'Agatha All Along' Finale Deep Dive plus Showrunner Jac Schaeffer | House of R
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We needed the whole gang to access the road. But after that, it's anybody's game.

It's like the ballad says, burn and brew with coven two and glory shall be thine. The ballad clearly says, with coven true, glory shall be thine. No, it doesn't. It's coven two. That doesn't make any sense. It does if you're a student of the ballad. Her mother recorded the most popular version of the ballad. So maybe we ask Alice. Okay. Hello. Welcome back to House of R. It is...

Dia de los Muertos. Yesterday was Halloween. We spent all day thinking about the Agatha two-part finale, which aired on Devil's Night. It's quite a week for witches, for holidays, for spooky stuff. I'm Joanna Robinson. Join me today. She is the essential two in my covenant of two. It's Mallory Rubin. Oh, bravo, child. Astonishing. How astounding here. Take you a

and others reward her for her talent. This is a video podcast, otherwise I would lie and say you were wearing Agatha's incredible hat in that moment, in that very scene. If only. Hello. We're here. We're not quite a coven of two today, right?

We're coming to three always because Steve Allman is here with us, always, are familiar by our side. And we have a special guest today on the Agatha two-part finale. So this is a, we're covering episode eight and episode nine of Agatha along the finale episodes, let's say. And then we have a special guest. We got to have a lengthy, healthy, juicy chat.

With Agatha all along showrunner, Jack Schaefer. So good. Thrilling. I could have talked to Jack for hours, 17 days uninterrupted and still not like hit all the questions we had. It's just, it was absolutely wonderful to get to talk to her about this incredible show and incredible slice of this universe that we love. At one point, she apologized for like going long on an answer. Mallory's basically like, have you met Ted? Like, have you met our podcast? That's what we do here. Okay. So,

Here we are. Yes. Talking about Agatha All Along episodes eight and nine. Before we get into that, quick programming reminders. We will be back next week to check in again with Penguin. Yeah. We're going to be covering a couple episodes of Penguin at the top of next week. So it's really exciting. Then we have a special, I'm going to call it a mystery tune at the end of the week because I don't like to promise things until like the thing has been recorded. But we have a very special and exciting episode

podcast project in the works that have been in the works for a while that we're hopefully going to deploy at the end of next week. So stay tuned for that over on the ringer verse.

The Midnight Boys, pew pew, will also, of course, be checking in on the Penguin. And they'll be doing it earlier in the week than they have been because they're no longer double dipping on Agatha and Penguin. So you'll get their Penguin reactions towards the beginning of the week. We've got the Minty Boys, the coven of two that is Steve and Jomie and sometimes Ben and other people are covering Arcane.

A show that the Bad Babies and the Midnight Riders and everyone alike has been begging for coverage. And the Mint Edition crew will be covering that. And then Button Mash...

Has a few things going on, including something called Mario and Luigi colon brothership. That sounds like a game even I would play. So that's really exciting. So that is what is going on in the various feeds. Mallory Rubin, how can folks keep track of the mints and the buttons and the midnights in the House of R's? Thanks for asking. You're welcome. Here's what I would recommend. Follow the pod. Follow House of R. Follow The Ring of Earth on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to this.

You can watch full episodes of House of R and Midnight Boyz Pew Pew on Spotify. You can also watch on the new-ish Ringiverse YouTube channel. So after you follow the pod, go ahead and subscribe to the YouTube channel. And don't stop there. Follow the Ringiverse on the social media platform of your choosing because we are on Instagram.

TikTok, Twitter, you can see fun little breakouts, little clips from the pods. You can see wonderful Jomie memes and photos of the squad watching Venom together. Just an astonishing number of ringer staffers all together in one place to watch Venom. Delights abound. And then, hey, while you're at it, keep typing because the inbox is open. Hobbitsanddragons at gmail.com.

Thank you for all of the wonderful Agatha emails all season long, including this week. Keep them coming. You know, we don't want to

Cease talking about Agatha. We're not ready. So keep the emails coming. Send us your Penguin emails. Send us your emails about Dune Prophecy, which is starting soon. Silo. Gladiators. Thighs o'clock, folks. Get hyped. So keep the emails coming. Jo, back to you in the studio. Thank you so much. And here at the top of the hour, we have...

your friendly neighborhood spoiler warning, which is just, we're talking about everything up through Agatha, the end of this series. We don't, I...

have like a crumb or two about Vision Quest, but not much at all. No spoilers, certainly. We have a little bit of combat lore we're going to inject into the discussion today. And that has been, and obviously all of WandaVision, all of that, everything MCU that has ever existed is on the table as well. And that is your spoiler warning for Agatha all along. Should we go to the opening snapshot? Let's do it. Okay, so quick facts. Today...

