Summary
Agatha All Along comes into its own here, delivering big swerves, more character deaths, and a vital link to the MCU.
I have been relatively positive about Agatha All Along since the beginning, but Episode 5, “Darkest Hour / Wake Thy Power”, feels like the moment it cements itself as a truly worthwhile show. It embraces the seasonal release date with some more overtly horror-tinged stuff, it breaks the general storytelling rules it has established with its trial-of-the-week structure, and it finally gives us the big reveal about Teen’s identity that connects this admittedly disconnected-feeling show with the wider MCU.
Will this episode win over people who didn’t like the show in the first place? Probably not. But I strongly suspect it’s the one that’ll convince people who like the show to really double down on that position. It’s full of really good stuff.
The Salem Seven
One of the cool things here is revealing who the Salem Seven are and tying them into Agatha’s backstory. To be fair, in the comics, they’re tied to her too, since they’re literally her grandchildren, but this take reimagines them as the children of the witches she murdered when she wiped out her original coven.
And you know what? I prefer this. Rio describes the Seven as “feral” and “hive-minded”, and the idea of revenge as a motivating factor gels with those descriptors. It’s just a meaner version of the same concept. I also suspect it’s a way for the MCU to distance them from Nicholas Scratch, Agatha’s son, who gets a mention in this episode (more below); they’re all his children in the comics.
We’ll get even further away from Scratch, despite the namecheck, a bit later.
Agatha’s Trial
As I mentioned at the top, “Darkest Hour / Wake Thy Power” subverts expectations a little bit by revealing that the third trial on the Witches Road is Agatha’s.
This was surprising to me, at least. The first trial in Episode 3 tested Jennifer’s potion-making skills, and the second trial in Episode 4 was focused on Alice’s generational musical curse. I assumed, like most people, that we’d go through each of the coven’s trials in turn to eventually get to Agatha’s at the end.
But no. This trial is designed to test Agatha, whose craving for power has always positioned her as a bit of a risk factor in the new coven. The others have to come up with ways to punish her for her persistent evildoing with the help of a rather draconian Ouija board.
You can see a lot of the horror flourishes coming into play here (as with the Salem Seven earlier, who all have that herky-jerky movement that creeps in horror movies have had since The Ring.) There’s a Ouija board, for a start. Agatha turns into a demon and does Regan’s crab walk from The Exorcist. It’s all very on-trend.
Evanora Harkness
Agatha’s demonic turn is a result of being possessed by her own mother, Evanora Harkness. If you thought you had parental difficulties, one suspects they’re nothing on this. Evanora is raging with the rest of the coven for willingly joining Agatha after Evanora’s coven did everything in their power to kill her.
“You were born evil,” Evanora tells her daughter, “I ought to have killed you the moment you left my body.” Yikes!
Evanora clearly has unsavory plans for Agatha, but while the idea of leaving Agatha behind to deal with them to satisfy the trial’s rules is floated, Rio opposes it. Alice casts a spell that forces Evanora’s spirit out of Agatha, and then subsequently to vanish, but Agatha takes the opportunity to absorb Alice’s magic, draining her life force with it.
Agatha All Along | Image via Disney+
Nicholas Scratch
Teen tries to intervene by using the Ouija board to communicate with Agatha’s son, Nicholas Scratch, who begs his mother to stop. By this point Alice is too far gone and falls to the ground, dead and withered, getting rid of another key cast member.
But this is important because it proves that Teen is not Nicholas, which was a popular fan theory since the beginning, and also seems to prove that Nicholas is indeed dead and is unlikely to appear in any form. Otherwise, how would he be communicating through a Ouija board?
This does, though, give us some insight into Agatha’s feelings towards her late son, and perhaps helps to rationalize her apathy towards Teen, which manifests in the next scene.
Billy Maximoff
The end of Agatha All Along Episode 5 delivers the show’s bombshell reveal. When Teen confronts Agatha about killing Alice, he claims he doesn’t want to be a witch if acquiring power means these kinds of sacrifices. “Are you sure?” Agatha taunts him, “You’re so much like your mother.”
Yes, Teen is Billy Maximoff, Wanda Maximoff’s son. Given if he wasn’t Nicholas Scratch this was the only other viable contender, it might not constitute the biggest twist anyone has ever seen, but it’s really, really well done. Agatha’s realization that she has been reunited with a young boy who she thought could have been her own son, but instead turned out to be the son of her arch-nemesis, is the perfect catalyst for her resumption of outright villainy.
And it’s just a cool moment in general. The episode’s title, “Darkest Hour / Wake Thy Power”, is clearly referring to Teen, whose hand crackles with blue energy while Lilia and Jennifer’s eyes light up with the same. They carry Agatha to the quicksand on the Road and toss her in, and then Teen telekinetically throws them both in with her. As they sink below the surface, a blue crown, eerily similar to Wanda’s red one, manifests on Teen’s head.
Did Teen know who he was all along? Is he as powerful as the Scarlet Witch? Could he be a new MCU villain to rival Agatha? It’s fun for an episode to leave us with this many interesting questions, especially with the MCU overall so stale right now. The remaining episodes of Season 1 are suddenly a much more exciting proposition.
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