We’ve officially reached the end of the witches’ road — even though technically, it ended up being a circle — and everyone’s got their power back. Though admittedly, in some unexpected ways.
In the two-episode finale of the Marvel series “Agatha All Along,” now streaming on Disney+, we learn that the Witches’ Road isn’t actually real, and it never has been — at least, not until Billy Maximoff (Joe Locke) came along. With powers similar to his mother’s, he quite literally conjured the road under the streets of Westview.
He’s responsible for the trials and, by unintentional extension, the death of his coven. Well, most of his coven; Jen (Sasheer Zamata) managed to get out alive. But Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) sure didn’t.
Don’t worry, we aren’t technically losing her from the MCU. She’s a ghost now, determined to use her afterlife to help Billy find his brother Tommy.
A whole lot went down in Westview once again, so for one last breakdown of the season, we went to showrunner Jac Schaeffer to unpack it all.
The very first thing I want to talk about today is Rio, and the characterization that you guys went with of Death. We open on this scene with Alice, and Rio is almost a comforting presence. Alice is obviously terrified, but Rio says “You’re a protection witch. You died protecting someone.” There’s a level of gentleness there. But for Agatha, Rio’s a bit more of a menacing presence, yet also a comfort, because they love each other. So how did you guys decide how to characterize Death, as a person?
So our notion of Death and her power set, because we were doing witches and because witches are rooted in nature, we wanted our version of Death to be death and life in constant conversation. We didn’t want Death to be destruction. We didn’t want Death to like, walk by things and they wither around her. We wanted it to be an actual flow.
And I think that’s sort of my life view, and I would say a lot of the folks in the room too, that we should endeavor not to fear death. That it is a part of life, that it can be beautiful. We were all born. We all die. So we wanted that divine feminine energy involved in how she operates. And so I think that informed her as a character, that we see her in what she calls her “job,” that there is a neutrality about her work, much the way nature is neutral, you know? Nature is beautiful, and fierce, and terrifying and uncaring, but also can hold you and can fill you.
So we wanted all of that, and that scene with Alice’s character, you know, part of the reason that’s there is to see how Death is in her job. There is like an edge of cruelty, but also she knows the truthful statement to make, to contextualize things for people in the sort of larger scheme of their lives.
How she is with Agatha is a totally different story, because that is their love affair. And so, with Agatha, she is toxic, and petty and vulnerable, and she does not have the upper hand, which was our favorite thing. We were like, “If Agatha is going to be in a relationship with Death, Agatha would have the upper hand.” How hot is that for our main girl, right? Our protagonist has Death whipped. We were just like, totally gaga over that idea.
And so Aubrey, in her performance, her sort of natural Chaos Energy is all in sort of the intermingling with Agatha. But as Death, she is more sure-footed. And yeah, it’s “Death’s hand in mine.” She’s doing her job.
One of the scenes with with Aubrey that I can’t stop thinking about is when she takes her knife and plunges it into your set. That is the beauty of practical design. How’d you arrive at her literally cutting open reality?
Yes. So, this is the moment in our press journey together Andi, where I tell you that the reason that the road and our show is practical is because Billy Maximoff is a baby witch. And he can’t be creating thousands and thousands of miles of forest. So he created a backdrop, and he created forced perspective, and he created models, and all of the practicality of our sets is because of him, and because of his limitations of physically creating this world underground, underneath Westview.
And so that moment with Rio and the knife cutting the backdrop, that is Rio acknowledging that she knows what’s going on, that she knows that Billy has created this witches road hex. It also just is such a badass moment (laughs).
It’s something that was actually, truthfully, hard to accomplish. It was this thing that we kept having to sort of like, kick it to the edge of the schedule, and it was hard to figure out how to do it with the knife, and there was, like, a safety issue. It was one of those things that it felt like logistics kept telling us not to do it. And it was a baby of executive producer Mary Livanos’, and she really, really fought for it and protected it on the schedule.
And then Aubrey did it with so much (gutteral sound). Like, feral animalistic vibe. And then Christophe Beck and Michael Paraskevas came in with that score that sort of feels a little distorted, but still in the Rio Vidal soundscape. That is all the intention behind that moment, however, I’ve seen a few other things online, and I love the different interpretations.
It was also a nod to “WandaVision.” It was meant to sort of have the “WandaVision” feels, like the jump cut moment, like Vision’s head being crushed in, like all of our weird sort of step out moments — the beekeeper — because we had such a short period of time where we were ready to hint at the twist that Billy had made the road. And so it was in that same episode that we were like, “We’ll do this sick moment.”
