The first (and potentially only) season of Agatha All Along concluded this week, and the latest Disney+ series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has left a lot for fans to unpack. There was another major death, the truth about The Witches’ Road was revealed, and we finally learned Tommy’s fate, too. We also got some pretty significant moments such as that devastating “romantic” moment between Agatha and Rio and a couple of disappointments when neither Wanda nor Mephisto showed up in the end. But beyond all of those things, it is ultimately Agatha’s story that remains the biggest thing to examine because the series’ revelations about the infamous witch leave us with an unexpected truth: Agatha Harkness and Wanda Maximoff, it turns out, are far more alike than anyone realized and it’s those similarities that put Wanda’s story into a whole new light and may make you reconsider how you see Agatha as well.
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There are multiple aspects of both Agatha and Wanda’s stories that have major similarities. Everything from their early family experiences to their romantic entanglements to even their children reveal that the two witches have a lot in common with the biggest difference being how they dealt with those aspects of their lives. While one can argue that they both ended up in villain-like roles before ultimately seeing the error of their ways, they are both highly complex characters that fans want to see more from. Let’s break it down.
Agatha and Wanda Both Have Family Trauma
For both Agatha and Wanda, the similarities begin in their early histories as both witches have deep family trauma. In the case of Wanda Maximoff, her parents were killed when she was a child when a missile struck their apartment in Sokovia during a war, leaving Wanda and her brother Pietro trapped for two days with the missile. Years later, Pietro was killed in the fight against Ultron, leaving Wanda traumatized yet again and deeply grieving another significant loss that, this time, left her largely alone in the world. In Agatha’s case, the trauma is a bit more complicated. We know nothing about Agatha’s father or her childhood, but we do know that Agatha is responsible for her mother Evanora’s death — though it’s a sad story all of its own. In 1693, Agatha killed members of her Salem coven (including her mother) in essentially self-defense when they tried to have her executed for the practice of dark magic. However, during The Witches’ Road trials we learn that Evanora may not have been a loving mother at any point in Agatha’s life. Evanora’s ghost tells Agatha that she should have killed her when she was a baby, a revelation that visibly hurts Agatha all these centuries later.
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While Wanda’s trauma is familial loss, Agatha’s trauma of being an outcast and having her own mother decide that she is evil and needed to die is just as significant and creates a form of grief itself. Both witches carry with them a sense of loss as well as other emotions that impact how they view themselves and the world around them and, in turn, how they interact with others.
Agatha and Wanda Both Have “Taboo” Loves
Another parallel between the two witches are their romantic lives. Both Wanda and Agatha’s choice of romantic partners fall a little bit outside of what might be considered normal or acceptable for their social norms. In the case of Wanda, she has a healthy and seemingly happy relationship with Vision who just so happens to be a sentient android rather than a human man. That’s something that probably is seen as a little weird. In the case of Agatha, her love is literally Death, which means that there are aspects to their relationship that simply do not work the same way as it would between two mortals (after all, fans are debating whether Agatha’s death kiss was the couple’s first kiss). For both Agatha and Wanda, their unconventional loves present challenges that ultimately lead to them not being able to be together — something that causes both women a great deal of pain, and in Wanda’s case, prompts her to create a whole false reality.
Both Agatha and Wanda Are Mothers Who “Created” Their Children… and Lost Them
We already know that Wanda created her children. Both Billy and Tommy were products of her hex, created out of her magic and her grief with Billy only becoming “real” when his essence found a vessel in the form of the recently deceased William Kaplan as the hex was collapsing. But the final episode of Agatha All Along reveals that Agatha also created her own son, Nicholas Scratch. While Agatha clearly says that she did not use an incantation to bring Nicholas into the world, she does say that she “created him from scratch”. It is entirely possible that there was some sort of magic involved — the series doesn’t get into the details of Nicholas’ full parentage which means this could be a situation of manifestation, a deal with the devil, or really any number of possibilities. But there is something to be said about the “magic” of carrying and giving birth to a child more broadly so even if magic in the witchy sense wasn’t involved in Nicky’s birth, for Agatha he is still something of her creation and indeed the first “pure” thing she’s ever done.
Tragically for both Agatha and Wanda, they lose their children to death or death-like scenarios. Those losses change both women in big ways. For Wanda, it makes her more determined than ever to find her children again as she believes they are out there somewhere. That leads her down a dark path — literally, she uses the Darkhold — while for Agatha, losing Nicky haunts her. It ruins her relationship with Death and may even be what prompts her to continue using the Ballad of The Witches’ Road to lure in and murder unsuspecting witches and take their power for centuries. Neither woman is the same after losing their children.
By looking at the similarities between Agatha and Wanda, there’s a fundamental shift to not only how we view Wanda’s story, but to everything we thought we knew about Agatha. While she initially just comes across as a power-stealing antagonist, there are more layers there. Agatha’s motivations in WandaVision may have been less about merely wanting to take ultimate power but instead more about taking Wanda’s power to do something similar to what Wanda did in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: try to get her child back. Yes, the end of Agatha All Along does have Agatha not wanting to transition to the afterlife because she’s not wanting to face her son, but this takes place three years after the events of WandaVision and with a newly dead Agatha having to face the reality of everything she’s done. It’s a different scenario than where she was in WandaVision where she was trying to take from Wanda.
We see a bit of the shift in how we perceive Agatha in her relationship with Billy at the end as well — which interestingly enough also has a parallel to something from Wanda’s life. In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, while Wanda starts out wanting to use America Chavez for her powers as part of her own efforts to reunite with versions of her children from another timeline, she ends up relenting and sacrificing herself to destroy the Darkhold, freeing Chavez. Agatha ends up sacrificing her own life to keep Death from taking Billy and then returns as a ghost to become Billy’s spirit guide and heads out into the world with him to locate Tommy having helped Billy bring Tommy into reality during the final trial. For both Wanda and Agatha, they start their journey as one thing and end as another — all informed by their complex life experiences.
The MCU is nothing if not full of complex and layered characters. Agatha and Wanda may be two of the best examples of that and looking at the similarities between the two witches really highlights that. For both of them, the significance of motherhood and grief in their journeys are driving forces that see them grow and change in ways that lend to not only good entertainment, but rich and flawed stories of redemption. Ultimately, both Agatha and Wanda have bittersweet fates. Neither woman is truly a villain nor a hero. They’re simply complex women with stories viewers want to see more of.
Agatha All Along is now streaming on Disney+.
