“'Agatha All Along' Finale Review: Nicholas Scratch's Fate Revealed”

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the finale (episode 9) of Agatha all the time.

Perhaps the friendships made along the way were the real true circle. However, circle two is much more complicated.

The penultimate episode of Agatha all the time ended the many miles of tricks and trials on the witches' path, but left viewers with many questions about the reality of what happened and who ended up where.

Episode 8, titled “Follow Me My Friend / To Glory At the End”, suggested that the road itself only took place in Billy's head. Episode 9, the series finale, titled “Maiden Mother Crone,” expands on this idea while telling the story of Agatha, her son Nicholas Scratch, and what Rio did to make Agatha hate her. Deadline's episode 8 recap will refresh viewers' memories before the finale.

The finale begins in a lush green forest area while women sing in the background. A hooded woman scurries through the forest in a purple robe. It's 1750 and the woman is Agatha.
She is pregnant and apparently in labor. She cuts open a lemon on a tree and bites it to start the process. She looks up and Rio, dressed in green, is waiting for her on the shore of a lake with a flower.

“That can’t be right,” Agatha tells her. “It has to be,” replies Rio. “If you do this, I will hate you forever,” says Agatha, begging Rio to let him live. This is reminiscent of the time when Death mentioned that she betrayed a woman she loved and made her her scar.

“All I can offer is time,” says Rio. Agatha asks how much time. Rio disappears and Agatha gives birth to the baby. “I didn’t cast a spell, I didn’t say an incantation,” she says, naming him Nicholas Scratch – made from scratch.

A mist envelops Agatha as she holds her son to her, and the episode jumps forward a bit. She leads him through the forest, crying, when she comes across a group of women singing around a cauldron.

“Sister, come out,” an older woman asks. “Is the little one okay?” The woman lets Agatha into a circle of stones while the blue veins in it glow yellow, but first she gives Agatha a suspicious look. “We haven’t eaten anything for days,” Agatha apologized. Agatha sucked all their strength away.

Six years later, an older Santa Claus sits at the foot of a fountain. He steals a bell – which looks suspiciously like the one Agatha rings before she and her makeshift coven begin singing – from a witch stand and lures them to Agatha's hut while draining them of their power.

“Mom, why do you kill witches?” he asks. “To survive,” she tells him, and he asks, “Couldn’t we stay with the witches and survive with them?”

Agatha says no and tells him to get used to the feeling of being alone.

“Walk, walk, walk the road / I walk the windy road,” he sings in an early version of the Ballad of the Witch’s Path.

“I can’t heal you, I can’t protect you from what’s coming,” she tells Nicholas when he asks her to make him food one day, knowing that death will return for her boy.

Agatha and her son slowly wrote the lyrics to the Ballad of Witches' Road and called it “Windy Road”.

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Nicholas then plays the song as Agatha sneaks through the distracted audience. She pays him and encourages others to reward him too. A red-haired witch asks where he came across the strange song. Nicholas looks sick and when offered a hot meal he says, “Thanks, but no. My mother needs me home.”

“We can kill more witches tomorrow,” he says, coughing, as darkness falls over the forest. As they fall asleep and sing the song, Nicholas wakes up in Rio with a green flame. Rio holds the torch and waits for her in the dark. She waves to Nicholas, who picks something up from the blanket as he walks with her. Agatha wakes up and finds him dead.

“I want more time,” she sobs. She buried her boy under stones with a bushel of lavender and sang the song with new lyrics. “I buried my own heart, here with you, my child,” she sings.

“Then you must know the way,” a blonde woman says to Agatha and assumes that, according to the ballad, she knows the way to Witch Street. “I am in great need,” says the young woman after telling Agatha about the path that offers courageous and loyal witches a prize worth the risk. “Could you show me the way?” asks the young woman.

“You ask in good faith, so I will answer in kind,” says Agatha. “I know it by heart. First we have to put together a circle.”

