The last time we saw Lilia, she was sucked into a swamp, but Agatha All Along’s seventh episode titled “Death’s Hand in Mine” starts with the character – now dressed as Glinda the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz – falling into the black void. The scene fades as we return to Agatha and Billy/Tin/William wandering through a fog-filled magic road, waiting for their naturalist engineers to build another death trap for them.
During their downtime, Billy/the teenager/William wisely asks Agatha some pressing questions: “Where is Rio?” and “Did Wanda Maximoff really die?” Agatha evades both questions and refuses to answer the first, teasing “yes…no!…maybe…” for the second. She saw Wanda’s body, but “it’s hard to say” if anyone else can confirm her death, jokingly saying, “if you want direct answers, ask a straight lady.” As they move forward, they come across a castle in the distance and recognize it as their next trial.
Upon entering, Agatha transforms into the Wicked Witch of the West (or Elphaba, if you prefer) while Billy/Teen/William becomes Maleficent. While the dress code may suggest a fantastical experience, the remaining witches are instead asked to interpret a set of tarot cards and give readings to each other. Billy/the teenager/William reads for Agatha, drawing first “the carriage,” but fails to provide an accurate interpretation of its meaning.
It turns out that for each card the player gets wrong, a sword falls from the ceiling. After drawing the reversed Seven of Swords, Agatha suggests that she must be honest, bringing them closer to death by another sword. Proposing that the tarot is just a “trick” with no “skill” or “magic,” Agatha takes charge, causing five more swords to fall from above just with her stance. At this moment, we discover that our heroes are trapped in a room with a descending ceiling, adding an extra ticking clock element to the proceedings.
As BTW wishes that Lilia were here to save them with her tarot reading, we learn that she and Jennifer escaped the quicksand but fell through the ground and into an underground tunnel. After receiving another enchantment, Lilia feels disoriented by her surroundings, so Jennifer tells her, “I was very clear that we should follow this total tunnel and look for the shelves,” without knowing what she meant by that. We learn that Lilia’s recurring strange side trips are actually her non-linear time experiences, bouncing back and forth through different moments in her life like Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s finale, or Desmond in Lost.
Then mentally retracing to the moment she learned tea leaf reading from her childhood before returning to the present. She confesses that her waking dreams have become more frequent, and realizes that she must be “close to the end” in her life. At that moment, the two (seemingly) are transported to the castle to compete in the final trial alongside Agatha and BTW.
Now back in the game, Lilia wears Glinda’s costume, as mentioned before, while Jennifer is the Evil Queen from Snow White in her alternate sorceress form (though I initially thought she was the man behind Winky’s from Mulholland Drive, to begin with…). Lilia reminisces and confirms that she recalls from a tarot reading from her adolescence, as we saw last week on Agatha All Along; she immediately apologizes for throwing it into the swamp. Lilia reveals that she marked him knowing that he “needs time” to find himself after his death in a car accident and his body being abducted by a comically born theatrical character magically. So…I guess that makes sense?
With their own tarot reader now, things should run smoother – if only Lilia’s complicated relationship with the flow of time were not in the mix. When her mind suddenly shifts back to the tunnel with Jennifer, she reveals she consciously put an end to her timeplay antics in childhood after “all she saw was death.” At that point, they find the “shelves” they were looking for: a real bookshelf that can be used as an entrance to a specific room in the castle. Agatha and BTW struggle to read the tarot cards.
Returning to the game for real this time, Lilia reshuffles the deck and reveals her fortune. While the witches prefer the cards to be asked about how to escape the death trap represented by the falling swords, she instead asks: “Am I William or am I Billy?” She receives a reading of six cards, drawing the magician and the sun before retrieving another from her childhood.
She has a vision suggesting that the cult she was raised in was doomed to die in the plague, and despite her warnings, she spent the rest of her life shocked by their disregard. Her mother tells her that her death is not a singular thing but a shared one, and that her fate is one that everyone shares. It seems Lilia always knew she would die in the fall. She ignores her mother’s insistence and asks, “What will you do in your remaining time?”
Once again, Lilia’s mind palace reverts to the tunnel as we discover the Salem Seven pursuing them intensely – although they walk backward, in genuinely bizarre scene. Returning to the tarot trial, Lilia suddenly realizes that this is her trial, meant to give herself the reading. She pulls the Queen of Cups, and delving into it must represent herself and the triads, which she considers her magic. The Knight of Cups was Alice (RIP), the High Priestess was Jennifer, the Three of Swords for Agatha, the reversed Tower for BTW, and Death for Rio who is still conspicuously absent – which, as we found out, is not actually “Rio Vidal.” At all, but instead, the Marvel Universe incarnation of Death itself!
After completing her trial in time, the ceiling recedes, and an iron virgin nearby opens to reveal the exit. While the others escape, Lilia decides to stay behind and confront the creeping Salem Seven, who enter the room as their cute animal forms. Lilia reverses the Tower card, causing the entire castle to flip on its head, leading to the skewering of at least five Salem Seven on the swords below. Embracing her fate, she also falls, and in her final moments, she returns to the moment she began studying magic.
We can safely say that this was probably the best episode of the series so far, as it ended Lilia’s story in a much more satisfying way than Alice’s. We didn’t know much about Madam Calidoro before this episode, but we certainly managed to deal with her before the end.
Although this gave Lilia a reason to sacrifice herself nobly and add more to the body count, I felt that this was a somewhat shameful exit for the Salem Seven, who didn’t ultimately amount to much – especially considering they were supposed to be replaced by Death as the main antagonist of the series. I believe their revenge against Agatha for killing their parents and raising themselves as a semi-wild mutant family unit should end here.
We hope that the motives for Death and the engagement of the witches in Agatha’s hatred make for an interesting half. (However, only five bodies were counted, so maybe they’ll keep a couple of Salem followers and make them seem like they’re doing something besides creeping around, after all? This would also give both Reteach for Work and Jennifer someone to fight in the finale.)
Talking about Rio’s absence and the later reveal…kind of sucked, didn’t it? Rio has been MIA for two full episodes now, so revealing her true identity in the constant absence of the character is puzzling. Especially since the show is titled after the unforgettable antagonist of the original series, WandaVision. The last two episodes have a lot of work cut out for them to justify almost everything about Rio’s inclusion so far – not to mention the reason for choosing the element of death to appear as a woman named Rio Vidal in the first place.
Through the fingers Agatha All Along lands on its feet with its two-part finale next week. See you then.
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