Part of the charm and the occasional frustration of superhero media is the impermanence of death. Done badly it can feel like there’s little weight to the act, done right and seeing characters wrestle with the tangibility of their mortality can be truly fascinating. That’s why it was so interesting to see Agatha All Along wrap up its season having its metaphorical cake and eating it on that front—which, according to its showrunner, was kind of the point.
By the time credits rolled on Agatha All Along‘s finale, the body count for the show is pretty high, even for one where the literal embodiment of the concept of Death itself was a recurring character. Billy and Jen are the only two members of Agatha’s coven to make it out (relatively) unscathed, with Agatha herself in a proverbial limbo, sacrificing herself to protect Billy from Death’s desire but remaining in intangible form to act as his ghostly guide. Given that we’re well and truly trained to assume no death is final in Marvel media, or a lot of media in general these days, fans have already started making the assumption that some of these fallen characters will return some day.
But for showrunner Jac Schaeffer, that idea is both a blessing and a curse—something about the genre she admires, but not something she wanted to lean on in Agatha‘s case. “One of the things that’s really fun and special about comics, generally, is that these stories can go on for decades and decades. That is due, in large part, to people dying and coming back, and so there’s a soap opera quality to it that can be magnificent. But I really wanted to explore, in the scope of things, this small idea of Agatha having a son who died, something that simple and that human,” Schaeffer recently told the Hollywood Reporter. “And if we were going to do that, then we couldn’t play it fast and loose with all of the other deaths.”
“The fact that we then brought Death on as a character, it felt like our job was to have a more honest exploration of death and how people meet their ends and the permanence of that,” Schaeffer continued. “So it wasn’t me reacting to the landscape, but I did see it as an opportunity to do something unexpected. People are wired to expect a proper happy ending, and we did write that, but it felt disingenuous. So we went for the real.”
That extended to Agatha herself, who gets a “happy” ending in so much that she’s still around, but there’s a consequence to her decision to save Billy over her own sense of self-preservation. “Well, we knew [Agatha] was going to die because we knew we wanted her to be a ghost. Point A was getting Agatha out from under Wanda’s spell, and point B of the show was turning her into a ghost/Billy’s spirit guide. Those were the poles of the show that we were all committed to, and so there wasn’t pushback to the kiss of Death,” Schaeffer added. “It’s the death blow of the big Marvel battle, but it also is the culmination of this romantic relationship. Those two things came together in a way that felt right to all of the creative folks on the show, and there wasn’t much pushback.”
Even knowing that we’re going to see some of these characters again some day (and the lingering specter of an unseen, and still dead, Wanda Maximoff hanging over fan theories about the show all season long), there’s definitely something in coming out of Agatha with our heroes barely hanging on by the skin of their teeth. The impact of both Alice and especially Lilia’s deaths in the series made for some of the best moments of Marvel TV we’ve had in a while—as much as we’d love to see Patti LuPone and Ali Ahn again sometime, giving their character’s deaths time to matter is just as valuable.
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