I will also tell you something that brings me joy, that I don’t think anyone will be able to pick out. So when they first get on the road, we have a very lush soundscape that feels very alive, and on that last walk on the road before they find the shoes, we made the soundscape of the road a little more canned and it loops. Because our idea is that, as Billy is going along in this hex, his subconscious is getting more frustrated and disenchanted with the road, because people are dying. And so his sort of hexifying is starting to suffer. And so the sound design has a little bit of a falseness to it.
Another scene that I keep thinking about with Rio is the confrontation between her and Agatha. The line that grabbed me was “When I die a long, long, long, long, long time from now, I don’t want to see your face.” You technically followed through on that. They kissed, her eyes were closed, Agatha did not see Rio’s face when she died. Was that intentional?
It was tricky, because we had that whole moment, “I don’t want to see your face when I die a long, long, long time from now,” and then she dies I think, like, 12 screen minutes later. So not the greatest example of narrative structuring. And that’s my responsibility, not [writer] Peter Cameron. But that moment is more about Agatha saying, “I reject you and our love.”
This is something we never extrapolate on, and so I leave it to everybody’s interpretation, but my notion of Death is she can take any form, and this form, this Aubrey Plaza form, is tied to Agatha, and Agatha is saying, “I don’t want to see this form anymore, because this is the form that I loved, and this is the form that betrayed me.” That’s my interpretation, but I welcome however people internalize the show.
Well, I want to talk about the kiss itself too. Was that their first kiss? Because if the kiss is what killed her, and Rio stopped her from almost kissing her on the road… Was that their first?
I don’t think so. I think that that was — we call that the kiss of death, that was always the design, that Agatha wouldn’t be able to sustain Death’s power. If Agatha used her succubus power against Death, that it would kill her. So that’s the sort of mechanism in play.
We always wanted it to be a kiss, however, for the relationship of it, for the beauty of it, for the culmination of the arc of this chapter of their love affair. I believe there are other chapters.
But I also feel like, and this is kind of buried beneath, Agatha has this power that only works when she’s attacked, which is one of my favorite things about her, because that’s so complex, and it renders her isolated no matter what. She is a naturally tribal creature, and she cannot fulfill that because of her power set. And I really loved the idea of seeing her use her power set, but she’s not being blasted, that it is a kiss that triggers her power set.
So it’s a little murky, we don’t fully explain that, but that’s always been my sense of it. That this is the final moment of a battle, and instead of it being blasting, the way you would normally see in the MCU, it’s a kiss. But the kiss is toxic because of where they are in their love affair.
You talk about the chapters, one chapter we didn’t spend a whole lot of time with was the backstory of them. We didn’t go back and see how they started. Was there a conversation of whether or not you wanted to show how they came to be Agatha and Rio together?
We talked about it a lot. We talked about, what is their meet-cute? Over corpses, I imagine. That was from our ideation process. We never wrote it on the page, but we broke it out in the room of them seeing each other over bodies, and that that would grow.
And we thought about, you know, was Death there when she killed her original coven? How did their love affair evolve? We even went down a road of like, they lived together in a sweet little cottage. We talked about it a lot, because we believed in them. There was a time when they were lovers and partners.
We felt that going down that path narratively would be too much of a detour, because what we really wanted to focus on was the Nicky story. So I feel that that story of them, before Nicky, simmers under the surface. I like to think that that’s why people feel connected to them, is because they can feel that essence. You know, with this corner of the MCU, as I say all the time, it is non-linear. I believe that there are chapters that we can visit. So it’s a story for another day.
Might we visit them in a Season 2 of “Agatha?” You left it on a cliffhanger, and I wasn’t even gonna get to that ending yet, but while we’re here, is there any kind of desire for you to do another season? Or was it left that way to just let people imagine what that adventure looks like for Agatha and Billy?
You know, it’s hard to speak about because I have a lot of awareness of what the handoffs are between different properties. So really, all I can say is I, as a fan, am so excited about this duo of Billy Maximoff and his spirit guide, Ghost Agatha. And I think that there’s a lot of opportunity there.
Another machination that I’m curious about of the road is the passage of time. When we get off the road, we get Billy back to his family, he’s been gone for a full 24 hours. In stories like this, you can go to this hex, and it can be a different dimension, it could be so many number of things. So how did you guys go about figuring out what you wanted the the real time versus the road time to be?
As you said, it’s a carryover from “WandaVision” that we played with time of what the internal inside the hex was and what the outside time was. I think we ultimately landed on 24 hours because we wanted the Kaplans to be worried, but not calling the police.
