‘Agatha All Along’ Episode Seven Recap: “Death’s Hand in Mine”

*Warning: the following article contains spoilers for episode seven of Agatha All Along*

After a Billy Kaplan (Joe Locke)-focused episode last week, Agatha All Along again switches gears and devotes time to develop Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone) further. In fact, this episode is told entirely from her perspective, as Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) and Billy attempt to complete the latest trial, first without Lilia’s help. This will prove difficult because the trial is specifically tailor-made for her: a Tarot board whose cards need to be placed in the correct order. Only the tarot reader can perform such a task successfully and must do so before the coven gets impaled by swords. 

Jac Schaeffer returns in the director’s chair and tells this week’s story out of sequence, first beginning with Billy and Agatha entering a castle (the aspect ratio switches again, yay!) and donning the respective costumes of Maleficent and The Wicked Witch of the West. Lilia and Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata) eventually join, with Glinda and Evil Queen costumes, but not before Schaeffer pulls back the curtain and shows us how Lilia’s mind operates. 

It’s a fairly ingenious way to keep audiences on their toes, especially because Agatha All Along has been (so far) one of Marvel’s most straightforward series. Agatha assembles a coven of witches who must reach the end of the Witches’ Road to obtain their powers. Sounds simple in isolation. However, this episode decides to complexify things for Lilia with a constant push-pull she experiences between her past life, her present predicament, and what will soon come for her and all of us. Though, for her, the ultimate trip will happen much sooner than later. 

Yes, this is an episode where Lilia’s life (literally) flashes before her eyes, and she begins to realize that her time on this planet will soon be over. It does feel slightly strange to have already seen Pablo Larraín’s Maria at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma last week, where the movie discussed how one experiences their final moments on Earth: out of sequence, where her biggest regrets are laid out in front of her, and her most joyful experiences are usually the ones that don’t stay with us when we approach death. 

This also occurs in Agatha All Along: Lilia does not remember any moment of pure joy she had in her life. It’s always been filled with pain and the agonizing knowledge of when and how she will leave us. LuPone represents Lilia’s final moments with an aching melancholy that instantly makes us feel for her plight, which was not necessarily understood before. Unlike Alice’s (Ali Ahn) anticlimactic passing, the development of Lilia’s arc is handled with enough care and empathy in such a short runtime that we ultimately have an emotional swell when she pulls the Death card from the deck and realizes this is it. 

This central arc makes this episode worth watching, while the (predictable) reveal that Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) is indeed Death falls flat on its face. Perhaps it was because I saw it coming, but it also didn’t feel as vital to the story as Lilia’s tragic end. When Lilia dies, it’s incredibly heartbreaking. When she says, “Rio is Death!” it seems like an afterthought instead of a pivotal moment in the show, even though Death is one of the Marvel universe’s most intriguing antagonists!

Still, I remain optimistic that the next two episodes, which will be released next week as part of the series finale, will give Plaza time to shine as the show’s main villain and hopefully set a more exciting corner in the future of the MCU to be further explored in several films and TV series. Whether the supernatural side of things will continue to be treated remains to be seen, but the steps are intriguing enough for me to want to tune back into its two-part finale soon. 

The seventh episode of Agatha All Along is now available to stream on Disney+.