Agatha All Along Reveals Rio’s Identity With a Heartbreaking Twist

Even before Agatha All Along debuted on Disney+, one of the show’s major mysteries has been centered around Aubrey Plaza’s character Rio Vidal. While the other witches making up Agatha Harkness’ rag-tag coven traversing The Witches’ Road are taken from the pages of Marvel Comics, Rio didn’t appear to have any particular character correlation — until now. This week’s episode of the Marvel series finally revealed Rio’s real identity, but that revelation came with a heartbreaking twist as one of the witches fulfilled her destiny and found her full power at last. Warning: spoilers for Agatha All Along Episode 7 beyond this point.

This week’s episode pretty much gives away Rio’s identity in its very title: “Death’s Hand in Mine” which means if you guessed that Rio Vidal was actually Death, then you should give yourself a pat on the back. Here’s how that reveal went down. The episode saw Agatha and Billy make their way to the next trial inside a medieval-looking castle where they are faced with a tarot-based trial. They soon realize that they have to do a reading and if they don’t get the reading correct, swords are going to fall from the ceiling and impale them or the blade-riddled ceiling is going to lower until they are killed. At the same time, we find that both Lilia and Jen are alive, just below the road. The episode then moves backwards and forward in a non-linear fashion as we learn about Lilia. Lilia reveals that time is an illusion and her entire life she’s experienced her life out of sequence — which explains her “battiness”. As she goes back and forth from her very first magic lesson as a child centuries before to the present, however, she comes to realize that not only is her real reason for being on the Road to reach her end, but that the end is part of the journey.

It’s in this revelation for Lilia that we get the big reveal about Rio. A lucid Lilia connects all of the little clues that have been laid through the series thus far and puts together that Rio is Death, the “original Green Witch”. We even get to see Rio, briefly, in her full regalia as Death as she tells Lilia that in the end all roads lead to her. But that reveal isn’t the only major moment in the episode. Now that we know Rio is Death, it is time for Death to come for Lilia. Jen and Lilia make it to Billy and Agatha and Lilia successfully does a reading for herself and completes the trial. The exit opens just as the Salem Seven shows up and Lilia hustles everyone out before telling them that she loved being a witch and closing the door. She stays behind. Alone with the Salem Seven, Lilia has one more card to play, as it were. When the terrifying group arrives, she reverses a card on the table — the Tower upright — and causes everything to flip. The Salem Seven are sent “falling” into the blades protruding from the ceiling where they are impaled and die. Lilia holds on as long as he can, but soon falls as well but she welcomes her end — and the next we see her, she’s back in Italy as a child, getting her magic lesson again.

While Lilia’s death is heartbreaking, there is something also beautiful to it. In a sense, for the divination witch this is her “completing” the road. She not only fully embraces her powers and herself, but she is able to light the way for Billy and the other witches still travelling and be reunited with her old coven and, one could argue that she’s not really “dead” as Lilia says the flow of time is an illusion. With that in mind, Lilia will always exist, just maybe somewhere else in the flow. As for that Rio reveal, well, now we know that Death walks the Road with the coven – and with just two episodes and the mystery of whether Wanda Maximoff survived still left to solve – things could get very interesting next week.

Agatha All Along is now streaming on Disney+. New episodes arrive Wednesdays.