We are covering Follow Me, O My Friend to Glory at the End is one title, and the other title is Maiden Mother Crone. These are, of course, some lyrics from the ballad, which plays a huge role in episode nine of this show. Yeah.

So episode eight was written by Peter Cameron. Episode nine was written by Jack Schaefer and Laura Donnie, and both were directed by Ganja Monteiro, who directed an earlier episode in the season as well. Quick overall thoughts, Mellorubin, on episodes eight and nine and then the series overall. How are you feeling?

We have two episodes to cover today. We have an incredibly wonderful and rich interview. So we have a long pod coming. I actually am for once going to keep this quick. I believe in you. I believe in you.

Do you? I mean, even just saying I'm going to keep it quick required a 40-second preamble. I believe that perhaps you were crashing from all the Halloween candy you may or may not have consumed yesterday. I'm a little under the weather today and have gotten like a total of four hours of sleep all week, but I am energized. Nature's Caffeine is talking about this show with you, so I'm hyped.

We were wondering why were the final two episodes going to air at once? Was it just because it was a fun way to conclude the show on Halloween? I really think these belonged together. Episode nine felt truly like a coda on the heels of episode eight, the penultimate.

which in many ways functioned as a more traditional finale. And so I'm really glad, actually, that we got to see these episodes together and consider them and receive them as a pair. I have a few questions, some things I'm eager to theorize and speculate about with you today, and some stuff we're going to parse. Overall, I thought this was a strong finale to an exceptional show. Like, I just loved the series overall. I think back to episodes, I mean...

four, six, and seven as like God tier. I mean, truly God tier. And this is one of my favorite MCU shows and one of my favorite MCU experiences. And in addition to being a really rewarding and rich examination of

the characters in this story, it restores a lot of my faith in what Marvel TV can be. Totally. And that is a really great and energizing feeling. So yeah, we have a lot to dive into and a lot to talk about, but I thought the series overall was just truly outstanding and a great... We had a lot of confidence, but still it was a great surprise and a great delight. And so many people loved it. And that's just a really fun thing. I never think it's a good goal to try to make something that everyone will love.

And I don't think that's what the showrunners did here. And I think that's why it worked so well, because there was such a confidence and such a...

level of intentionality behind it. And I will genuinely miss talking about it every week with you. It was so rewarding to think about these characters and the decisions that they had made or not gotten to make and what that meant for them and their relationships with each other and the way that they understood their own lives and their own experiences. And I will be thinking about it for a long time. And I already can't wait to rewatch it. And my favorite feeling when I get to the end of a story is

is simultaneously feeling like a sense of peace and closure and also a desperation to return to the world. And that's how I feel right now. I think I agree with so much of what you said. I think it's such an interesting...

Full circle moment feeling for Marvel on Disney+, given that we started this whole journey with WandaVision, and here we are, and obviously we're not the end of anything, but we are in a bit of sort of a rebirth space for Marvel television on Disney+. So I think it's really great to have another Jack Schafer-led, with a lot of the same writers and talent, over from WandaVision on to Agatha all along. I agree with you. I think four, six, and seven...

perhaps six and seven, definitely most of all were like the peak for me. I would say, you know, we were worried a lot of Marvel TV kind of, uh, you know, falls off a cliff, uh, has fallen off a cliff at the end of the season. And we were not worried, but, you know, because we had a lot of faith in these particular storytellers, but just sort of like holding that awareness in our mind that like plenty of Marvel shows have kind of crashed and burned. And, uh,

And so while I do have some questions about sort of some of the things that happened in these two episodes, and they're not my favorites of the season, I don't feel like it fizzled in any kind of way at all. And there are some truly beautiful, heartbreaking, when rewatching To Prep for the Pod, I found myself sort of crying again. Not like the...

ugly soul rending sob that I had at the end of WandaVision, but like still like profoundly moved, moved by a lot of the emails that we got from people. We're not going to include all of them, but we actually, you know, given the various serious subject matter that has to do with like parental grief, that is a big part of the end of this show.