“Where is the door? “Pathetic, embarrassing,” Agatha shouts to a group of women she gathers to conjure up the rumored street. They then try to bombard them with their magic, which drains it from them and leaves them dead.

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A montage unfolds in which Agatha appears in different ways in different time periods, claiming more and more power, eventually catching up with Alice, Sharon Davis, Jenn and Lilia. She's completely shocked when a door appears, but she knows it's Billy.

Flashback to Billy from Episode 8 saying, “It was me.” The evil laugh may have been Agatha, but she appears as a GHOST with gray hair in an outfit like she appears in the comics.

“By the way, I didn’t sacrifice myself for you. I took a calculated risk,” she tells him. “I’m still figuring out the rules.”

“Did I make it?” Billy asks her.

“Unlike your mother, sorry Wanda, you did something interesting with your power. It was just a scam. The song has no meaning. That never happened,” she tells him. “The road wasn’t real until you made it real.”

“If I made it down the road, then that means I am,” Billy concludes. “I killed her. Are they ghosts too? I’m a murderer.”

Agatha says she killed Alice and Lilia chose death.

“My mind killed her,” he tells Agatha, who says, “Don’t give yourself too much credit. If you actually do the math, you've saved a life.” Cut to Jenn crawling through the dirt back to the border of Westview near the sign. She flies away with her newfound pink powers.

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“I wanted to kill them all in my basement on the first day,” says Agatha. “If you want to be a witch, get used to this feeling”

“I’ll never get used to it,” Billy says, to which Agatha replies, “We’ll see.”

Billy visits Agatha's – formerly Ralph Bohner's – which is completely boarded up while her purple mushroom grave still lies in the backyard. He goes to the basement, where the pentagonal door with a blue glow behind it awaits him, as does Agatha's ghost, who says he took something from her and wants it back.

“Give me what I want and I’ll be on my way,” she tells Billy, who draws a petagram in chalk and places a few candles around the edge, performing analog magic in Agatha’s eyes—or not.

He looks eerily similar to Wanda as she dreams with similar materials. Suddenly his black notebook appears behind Agatha in his hands. He takes out her brooch when he finds a page in the spell book where he can recite a spell to banish her.

“Time to go into the light or into Rio’s toxic embrace or wherever you deserve to spend eternity,” he says. “I really don’t care.”

“Do you think you can just send me to the afterlife with an incantation and a personal item?!” Agatha asks Billy, who says, “It worked on Wanda's spell.”

“It wasn’t you,” says Agatha, laughing. “Okay, maybe you solved the glass.”

“Five seconds ago you were all out of your mind about killing witches!” she says to Billy.

“You’re already dead!” he shoots back at her.

Her transparent form flickers as he repeats the words. “Why are you still here? Why don't you just die?” Billy asks Agatha, who screams, “Because I can't face him!” means Nicholas, as Billy deciphers. She had thrown her brooch on the floor and she can pick it up and touch it to her chest where it is stuck.

“I’m sure he would forgive you for everything you did,” Billy tells her.

“See, it’s when you say something like that,” Agatha tells him. “That you remind me of him.”

“You picked it up,” Billy remarks.

“I learn quickly,” she says.

Billy says maybe being a ghost might suit her – “The ghost is my guide,” to which Agatha says, “We could make a good team, you and me.”

“Circle two?” Billy says as a tear runs down his face. Then they realize that they both have a tendency to kill their coven members.

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Billy looks at the floor and pulls up the spell he created, inscribing the floor's stone tile with the names Sharon Davis, Alice Wu-Gulliver, and Lilia Calderu in the center of the pentagram.

“A door closes,” says Agatha.

“And another one opens,” Billy finishes her sentence and a staircase opens up into the white light.

Then Agatha says, “Let’s go find Tommy.”

So the spectators have reached the end of the path Agatha all the timebut hopefully not the last time we've seen Agatha Harkness or Joe Locke's Wicca aka Billy Maximoff aka William Kaplan.

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