Agatha All Along finally strikes the right balance

Agatha All Along‘s seventh episode, “Death’s Hand In Mine,” is out of time—both out of order and running down the ever-dwindling clock. The nonlinear structure cleverly jumps back and forth between the present and the past—sometimes centuries ago, sometimes just a few moments ago—to give Lilia the best sendoff we’ve seen so far on this show. “I’m close to the end,” Lilia says, somewhere in the middle, and Jen misunderstands her. “Of the Road, like your full power is returning?” she asks. “I’m not so sure I want it—” Lilia starts, and then she’s screaming, sometime in the future, continuing a conversation from the past.

“Death’s Hand In Mine” opens with a close-up of Lilia’s face. She’s falling, dressed as Glinda from The Wizard Of Oz, through a black abyss, devoid of context. Agatha All Along has given us just enough clues in the previous episodes that the imagery is intriguing rather than frustrating. In episode five, Teen threw Lilia and Jen into the mud along the side of the Witches’ Road; maybe this is how Lilia perceived that experience as she sank below the surface. Maybe it’s something to do with the visions she’s had throughout the show, the phrases dropped in conversations without explanation, the lack of memory when confronted about her strange behavior. Maybe it’s a vision of the future—she is, after all, the coven’s divination witch, capable of seeing forward and backward and many things in between, with a few caveats. Maybe it’s all of those things and none of them at once.

As that scene fades, we switch to a different one: Agatha and Teen are walking in uncomfortable silence down the Road. It’s awkward enough that even Agatha can’t stand it. “You just can ask me your questions. Aloud,” Agatha tells Teen. She refuses to answer his first question (“Where’s Rio?” which, to be fair, was one of our most pressing questions, too), but she responds to the second one, albeit in the most unhelpful manner possible. “Is Wanda Maximoff really dead?” he asks. “Yes,” Agatha replies immediately. A pause, then a teasing smile. “No. Maybe.” It’s obvious he’s not getting a clear answer out of her. The Road leads them to the setting for their next trial: in the episode’s second Wizard Of Oz reference (though by no means its last), it’s a Wicked Witch Of The West-style castle on a hill. Before they head inside, Teen throws one more barb at Agatha and questions whether she’s ever been on the Road at all. She looks bewildered, though it’s hard to tell if it’s genuine bewilderment or performative, like when Lilia (rightfully) accused her of goading the other witches into attacking her so she could steal their power in episode two.

Inside the castle, Agatha and Teen undergo another costume change. This time, she’s the Wicked Witch Of The West and he’s Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty. The trial centers on tarot cards, and they have to face it without their divination witch. They try, unsuccessfully, to do readings for each other. Each time they get something wrong, one of the dozens of swords hanging from the ceiling drops to the floor—and then the whole ceiling starts to drop. “I wish Lilia was here,” Teen says.

The show cuts abruptly to a different scene: Lilia and Jen are in the middle of a confused conversation. Despite what Agatha said in episode six, they’re both still alive. Instead of drowning in the muck, they just sort of fell through the ground and into a subterranean tunnel. Jen is recounting a conversation we didn’t see and Lilia can’t remember; though it apparently happened only moments ago, Lilia has no memory of telling Jen that they needed to head further down the tunnel and look for a bookshelf. There’s a quick series of flashbacks, and some puzzle pieces start falling into place. During Alice’s trial in episode four, Lilia interrupts an unrelated conversation and says, “Alice, don’t.” The scene jumps again: here’s Lilia during Jen’s trial in episode three blurting out “Try to save Agatha.” One statement, cut in two, delivered out of order, too late to help by the time it untwists itself in Lilia’s mind.

Suddenly, we’re watching a scene between a young girl and an old woman, seated across from each other at an outdoor table. They’re speaking Sicilian. The young girl asks, in confusion, “Maestra?” “Ah, I see,” the old woman replies. “You are visiting, eh? How long has it been?” The camera cuts back: it’s Lilia as we know her seated across from the woman now. “Centuries,” Lilia replies. The woman informs Lilia that this is her first lesson, and she’s learning how to read tea leaves.

Back in the tunnel, Lilia comes back to herself and Jen brushes it off as Lilia being confused again. But she’s not confused, and she finally explains what’s going on. “The flow of time is an illusion, Jen,” she says. “Most people don’t realize that. When I was a child, I experienced my life out of sequence. I would get these flashes, these gaps. Now it’s happening again and it’s… it’s getting worse.” Then, we’re back where this recap started: a misunderstood conversation between Jen and Lilia, close to the end, somewhere in the middle.

Lilia’s on the floor of the trial castle now, and she’s finishing her sentence: “—Back!” I’m not so sure I want it back. That’s what she was trying to say.

The beauty of this episode is that it shows us the world through Lilia’s eyes: until now, we’ve experienced her flashbacks from other people’s perspectives. From the outside, it seems like she just drops out of the conversation for a little while, then comes back with a small gap in her memory. From Lilia’s perspective, she’s effectively traveling through time. It’s alarming and wildly disorienting.