we got a lot of emails from bad babies talking about their personal experience. And I just want to thank all of you for feeling, um, you know, for sharing that I, I emailed you guys back, like, but like for sharing that, uh, with, with us, with, with, uh, with me. And, um, and I just think it's wonderful. You know, you and I have dedicated so much of our time in our lives and our careers to talking about these genre stories. And we are always quite insistent that like,

there are profound themes and profound experiences to be found inside of them. And so, yeah, this is the witch stuff go show on Disney plus, but it also has a lot to say, um, for a lot of people. And so I'm forever grateful for our listeners and for the show for giving them the space to, I don't know, cathartically reflect on something that has happened in their lives. Um,

I'm going to wildly grab the wheel and shift the tone. Okay. And say, I think one thing that people... You've created this road. It's yours. Do it. Sharp hairpin turn ahead. I'll...

One reaction I saw, I watched this episode with a couple friends who felt this way. I heard from a bunch of people that they wanted more Rio and Agatha was sort of like the big thing that people thought they might get and felt like they didn't quite get. We talked to Jack about that and you'll hear sort of like her response to that. But I do want to let you know, stories go ever on. Yes. Especially in the realm of fan fiction. Yeah.

We did get an email from our listener, Leah, who let us know that the Agatha and Rio stories are booming over on AO3 on our cup of our own. And specifically, she wanted to shout out a couple, not necessarily for the content, not pro or con anyway, but anyway.

Paddington fan 69. Nice. Um, which I do think is a great, uh, combination of like the house of our flavor. Like we love a soft gooey Paddington story and also just tack a 69 on there. Um, uh,

posted a couple of Agatha Rio stories titled into the wood lyrics. And so Leah's like confident that Paddington fan 69 is a bad baby. So if you are shout out Paddington, 50 Paddington fan 69, keep on keeping on. Um, and if any of you guys have, have like encountered great Agatha fan fiction, hobbits and dragons, gmail.com, you know where to find me. Um, um,

And then we got a couple requests from listeners who just like want to keep the vibes rolling and have asked for some recommendations. So Becca asked for, Becca who hasn't read much, many Marvel comics at all, asked for recommendations on where to start in sort of like the witchy space of Marvel. What would you recommend to Becca on that front?

I mean, there's so much waiting to be discovered, but I think in general with any character or any slice of the comics universe, it's like always, it's nice to think, okay, there's no...

bad place to start, you just pick one. You pick a character you're interested in. You pick a group of characters you're interested in. So I think if that question is on Becca's mind coming out of the WandaVision, Agatha slice of this universe specifically, I would recommend starting with some stories that involve those characters and also some of the...

Billy, Tommy, soul shard stuff. That's very top of mind right now. Shard stuff, go. Love a shard. I love a shard. I would recommend Vision and the Scarlet Witch, both volume one from 1982 and then volume two from 1985, which features the arc with Wanda's magical pregnancy. And then West Coast Avengers number 52, which we've talked about all of these before, but that's from 85 as well. And that's the Wanda, Agatha,

Billy, Tommy, Mephisto, Master Pandemonium, reabsorption arc. So I think that will feel like a very natural transition point coming out of this show and a great way to then discover even more from there. I mean, you know, eventually in time, certainly if you're enjoying reading about Wanda in the comics universe, you got to get to House of M eventually. I mean, yeah.

of this podcast. You know, you got to get there. You got to get there one day. Couldn't not mention that. What about you, Jo? What's a good starting point in your mind? I think I actually, I mean, I think those 1980s comics that you mentioned are excellent and kind of required reading if you want to like get the full scope of the story. But I think the Scarlet Witch, uh,

that started in 2015 by James Robinson, no relation, uh, Vanessa Del Rey. And it's got this like iconic red and black and white cover art by David Ajo. People know from his work on Hawkeye, et cetera. Um,

I really loved that run a lot. You've got some Ghost Agatha stuff in there. You've got some Witches Road stuff in there. So I think that's a really like nothing in this show is a one to one with anything that has happened other than sort of like loosely the Billy stuff. So you're not going to find like a direct adaptation anywhere. But I think those Mal's recs and my rec are a good place to start.

