Agatha All Along showrunner Jac Schaeffer recently spoke to The Wrap and addressed some lingering questions we have after watching this week's two-episode finale.
Facing Death, Agatha Harkness sacrifices herself to save Billy Maximoff but, rather than be reunited with her son, Nicky, in the afterlife, she chooses to remain on Earth as a ghost. That's led to a lot of fan theories about why she wouldn't take that opportunity to see him again.
Asked why Agatha didn't want to face her son, Schaeffer says, "I think that she’s ashamed of everything she’s done. I think she knows Nicky was always on the side of life, and didn’t want to kill witches. And I think she’s ashamed that she couldn’t save him and she couldn’t fix him, and I think she feels she failed him."
"And then I think she thinks he wouldn’t recognize her now, because she’s killed so much since then," the showrunner continues. "I personally found that to be an interesting reversal on the trope of a villain trying to resurrect a loved one. I liked the idea that Agatha would know that that’s futile and foolish, and that, in fact, she doesn’t want to see him because of her shame."
"To me, that’s far more tragic, that she would not yield to Death because she wants to keep her child at arm’s length because she’s afraid he won’t forgive her and won’t love her."
In Agatha All Along's penultimate episode, the surviving coven members return to where they started before the final trial begins. However, that trial takes place in a bare-bones, morgue-like structure and is a far cry from the extravagant, horror-themed efforts that preceded it.
Asked about the objective of that trial - which sees Billy find a new body for Tommy and Jen regain her powers - Schaeffer explains, "OK, so this trial is the least cohesive, and that was meant to - so, like 'WandaVision,' you know, as she goes forward in the sitcoms, she kind of starts to unravel, and the sitcom overlay starts to glitch. That’s sort of the arc in there. We mapped that to the literal stages of grief."
"With this one, this is something that’s happening entirely from Billy’s subconscious. He has no awareness of it. But we wanted to sort of chart a notion of him becoming disenchanted with the road, that he’s angry that his friends are dying, frustrated, that possibly there’s some subconscious guilt, that he sort of has a roiling malcontent, and that that would start to affect the trials in a subtle way."
"So this trial is very bare bones," the creative notes. "He’s no longer doing hair, makeup, wardrobe because, on some level, he recognizes how distasteful that is, given that people are actually dying. And so it’s a very bare bones trial, and they just have to grow something. It’s the earth trial. So it’s very simple. They have to grow something in a space with no soil or water or seeds."
"It’s Agatha who’s able to finally make that click, and so she, ironically, is the one who gets off the road having played by the rules."
There's lots more from Schaeffer in the link above, but it's clear from these comments that a great deal of thought was put into every decision made in Agatha All Along.
All episodes of Agatha All Along are now streaming on Disney+.