We were thinking about their side of it, because the timeline outside of the road matters to no one, really, except for the Kaplans. And, you know, if it was longer, it would matter to Eddie [Billy’s boyfriend, played by Miles Gutierrez-Riley]. So that’s how that decision was made.
I also want to ask about this last trial. What was the objective of this one?
OK, so this trial is the least cohesive, and that was meant to — so, like “WandaVision,” you know, as she goes forward in the sitcoms, she kind of starts to unravel, and the sitcom overlay starts to glitch. That’s sort of the arc in there. We mapped that to the literal stages of grief. That was the design of that show.
With this one, this is something that’s happening entirely from Billy’s subconscious. He has no awareness of it. But we wanted to sort of chart a notion of him becoming disenchanted with the road, that he’s angry that his friends are dying, frustrated, that possibly there’s some subconscious guilt, that he sort of has a roiling malcontent, and that that would start to affect the trials in a subtle way.
So this trial is very bare bones. He’s no longer doing hair, makeup, wardrobe because, on some level, he recognizes how distasteful that is, given that people are actually dying. And so it’s a very bare bones trial, and they just have to grow something. It’s the earth trial. So it’s very simple. They have to grow something in a space with no soil or water or seeds.
It’s Agatha who’s able to finally make that click, and so she, ironically, is the one who gets off the road having played by the rules.
Quick practicality question again, were they really in body bags in a drawer in that morgue?
Yeah! Joe actually hurt himself. He sat up too quickly, and I can’t remember if he hit the camera or if he hit the ledge, but he bonked himself. And he was really — he was fine, but I felt bad, but it was because of the body bag of it.
Watching it, that feels like my nightmare, especially for Sasheer Zamata, because she’s in there the longest.
It’s so funny, this show is such a litmus test of everybody’s phobias. I watch it with friends and people will really react strongly to something that I’m like, “That’s no big.” If it’s the the falling or the water, yeah, it’s always different for everybody.
Well speaking of Sasheer, I’m really interested in the choice to make her technically the lone survivor of the coven. Were there conversations about maybe making it someone else? Like Lilia, because she can divine what’s happening. What was, kind of the story process there?
So the decision for the witches, the coven members, to actually die was an ongoing conversation. I think we’d even started shooting, and we were still trying to decide if we were really going to do that and what felt right for the show.
And then once we decided that it felt correct for them to die for real, we had been looking at it as an all or nothing, like they all die or they all live. And then it occurred to us that that actually is a point in itself, that everyone’s outcome is different, that they all have personal growth. They all reach moments of understanding, and acceptance, and transcendence.
But you know, Alice’s story can be seen as unfair. In that scene with her, it feels unfair. We don’t know what happens to her once she goes off with Death, I’m hoping she reunites with her mother. But that initial “This is all I get?” is very human and very relatable. And then, of course, Lilia’s story is incredibly beautiful and incredibly affirming, and, you know, sublime.
And then it occurred to us that Jen could live, that she could reach her catharsis and make it off the road. We liked that for her because, strangely, it felt like she had the farthest to go. She started as the absolute worst version of herself. Lilia and Jen and and Alice are all sort of disconnected from their power, and kind of hiding in different ways. But Jen had actually done some harm.
Her sort of wellness crap had actually hurt people, and there’s a little bit of cruelty in what she’d done, and the vanity kind of curdling and turning her into kind of a materialistic charlatan. She became the thing that she had been persecuted by. So it felt like she had the longest runway, and we really felt that we could earn a true arc with her, that she would return to her former self, who is someone who is a helper, who is a healer, who looks out for others, and who is so in touch with her internal power. And that’s what Sasheer gave us.
You had three episodes in total without a trial. It was Episode 1, which was the “Mare of Easttown,” and then Episode 6, and then it was Episode 9. Structurally, what was the design process there? You mentioned that the road is claustrophobic, it’s confining. So how did you decide when you wanted to take breaks?
I remember early notes from Kevin [Feige], specifically, of not letting it feel too repetitive and episodic, even though it is episodic television. Which, [that] was an approach to “WandaVision” as well, that we were going through sitcoms through time, but if you get into a cadence with that, the surprise goes away. So that’s why in “WandaVision,” we jump outside of the sitcom in Episode 4. And then again in Episode 8, it’s sort of like our big explanation episode. So I wanted to apply that same thinking here.
And then we had a larger burden of [“Agatha”] with explaining what the road was, and more to the point, what the ballad was, whereas in “WandaVision,” you know what’s going on, and then Episode 8 is an explanation of Wanda’s experience, and Wanda’s psyche. In this one, we needed more real estate in order to unpack everything that came before.
