“Agatha All Along” creator clarifies the Tommy moment and where the Road goes from here
"I think that people are meant to expect more of Billy and Agatha somewhere in the MCU," Jac Schaeffer tells EW.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for all of Agatha All Along.
The ending to Agatha All Along's season finale left Marvel diehards with a lot of questions, but the show did close the book on other inquiries. We learned the Witches' Road wasn't real at all but another reality-warping hex from a Maximoff gone wild. We learned that, even though Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) herself is now dead (and maybe not entirely evil the way we once thought), she returned as a ghost to mentor the young Billy Maximoff (Joe Locke) on his journey to reuniting with his brother, Tommy.
We also learned that Tommy has indeed been reincarnated in another's body. If there were any lingering what-ifs surrounding that element, Agatha All Along creator and lead scribe Jac Schaeffer is here to confirm as much.
While on the Witches' Road in the final trial, Agatha decides to save Billy by helping him get what he wants. She guides him to use his magic to find another empty vessel in which to put Tommy's spirit. He telepathically finds one: a young man who's tricked by a group of teenagers and drowned to death in a prank run afoul. Billy then vanishes back to the real world, just as Jen (Sasheer Zamata) did when she got what she needed from the Road.
Related: How Agatha All Along ending sets up more witchy shenanigans in the MCU
"The intention is that, yes, he got what he was missing in that he successfully put Tommy's soul into a body of that young man who was the victim of a teen prank," Schaeffer tells Entertainment Weekly. "You know how these things go, and we'll see in future properties if they stick to that narrative. We loved the idea that Agatha would fully step into her mentor role in her nasty, nasty way, and that she would help Billy harness one of his biggest powers: to bring his brother back. It was a tricky thing to shoot because Tommy was not cast at that time, and so we had to shoot it in an obscure way."
Tommy was not cast at that time? So is he cast now somewhere behind the scenes? "I know nothing. I literally know nothing," the showrunner replies. "At the time of making Agatha All Along, there was not a Tommy."
Schaeffer shouts out episode 8 director Gandja Monteiro and cinematographer Isiah Donte Lee for executing the Tommy scene, as well as scribe Peter Cameron, who came up with the idea of how to pull off that character's resurrection semi-off-camera. "Everyone in the [writers'] room just loved that there was something kind of terrifying about it, that it was something done on Billy's side out of love, but that Agatha was all fingernails and meanness," she says.
Related: Agatha All Along star Kathryn Hahn celebrates being the first woman to show nudity in MCU
Of course, there are even bigger reveals in the final two episodes, mainly that Billy was the one who created the Witches' Road. For centuries, Agatha used the ballad as a trap to lure in other witches so that she could steal their powers. She fulled planned to do the same to the likes of Alice (Ali Ahn), Lilia (Patti LuPone), and Jen until Billy, in a panic from being attacked by the Salem Seven, subconsciously used his powers to create an entire reality in which to escape.
The idea came to Schaeffer and executive producer Mary Livanos almost simultaneously one month into opening the Agatha All Along writers' room. They already knew by that time that they wanted the Witches' Road, which is an actual alternate plane of existence in the comics, as their setting. "We were building a really beautiful tapestry of what the Road was," Schaeffer recalls. "We had really gorgeous ideas like all the trees on the Road were dead witches. Anyone who had died on the Road became a tree. Gorgeous ideas like that that were based on a lot of our really beautiful nature and witchcraft research. Then I thought, 'What if he made it?' And in that same thought was, 'What if Agatha manipulated him into making it?'"
It was a direction Schaeffer held at bay because, as she notes, she didn't want to make WandaVision 2.0. But once the writers' room came to the ideas of the Witches' Road being a long con and the ballad never working as an actual spell, the new puzzle box with Billy came into focus. "We had to abandon a lot of our earlier work that no longer made sense because no one has ever been on the Road," she adds. "But it was like many sacrifices you make in the development process."
The Usual Suspects, the Bryan Singer-directed crime-thriller, was a key reference. (Twenty-nine-year spoiler warning for The Usual Suspects.) "When you learn it was all a made-up story, it doesn't undermine your experience of the movie," Schaeffer explains. "You still care about Gabriel Byrne's character [Dean Keaton], you still care about Edie [Suzy Amis], and you care that Fenster [Benicio Del Toro] died."
Related: Agatha All Along confirms Aubrey Plaza's true character
As for the death of Agatha and her return as a ghost, that, as comic book readers well know, comes straight from the source material. Multiple comic book arcs see Agatha as a transparent spirit guiding Wanda Maximoff in her witchy pursuits, including Scarlet Witch: The Witches' Road from writer James Robinson — one big inspiration for Agatha All Along. Schaeffer saw that reveal as "inevitable" and was surprised more people among the fandom didn't bring that up often enough with their theories.
Now Agatha is a ghost mentor for Billy, who closes the Witches' Road for good, leaving it as a memorial to those they lost along the way and setting out into the daylight to find Tommy. Marvel is already at work developing the next extension of WandaVision, which is Vision Quest, a Disney+ series that will return Paul Bettany as the white Vision introduced in that first series who now embarks on a journey of self-discovery. That will begin filming next year. Schaeffer was originally involved in that project, but now it's in the hands of showrunner Terry Matalas (Star Trek: Picard).
Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.
Regarding the Agatha All Along ending scene, "I can't speak to the direct handoff to the Vision show," Schaeffer says, "but I think that people are meant to expect more of Billy and Agatha somewhere in the MCU. I don't know what's going on with that show, and I just wish them well. I love Paul Bettany so deeply, and I can't wait to see what they do."
All episodes of Agatha All Along are now available to stream on Disney+.