All season on Agatha All Along, Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) and her coven have been walking The Witches’ Road, a mythical path in magic that, per the lore, grants any witch who survives its trials and makes it to the end the thing they desire most. In fact, The Witches’ Road is so legendary that there have been songs written about it — Lorna Wu’s “Ballad of The Witches’ Road” — and Agatha, as the Road’s only known survivor, has a bit of legendary status of her own. But now, with the two-episode finale of the Disney+ series, a shocking truth about the Road has been revealed and it’s something that changes how we see everything about the series. Warning: Spoilers for the finale of Agatha All Along beyond this point. Read on only if you want to know.
As it turns out, The Witches’ Road has legend status because it is exactly that: a legend. It is revealed that The Witches’ Road doesn’t actually exist, or more accurately, did not exist until Billy (Joe Locke) willed it into existence with his powers, creating his own sort of “hex” to manifest it. The revelation that The Witches’ Road was never real also has a revelation of its own tucked into it. Agatha has, indeed, been lying for centuries about her experience with the road. The reality is much grimmer: the Road was a story created by Agatha to use in order to steal the powers of other witches for herself. We saw a peek of this earlier in the season, when Agatha gathered this current, makeshift coven and then tried to prompt them into blasting her with their powers. Agatha knew that she couldn’t open a gate to the Road because it didn’t exist. It was a fiction from the start.
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This also explains a comment Rio (Aubrey Plaza) made in Episode 4, where she tells Agatha that she can get the powers of the other witches and she will get the bodies. We already knew that there was an existing relationship between Agatha and Rio, but now knowing that Rio is Death and Agatha was scamming witches to take their power (and their lives) for centuries, it’s a whole new dimension towards that relationship.
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Of course, the reveal that The Witches’ Road wasn’t real also adds some new dimension to other aspects of the series we’ve seen. Since the Road itself was a myth created by Agatha, she knew from the start that whatever they were walking was likely of Billy’s creation, she just simply went along with it. This also means that the little details that many fans picked up on as the Road spread out in front of them each episode were genuinely clues — and by this we specifically mean the details that showed the Road to be very Billy-coded, such as the fictional witches, the horror movie-themed trial and more. And of course, there’s the largest implication of them all: Agatha knew pretty early on that Billy was Wanda’s son and to an extent suggests that she went along with things with the hope of taking Billy’s powers for her own, much like she planned to do with Wanda in WandaVision.
What is particularly interesting What is particularly interesting about the revelation that Billy created the Road is that we also get the history of how the concept of the Road came to be. The finale takes viewers back into Agatha’s history where it’s revealed that when she gives birth to Nicholas, she’s told by Death that all she can give her is time — meaning that the boy is going to die. While it is not expressly stated that Agatha has an existing arrangement with Death to kill witches, we soon see Agatha going about the business of doing just that with her young son in tow, indeed even utilizing him in the scheme. As they walk along together, young Nicky starts singing a song that eventually becomes the Ballad, and in turn, becomes the legend of the Road that Agatha uses to lure in witches that she kills for their power.
Billy’s realization — and Agatha’s confirmation — that the Road wasn’t real until he made it so not only hints at Billy starting to come into his true power, but also ultimately sets him on a different sort of journey. When Agatha dies to spare him Death (though Agatha later insists she didn’t sacrifice herself, you know, just Agatha being Agatha here), she returns to Billy as a ghost unwilling to transition so she doesn’t have to face her son. It puts her in a position to be his guide — and the two are now a coven of their own off on a new impossible mission: find Tommy.
Agatha All Along is now streaming on Disney+.