We hired Rachel Goldberg for the trial-heavy episodes because she has a background in theater, and comedy, and puppetry, and so we knew she could do the spectacle of those episodes, and the tone, and the pacing of those episodes.
And then we hired Gandja Monteiro for 6, 8 and 9 because those were the episodes with more sort of dramatic grandeur, and bigger, sort of Marvel-y scene work, and then also more intimate moments. And yeah, it was a tonal shift so that was the sort of sense of parsing it out.
You talked about wanting more real estate, was there ever a conversation of wanting “Agatha” to be more than nine episodes?
No! I mean, there are plenty of Marvel shows that are only six. So no, it was always meant to be nine, like “WandaVision.”
You also talk about figuring out what the ballad was going to be, I love that it comes from Agatha and Nicky. On Nicky, I’m really fascinated by the way that his death was executed. We talked at the start of this conversation about how Rio is when she’s Death, and there is that playfulness with him. She says “Go back and kiss your mom.” But the choice to take him in his sleep. Was that mercy on Agatha? Because that way Agatha isn’t going to fight her, she doesn’t have to feel the pain of him going, it’s just she goes to sleep and he’s gone.
I like that interpretation. Our sort of feeling was that Death doesn’t have real control over the circumstances of somebody’s demise, but this is a special case, because she gave him a stay of execution, literally. So yeah, I mean, I think that that’s right.
I can’t remember, I think it was Laura Donney, my co-writer on the episode, I think it was her idea to do the kiss on the cheek. And so I think that tenderness there came from Laura, who is a very tender writer. But yeah, I mean, I think Rio’s heart is broken by what she has to do.
My heart is broken by what she had to do! OK, let’s get into the the decision to bring back Agatha as a ghost. Was that always the way that this was going to end?
Yes, it was always going to end with Agatha being a ghost. Like, well before the writers room, that was the point B. Which, I believe you got to go into these things knowing where you land. Of course, it never works out that way. You end up writing the last scene over, and over, and over, and over, and over again. But the sort of mechanics of “This is where we land this character,” it was always the plan to have Agatha become a ghost and become Billy’s spirit guide.
The actual making that happening was really, really complicated (laughs). But yeah, I see Agatha’s arc as becoming a mentor, really stepping into that role. A spirit guide is a classic mentor trope. In the comics, she spends so much time as a ghost, I was quite surprised that that wasn’t on everybody’s bingo card. I know it was on a lot of bingo cards, but I thought it would be louder. So it was kind of fun for that to not feel like a totally foregone conclusion.
And the show was practical, and so we did the ghosty stuff practically, which was challenging to do.
You killed Kathryn Hahn and you made her a ghost?!
We did it! We had to. She was up for it! You know, she bleeds for her work.
I know this might be hard to sum up, but a lot of “Agatha” was spelled out for us without viewers realizing. You had lines like Rio saying, “I get my bodies,” and you have Agatha indicating that she knows that the road is created by Billy before it’s revealed. When and where you give up information, especially ending this whole series on a flashback, on this emotional beat has always been interesting. So what’s your kind of process in creating these stories?
I mean, I love big reveals. I love big twists. I believe you have to prep the audience for it, because I always want it to feel right. So I think it’s about earmarking: what are the reveals that you are planting in a way where a percentage of the viewership is going to guess it? What’s that box? And then, what are the reveals that you are protecting that cannot be guessed.
So no one could have guessed the Nicky sequence. There’s no way. It’s not in the comics, there’s no hinting at it, we don’t see that era, we don’t see that child. And the idea that he came up with the ballad, that that was just a little ditty that he started working on, there’s just no way for that to be predicted. So to me, that is the tiny nesting doll that you have to protect above all.
And “WandaVision” was somewhat similar in that there wasn’t a way to anticipate that Episode 8 would unpack all of these smaller nuggets of her psyche. And so to me, that’s like the present you’re holding back. After all the presents have been opened on Christmas morning, you’re holding back the super special one. But I believe, for the larger ones, the audience needs to feel ready, consciously or subconsciously. So I do think it needs to be planted, and then you got to execute it in a way that’s surprising.
In Episode 8, one of the sections that I really love is, when Billy comes home, you feel like the episode’s over. You have that internal sense, as a viewer, that the story has completed, right? We’ve had the big battle, we had the big sacrifice moment, our main character died, we’re all very sad, we were in slow mo, we did it.
And then he’s in the shower, and we’re sort of pushing in on that door, we have that sort of tentative music and any human being who’s watched content is going to be like, “Why am I still here? What are we doing?” And it’s that whisper inside of yourself, that’s what I’m always after, that feeling of the hairs on your arm standing up. And so I feel like that’s the difference between being like “Billy made the road!” and teasing it, and executing in a way that feels thrilling and like a gift.
