REVIEW: Agatha All Along – Season 1, Episode 7, “Death’s Hand in Mine”

Television Reviews

Agatha All Along is sputtering towards its finale (which is next week, doubled up with the penultimate episode), and “Death’s Hand in Mine” is another tedious, confusing episode that almost dares you to pay attention to it as it does everything it can to bore you. This is Patti LuPone’s showcase episode – yeah, Lilia and Jen are still alive despite Agatha saying they were dead last week; no explanation is given for why Agatha thought they were dead or how Agatha escaped the mud trap but not them –and we learn a little more about Lilia, but not much and certainly nothing interesting.

A bickering Agatha and Billy come upon a castle as the next testing ground on the Witches’ Road, but they’re given a challenge neither of them is equipped to pass. Lilia and Jen awaken under the Witches’ Road, and as they try to find a way out of the tunnels, Lilia moves through time, from her distant past to the future that may doom them all.

“Death’s Hand in Mine” picks up with Agatha and Billy sniping at each other over pretty much anything they can think of. Billy appears to be done pretending he’s an Agatha Harkness superfan, so he berates her for understanding so little about the Witches’ Road despite claiming to have traversed it before. And he’s right, which demonstrates how poorly conceived this show is; Agatha is constantly flouting the rules of the Road, setting herself back several steps when she should know her tricks won’t work. She comes off as a poser more than an actual witch, and it makes her look stupid. Billy asks if Wanda Maximoff is really dead, and Agatha does the whole “Yes… no… maybe… I don’t know” thing so Marvel can inevitably bring her back. It feels like wasted time because they don’t reveal anything about anything; they just try to score sick burns on each other until stumbling on a fairy tale castle, the site of the next test.

***SPOILERS***

They enter the castle, and suddenly, they’re evil Disney witches. I mean it; Agatha has become the Wicked Witch of the West, and Billy is Maleficent, replete with lipstick and eye shadow. Why did they become Disney witches? Because Disney owns Marvel, which I surmise because no actual reason is ever given. ( (Okay, the Wicked Witch of the West isn’t a Disney witch, but she’s in the public domain, and… stay tuned.) Regardless, they’re here to deal out some tarot cards, the objective being to put the correct cards into five slots on a table. Above them is a ceiling full of dangling swords; every time they get a card wrong, a sword falls into the floor – and through whatever is in its way. There’s also an hourglass filling with sand, indicating that they have a time limit. Both give it a try; Billy tries to match a card to each member of the coven, while Agatha just throws down random cards, deducing she’ll eventually get the right sequence. This is what I mean: Agatha is an idiot, and that’s completely at odds with her character in WandaVision. But the point is that it’s clear neither of them is prepared for this challenge.

That’s because the challenge is meant for Lilia, who is the featured character in “Death’s Hand in Mine.” She and Jen traverse the underground tunnels of the fantasy realm, and as they go, Jen talks about conversations that haven’t taken place, knowing things she couldn’t know and insisting Lilia told them to her. You see, as Lilia eventually explains, time doesn’t move the way people perceive it to but is rather a sort of ribbon, with past and future existing in a permanent present. Lilia’s powers allow her to travel through it so she can experience different events out of sequence. That’s right, get set for a confusing episode as past and future are jumbled, something only a really good show with likable characters can pull off – so, not Agatha All Along. Lilia goes from being a little girl talking to the leader of her old coven to various points in the show, explaining some of her random outbursts from earlier episodes but really just dragging this one down.

Of course, Lilia and Jen eventually make their way to the castle with Agatha and Billy, where they turn into Glinda the Good Witch of the North and… I think the old lady version of the Evil Queen from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Being a seer, the tarot challenge is meant for Lilia, and while she initially tries to perform a tarot reading for Billy, she soon discovers that she is supposed to assign the coven members a card, like Billy thought. (So, Billy was right; he’s just bad at tarot.) She does, the challenge ends, and everyone flees the castle… except Lilia. She stays behind after an ominous warning from her old coven leader about the inevitability of death and waits for the Salem Seven to show up, then uses a tarot card to flip the castle, impaling the Seven on the swords still hanging from the ceiling before dying herself. Yep, that’s the end of the big villains who’ve been stalking Agatha throughout the series. Sure, they sucked, but this is still anticlimactic. These are the children of the coven Agatha killed, and there’s no confrontation or reckoning with Agatha? No, they’re just wiped off the board when the show doesn’t know what to do with them anymore, not that it ever really did. Again, this feels like such a waste, like Agatha All Along was spinning its wheels to kill time before the finale.

Who’s the villain now that the Salem Seven are gone? Rio Vidal appears to be the true big bad, as “Death’s Hand in Mine” reveals that she is Death. I assume this means she’s Lady Death, the personification of death from Marvel Comics and the motivation for Thanos’ actions on the page. But we’re talking about people who don’t know who Mephisto is and are pissed off that fans do, so who knows? Whatever the case, Rio is Death, which is why the Ouija board several episodes ago said death was in the room with the coven. What she wants and why she wants it is still a mystery, as is why she’s playing some game on the Witches’ Road rather than just enacting her will, but at least it means Aubrey Plaza will probably be around more in the final two episodes. But again, this is the problem with using the Salem Seven as red herrings; we could’ve had a whole season of Aubrey Plaza being deliciously, seductively evil, but they had to pull their little twist, so she’s only been present in three or four episodes while we watched that pack of lame-os chase Agatha around. And if she’s Death, how is she also a green witch? I guess if some random suburban housewife with no magical abilities can fill the role, Death can as well. But it’s hard to care anyway; none of this is interesting, and after “Death’s Hand in Mine,” it feels like it matters even less.

Let us know what you thought of “Death’s Hand in Mine” in the comments!

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