The scene plays out much like the one in the tunnel: we come into it halfway through, the other characters remembering what happened in the past few minutes while we, and Lilia, are in the dark. Lilia was in the middle of a tarot reading for Teen and it wasn’t going well; she ended up on the floor after Agatha tackled her out of the way of a falling sword. We jump around in time more; first, we’re back in Sicily, then in the tunnel, picking up on the conversation about Lilia experiencing her life out of sequence. She and Jen hear Agatha and Teen close by. There’s a bookshelf around a bend in the tunnel and it opens into the castle, where Lilia transforms into Glinda and Jen turns into the Queen in her old hag disguise from Sleeping Beauty. Now, we’re seeing the full scene that Lilia blinked into the middle of earlier. “I wish Lilia was here,” Teen says, and Lilia bursts through the shelf, right on cue. Since Lilia’s already experienced part of this scene, she knows the stakes immediately and gets to work on Teen’s tarot reading. It doesn’t work, and Agatha tackles her to the floor.

Then, we’re back in Sicily again, and Lilia gets a short but powerful monologue about how her foresight has caused her nothing but pain for centuries as she foresaw the deaths of everyone she loved and was powerless to stop it. “Death comes for us all,” the Maestra shrugs. “When will it come for me?” Lilia asks. She pauses, and then she remembers something: “I was falling. I will fall.” Past and present, out of sync. Close to the end and the beginning at the same time.

The show jumps back to the tunnel again. This time, we’re seeing the scene that Jen recounted for Lilia when she couldn’t remember where they were, the immediate aftermath of them falling through the earth. “I can see all the pieces falling into place,” Lilia says. “The gaps are filling in. I’m telling you now because soon I’m not going to remember any of this.” As they head down the tunnel, Lilia realizes what she did wrong in the tarot trial, and then we’re back there, at the table, as Lilia clears the deck and starts a different reading: her own, this time.

It’s a Safe Passage spread, a kind of reading that foretells a journey or quest. The first card represents who she is as a person. She pulls the Queen of Cups. “Empathetic, intuitive, inner voice to be trusted,” Lilia explains. Next, she pulls a card representing What’s Missing, or the reason for her quest: she flips over the Three of Pentacles. “Collaboration, community, singular voices waiting to harmonize,” Lilia says. “I needed you. My coven.” The third card represents her past, the Path Behind. This time, it’s the Knight of Wands, a nod to her fighting spirit. The fourth card represents the Path Ahead, or “a space for growth and discovery,” as Lilia explains it. She pulls the High Priestess, which represents “Immense spiritual power, unable or unwilling to use it.” Next up is a card that represents Obstacles: the Three of Swords, signifying sorrow and grief. Then the Windfall: Lilia pulls the Tower reversed, representing a miraculous transformation. In the tunnel, Lilia wakes up before Jen; there’s a figure approaching in the darkness. “Who is that?” she asks. “Don’t you recognize me, Lilia?” Rio responds. She steps into the light, her face transformed into a skull. Lilia says, “Rio is…”

Back in the tower, Lilia pulls the last card, the one that represents her destination. “…Death,” she finishes. The final piece of Lilia’s memory clicks into place. Agatha confirms that Rio is, in fact, Death, but the Salem Seven have caught up to them, and they need to get out of the castle before they can address the Rio situation. Lilia ushers them all out—through an Iron Maiden this time—and, just as Jen turns back to help her through, Lilia shuts the door in her face. “I loved being a witch,” she says. The Salem Seven have arrived, but Lilia has one last trick up her sleeve. The Tower, upright. “Disaster, destruction, sudden upheaval,” she explains. Lilia turns over the card and the room flips upside down, impaling the Salem Seven with the swords on the ceiling. Lilia catches the edge of the tarot table, suspended for a moment between life and death, past and present. She was falling. Will be falling. And then, she lets go of the table, and finally, she is falling.

Stray observations

• • I’m going to keep referring to Joe Locke’s character as just Teen until he makes his identity clear—this episode revealed he’s still unsure about whether he’s William or Billy, so I’m not ascribing either of those names to him yet.
• • Agatha’s response to Teen’s frustration with her dodging questions: “Hey, you want straight answers, ask a straight lady.”
• • The moon is on the walkway in front of the castle door this time. It’s a waxing gibbous (I think), the last phase before the full moon. Any astrology experts have more insight?
• • Agatha on the Wicked Witch Of The West: “She’s based on me, you know.” “Prove it,” Teen shoots back. I’m really enjoying their evolving relationship—he can’t snark quite as well as her yet, but he’s doing an admirable job of trying to keep up.
• • I wanted to focus the core of this recap on Lilia’s journey, because I think this episode finally lived up to its potential and did a trial episode right: it focused squarely on Lilia and gave her backstory impact and meaning. This episode was about her and her power in a way that none of the other trials have been about their respective witches before.
• • That being said, yes, we do need to talk about that conversation between Lilia and Teen about the sigil. “I saw what was going to happen to you that night. I saw who you were and who you would become. I knew you’d need time,” she tells him.
• • Me, in a nutshell:
  • • Lilia: “Jen, aren’t you furious?”
  • • Jen: “I mean, always. But collectively, we’ve moved on.”