Because it’s him realizing it in time with the viewer.
Yes, yes.
With “Agatha All Along” and with “WandaVision,” they’re both shows really about grief and about coping with loss. What is it about that theme that calls to you?
I don’t know, I think I’m interested in people’s source pain, you know? Maybe it’s because I’m a mom, and children wear their emotions so clearly. And then as you get older, all these sort of protection mechanisms cover your pain, and cover your pain, and cover your pain, and then you behave in ways that are because of that pain, but you don’t know it, and the people that love you don’t know it.
So these shows have been cathartic for me, of like peeling back “What’s underneath it all for these women? Why are they behaving in this way? And can we heal? Can we heal the injuries of our past? Can we heal our inner children?” It sounds really woo-woo, but I feel like that’s what we’re all in process of. That’s the ultimate goal, is like, healing and peace inside of us so that we can walk around the planet and be good.
There’s also the element of time in all of this. You’ve got a lot of references to time. You start out Episode 8 with Alice saying “That’s all the time I have? That’s all I get?” And then you have Agatha screaming, “I want more time.” So time is this really big thing, and that’s kind of a human thing, right? Every human wants more time, or they want to know how their time is going to go. What made you want to touch on it here?
Andi, thank you for linking those two moments. That was really intentional, and it’s meant to sort of speak to the entire Lilia episode.
You know, in Episode 7, I wrote the line, “The flow of time is an illusion.” I did some research on time theory, and that came out, and I found that so comforting (laughs). Because I spend a lot of my time worrying I’m using it wrong. I’m procrastinating, or I’m not being present. I’m thinking about other things. I don’t have enough time, or I have too little time. It just, it’s a constant preoccupation and a weight. I think we all experience that, and I think we live in a moment where our attention is pulled all over the place. And yeah, I want to not feel bad about it (laughs).
I want to relax and be like, “It’s all happening all at the same time.” And like, if someone in my life is no longer here, I can visit them in my mind, I can speak to them. There’s this idea that there’s this membrane, this very thin membrane separating everything. And if we can just relax, it becomes transparent.
Well, and then you have the lyric in the ballad, “The road is wild and wicked, winding out of time.” It’s one of those things that it kept coming back.
Yeah.
I also want to touch on the show’s title. There are constants to Agatha. There are things that stay true to her no matter what happens in the series. She’s always going to be the first to know a secret. If she doesn’t have the answer to a question, she’s going to toy with her food, like we talked about last week. She’s always going to wait for the opportune moment. Is that where “Agatha All Along” comes from? What did the title mean for you guys in the room?
The goal was to give the — because at the time, we weren’t sure that was the title we were going to go with. But the sentiment, “Agatha All Along” was what we wanted to make good on. I really wanted to do this “Usual Suspects” reveal of Billy made the road, but I always wanted Agatha to be at the end. Whatever anybody else did in the show, any other characters having secrets of any kind, or doing anything, the last word I always wanted to be with Agatha.
And the idea of making it emotional, that really, truthfully, the show is “Nicky All Along,” you know, he actually came up with the ballad but really it’s her long con through the ages that we’re talking about with the “Agatha All Along,” that’s what it was. It was paying service to our protagonist, to our heroine, and giving her the rightful honor of being the one behind it all. She’s the man behind the curtain.
One of the very last things she says is, “I can’t face him.” Is that because she’s been killing witches for centuries, and she’s been using the song he created to lure these women to their deaths? What was the intent there?
Yeah, I think that she’s ashamed of everything she’s done. I think she knows Nicky was always on the side of life, and didn’t want to kill witches. And I think she’s ashamed that she couldn’t save him and she couldn’t fix him, and I think she feels she failed him. And then I think she thinks he wouldn’t recognize her now, because she’s killed so much since then.
I personally found that to be an interesting reversal on the trope of a villain trying to resurrect a loved one. I liked the idea that Agatha would know that that’s futile and foolish, and that, in fact, she doesn’t want to see him because of her shame. To me, that’s far more tragic, that she would not yield to Death because she wants to keep her child at arm’s length because she’s afraid he won’t forgive her and won’t love her.
(Deep breath)
(Laughs) It’s rough, I know. But there’s this boy, this Billy Maximoff, standing in front of her, and I don’t know, I think he’s maybe her path to more healing.
Note: this interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
“Agatha All Along” is now streaming in its entirety on Disney+. You can check out our breakdown of every episode with Jac Schaeffer below:
