Agatha All Along’s two-episode finale aired this week and while the coven — or rather, what was left of it — reached the end of The Witches’ Road and its final trial, there was still a couple of major surprises about the mythical path to be revealed. The MCU series revealed that the Road was originally a con created by Agatha using a song she and her son created — the original Ballad — to lure unsuspecting witches to their deaths at her hands but that Billy had somehow made the Road real with his own powers. The latter revelation meant that everything that happened to the coven along the path did in fact happen and the deaths of Mrs. Hart, Alice, and Lilia were sadly very real as well. But it also means that there was indeed something at the end of The Witches’ Road for those how made it to completion. Here’s how that went down and what was really at the end may surprise you.
After leaving the tarot trial that saw Lilia sacrifice herself to stop the Salem Seven, Agatha, Billy, and Jennifer had just one trial remaining but when they continue on the road, they find themselves back at the beginning — literally. Instead of finding a new location for a final trial, the trio find their shoes that they took off when they first started down the path. It turns out that the end of the road was just a circular path, but as with most things in magic there’s more to it than that. When Billy puts on his shoes, he suddenly finds himself in a bare, almost clinical room with grow lights overhead. Agatha and Jennifer soon appear as well and they deduce that whatever this trial is, it’s about green magic.
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As the lights start ticking down the passage of time, Jennifer realizes that Agatha was responsible for the spell that bound her powers in the past — Agatha was selling spell work back then — and then performs an unbinding ritual, freeing herself. Jennifer vanishes from the trial, now free. Then, Agatha helps Billy, guiding him to find his brother Tommy and then, helps him guide Tommy into a boy drowning due to a horrible prank. Billy freaks out and asks if he’s killing the boy so his brother can live, but he doesn’t get an answer. He’s completed the trial and disappears. Only Agatha is left and, with time running out, she finds a seed in lock of hair kept in her brooch. Using the soil from the broken part of the floor and a tear as hydration, she plants it and it grows into a dandelion with just seconds to spare, completing the trial and exiting Agatha as well.
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So, what was really at the end of The Witches’ Road? Despite the Road not actually being real until Billy manifested it, the Road did give the witches who completed it the thing that they were missing and thus fulfilled its promise. Jennifer was no longer bound, Billy located Tommy, and Agatha got her powers back. However, it was less the Road that gave those things back to the witches and more the witches themselves. At the end of the Road was less a true trial and more a situation where the witches had to face themselves and come to some pretty important realizations about self. For Jennifer, that meant she had to recognize that she had the power to empower herself, something that we see her do when she uses the unbinding ritual to free herself from Agatha’s spell. The scene where Jennifer repeatedly tells Agatha that she holds nothing, each time growing more confident, is incredibly powerful and you can see Jennifer returning to the power within herself — a power that may or may not have anything to do with witchcraft. For Billy, it was about not only finding Tommy — and in this case creating a path for him to be reborn — but also recognizing that being a witch and using magic is something that comes with hard choices. Once Billy does it, the next time we see him he has fully transformed into Wiccan, presumably having fully accepted who he is and having stepped into his power.
And when it comes to Agatha, for her it’s a little more complicated. While it would seem that what she wanted from the Road was her son, what she needed was acceptance. This plays out with her creating life from death — the hair and seed were taken from her son after his death centuries before — and given that Agatha has been the source of so much death in her time, this moment is significant. It’s a moment in which she actually has to sit with her grief, which the actual finale episode hints is something she never really did as she goes directly from burying her son to tricking witches with the con of the original Ballad. The final trial, for Agatha, was about having that moment and in that moment perhaps becoming whole.
Ultimately, what was at the end of The Witches’ Road was self — and it didn’t just come at the true “end”. For every witch that walked the Road Billy manifested, the trials were a confrontation of self. Each witch had to work through something that had been holding them back and preventing them from being their authentic selves. Alice finally broke through and stepped into her power as a protection witch when she saved Agatha from Evanora in the ‘80s horror themed trial. Lilia found her own acceptance of being a witch and her powers in the tarot trial. Each witch that walked the Road found the end, albeit at a different place, but they each found glory — in themselves.
Agatha All Along is now streaming on Disney+.
