What do you get when a show spends episode upon episode teasing a devastating, all-encompassing love story for its main character, only to brush past it in the finale? Marvel’s Agatha All Along, that’s what you get.
The last two episodes of the Kathryn Hahn-led witch show landed on Disney Plus on Wednesday evening to a level of anticipation that hadn’t been felt around a Marvel Television title since the finale of Loki last November. Lilia and Alice were gone, the Salem Seven were finally defeated (however underwhelmingly), and now it was time for Jennifer, Billy, and Agatha to finish the Witches’ Road.
The show’s incredibly rich and detail-filled development naturally built up the expectations for the finale as fans eagerly waited to learn more about the true nature of the Witches’ Road and Agatha’s past, particularly her tragic history with both her son Nicholas and Rio, whom we had recently learned was actually Lady Death.
Episode 8 saw Agatha make a pact with Rio to spare her life in exchange for Agatha convincing Billy to hand himself into Death’s embrace. After an entire season of pining for each other, Agatha and Rio were back to where they were in episode one as the witch told her deathly former lover that she never wanted to see her face again, not even in the afterlife. The two eventually entered a stand-off in the final minutes of the episode when Rio came after Agatha for not honoring their pact. The latter ultimately chose to end her life both as a sacrifice so Billy could live and, seemingly, as repentance for Nicholas’ death.
Functioning more like an epilogue, episode 9 was fans’ last hope to find out what exactly happened to make Agatha and Rio’s relationship so loaded and angsty. Come to find out, Nicholas was meant to die at birth and all Rio did was give Agatha six more years with him before coming to get him for good. It’s implied that Agatha had to pay for this “special treatment” by sacrificing other lives, so for those six years, every day, she drained fellow witches of their powers, giving them the same fate as Alice in episode five of the show. The one day Nicholas asked his mom not to kill anyone turned into the evening when Death finally came for him.
That’s basically all we see of Rio in Agatha’s past. As she was giving birth to Nicky, and making yet another pact with Death, Agatha calls the other woman “my love,” yet the audience is never shown what prompted the pet name. We never get to see how they fell in love or why Agatha resented Rio so much when she actually bent the rules of nature to allow her lover six more years with her son.
In conclusion, while the show delivered the goods on many fronts, including a great reveal of Joe Locke’s Wiccan, the culmination of the very central and frequently teased romance between Agatha and Rio amounted to essentially nothing. That is unless you count extreme confusion and a bittersweet aftertaste as something.
“They made their relationship so pivotal to Agatha and the show in general that a lack of depth diminishes the storytelling,” one fan graciously observed. Others were not so soft-spoken. “WHAT THE —- HAPPENED” and “JAC I AM IN YOUR WALLS” were some of the more desperate cries echoed by fans of the couple, who thought they would be much better served by the show.
tbh my only complaint about the show. and it’s not even a question of preference, but i felt like they portrayed their relationship to be so complicated and pivotal that absolutely no backstory as to how they got together diminishes the storytelling.
— 🗿carol🗿 – Absurdist Lover (@ineffable_ohara) October 31, 2024
It’s been as good as confirmed that we will see Kathryn Hahn in this role again, and rumor has it Aubrey Plaza will show her face around the MCU in the future, too. Could we end up getting the backstory we were promised? At this point, we’ll even accept some long, boring exposition, but just give us something, Marvel, please.