by all –that is, until one evening, while Agtha is asleep, Nicky wakes up to find Rio waiting for him, and she finally takes him away.
And then we get the best scene in the show. In the morning, Agatha finds her beloved son has passed away. There’s no spectacular duel with the minions of Mephisto, no witty barbs, or daring battles against unknowable cosmic forces. Nicky just slipped away in the night while Agatha was lying next to him.
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It’s a heartbreaking moment and shockingly matter-of-fact. Anyone who’s experienced death knows that most of the time, it doesn’t play out the way movies have trained us to expect. There’s not always a bedside vigil, knowing tears from the grieving, or poignant last words. Some people just go to sleep and never wake up.
We all need more time
For a Marvel show – I love the MCU, but let’s be honest, subtle drama has never been its strong suit – to pull off such a raw moment of drama was genuinely surprising, especially in a series as silly and camp as Agatha All Along.
It helps, of course, to have an actor as talented as Kathryn Hahn playing Agatha, and she did a beautiful job at that moment. It’s not overwrought or saccharine. It’s just the desperate cries of a woman – so used to feeling powerful and above everyone else – trying to wake her son, knowing that even with all her magic, she can’t bring him back.
That’s why I loved this scene and think it’s the best moment in the show. It encapsulates so much of what Agatha All Along has been about. It sums up that universal need we all feel to be close to those we’ve lost, how many of us use grief to push us to do the impossible, and the tragic truth that grief can drive us to do the unthinkable.
If you want to know more about Agatha Hakrness, we’ve explained why she killed the witches in Episode 9 and revealed what’s next for her and Billy. We’ve also done separate guides on Fantastic Four, Spider-Man 4, and Avengers Doomsday if you want to know more about the upcoming Marvel movies.
