Agatha All Along: What Does Agatha Really Want From The Witches Road?

The Witches' Road gives you your greatest desire if you survive. What if Agatha desires something more than power?

By Nicole Drum

In the first two episodes of Agatha All Along, Marvel fans caught up with Kathryn Hahn's Agatha Harkness who, after spending three years stuck inside of the spell placed upon her by Wanda Maximoff at the end of WandaVision, finally escapes and finds herself powerless. To get her power back, she forms a coven with a mysterious Teen (Joe Locke) and a ragtag group of witches to face the trials of the legendary Witches' Road. Except… what if, for Agatha, going down the Witches' Road isn't about regaining power at all? It's established that the Witches' Road rewards any witch who survives it with that which they most desire but it might not actually be power that Agatha truly desires. The witch everyone loves to hate may just have another reason for taking on this dangerous journey and her true motivations might just change everything.

Warning: spoilers for the first three episodes of Agatha All Along beyond this point. Read on only if you really want to know.

In the two episodes of Agatha All Along, "Seekest Thou the Road" and "Circle Sewn With Fate/Unlock Thy Hidden Gate", there are a few things of note that are established about Agatha. The first is how Agatha gets her powers. In the first episode, a powerless Agatha faces off with Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) who comes to kill Agatha once she's free of Wanda's spell. During the banter between the two witches during the fight, Agatha points out that Rio doesn't want to kill her when she's powerless and Rio suggests that Agatha simply take her power from her, ostensibly to make the kill more satisfying. Agatha says she can't do that and Rio is ultimately convinced to wait until Agatha has her powers back, but we find out a little bit more about Agatha's power in the second episode. In that episode, Agatha reveals to Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone) that she can only take the power of other witches if she's blasted with them. That piece of information comes up useful later when the coven attempts to open the gate to the Road and it initially appears to fail. Agatha is shown as expecting the gathered and now angered witches to blast her with their powers so she can steal them. They don't, Agatha's manipulation fails — but the gate to the Road appears and off they go.

So, if Agatha can gain power simply by getting another witch mad enough at her to blast her with their powers which she in turn steals, it calls into question if Agatha really needs the Witches' Road for power. Certainly, one could argue that given the witches she has to choose from, all of which seem pretty aware of Agatha and her machinations and, thus, are a bit more careful in their dealings with her, the chances of her being blasted with power that she can take are low but low isn't zero. We also know that, historically, Agatha has taken the power of other witches before — specifically in Salem 1693 when a cover led by her own mother try to execute her for the use of dark magic and, instead, Agatha drains them of their power/life force. She'd probably be clever enough to find suitable magic in the short term until she could get bigger power on her own which means Agatha isn't walking the Road for power.

Agatha's heart desires something else and the clues are in episode one and in this week's episode three, "Through Many Miles of Tricks and Trials."

In the first episode, viewers are shown that, in her house — or at least the version where she's caught in Wanda's spell — there is a child's room set up and left untouched as though the child isn't coming back to it. In that child's room is a trophy with the name "Nicholas Scratch" on it. Fans of Marvel Comics know that Nicholas Scratch is the name of Agatha's son and given the sadness Agatha seems to feel in that room as well as her frantic response to the idea that the intruder (Teen) may have taken something from the room, it suggests that there is some grief there. We get another clue that Agatha may be grieving a child in episode three. In that episode, Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata) tells Teen to be careful because Agatha traded her own son for the book of the damned (aka, the Darkhold) and suggests she has no remorse, but when Agatha is hit with the nightmarish hallucination that the trial the witches face inflicts on them, Agatha hears a baby crying in an antique cradle only to pull back the blanket and find the Darkhold, which horrifies her. Agatha's reaction in part speaks to the deep pain a parent feels at losing a child but also suggests that the real motivation for Agatha to walk to road is that her heart's greatest desire is not power, but to have her son back.

Agatha can take power. She's done it before. She will likely do it again. She doesn't need the Road to grant her power. But what she can't simply take or steal or bargain for is the life of her child. That appears to be something that one can only get through a deeper mystical act of magic, like walking the Road. And if Agatha is embarking on this Road in an effort to get her son back, this motivation completely changes her actions in WandaVision by making her not so different from Wanda Maximoff after all. Remember, in WandaVision, while Wanda trapped the people of Westview in her grief-hex all on her own, Agatha isn't innocent in things. Agatha figures out that Wanda possesses legendary chaos magic and is the Scarlet Witch — and promptly starts to attempt to steal Wanda's magic for herself. Since Wanda was using chaos magic to create a family and a "happily ever after" sitcom ending for herself out of grief, it isn't a stretch to think that Agatha wanted the chaos magic to do something similar for herself, specifically to use it to get back her own son from wherever he is.

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And if Agatha and Wanda are both grieving women simply trying to use dangerous magic to heal their hearts and traumas, it certainly changes everything we know about them both… and could suggest that neither woman is really a true villain. After all, what mother wouldn't harness chaos for their child?

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

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