For sure. And then Amber asks, outside of the world of comics, if there are any, like, books. Specifically, maybe one... The call is really reverberating today. It's very Witchy Road of it, I think. It is. It is. If there's any books...

preferably with great audio books that we would recommend. Do you have any recommendations here? Jo, you just take this and run. Okay. Rapid fire witch book stuff go before we get into the deep deck. And I did this in like 30 seconds. It was just like top of mind for me. Okay. Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo. It's not like witch, witch, witch,

stuff go, but it is witchy and there's like ghosts and stuff like that. It's very good. Juniper slash wise child by Monica Verlong. I named my cat after the book Juniper. This is like a great, a great witch text.

Uh, once a future, which is by Alex Harrow, which you also read Mallory. And I loved that. We love Alex Harrow. Love, um, really recommend the very secret society for regular witches by Sengu Mandana. This is not a great book, but this is like a very cozy book and you might find it shelved in like the cozy romance section. So like, just want to like make you fully aware, but it, it basically lifts the plot of, um,

house in the Cerulean Sea but make them witches essentially so like I'm intrigued I don't know if Sangu like paid TJ Klune any money or whatever but that's that's a that's a an audiobook that Spotify just like pushed in front of me and I was like sure and I listened and I had a fun fine time at the Spotify audiobook arena

Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic. You know the film. The book is tremendous. And The Rules of Magic was a prequel to Practical Magic. I really recommend. And then the Tiffany Aching series by Terry Pratchett, which is The We Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, Wintersmith, I Shall Wear Midnight, The Shepherd's Crown. The Tiffany Aching series. Tiffany Aching is like the Tisha Rich. These are like young adult. They're for like kids. But...

They feature my favorite fictional witch of all time, which is an old witch crone, if you will, called Granny Weatherwax. And I just want to share really quickly three Granny Weatherwax quotes that I just was thinking about when I put this list together. Okay.

Quote, a witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her. Love. That feels like real Agatha energy to me. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Find the story, Granny Weatherwax always said. She believed the world was full of story shapes. If you let them, they controlled you. But if you studied them, if you found out about them, you could use them, you could change them.

That's very House of R core as far as I'm concerned. And last but not least, and I love this, I love this quote, Granny was an old-fashioned witch. She didn't do good for people. She did right by them. But Nanny knew that people don't always appreciate right. So those would be my recommendations. All of those would be a really good time. And if you folks... Oh, and The Great Witch of Brittany. I forgot to mention that. Louisa Morgan. Those are all great witch books. There's a million more. Someday, maybe I'll just...

retire and read only witch books the rest of my days. Let's go now. Enough shilly-shallying. Let's go now to the deep dive. Our last deep dive, Mallory. I'm sad. Devastating. I'm sad. I'm still saying this is just the second to last because we get to do two episodes right now. Okay. And ultimate episode, episode eight.

We tie some loose ends. Rio reaps Alice and Lilia essentially reaps herself.

Jack had said in several interviews the last few weeks that it was important to them on the show that dead means dead. And we talked about that at length in the interview, so I'll sort of let her cover that. But we had been sort of speculating who might be alive, and it turns out everyone's dead, actually, for sure, for real. And Alice speaks to our, like, oh my God, this is devastating. When she says, I finally broke the curse, I mean, I can really do something with my life now.

And what I liked about this sequence, as devastating as it is and as, you know, I just want more time, very reminding us of death from Sandman and all of that, is how sort of like not unkind but resolute Rio is here, like sort of dispassionate.

compared to what we see from her in the past with Agatha and Nikki. Yes. But she says you're a protection witch. You died protecting someone. How did all of this work for you, Mallory Rubin? I thought this was a great...

Opening note for the episode, even just the way the camera flips when we're first considering Alice and this idea of the underworld and the role that that's going to play in this episode and even just what we understand about reality and perspective. The music, the score, the tone setting of this episode, both from a story beat and just everything visually perfected.

I thought that, to your point, like this bit of...

relativity, like giving us that comparison point so that we understand we've seen Alice plead for more time and we have seen her denied. And so, you know, it's immense ahead of the extra time that Rio does grant Nikki and Agatha, limited though it is, that that is genuinely not something, as Rio says, that anyone else receives, even though, of course, they all ask for it, right? So I loved that. And then in terms of the tragedy of

of Alice dying after breaking the curse, like you said, that had been on our minds. And no surprise that it's her lament as well. And I found this just incredibly effective to live your entire life. It was like a couple minutes at the beginning of the episode, but it really hit. You live your entire life in fear.

in fear of dying and fear of what that fear did to your mother, to other members of your family. And then you think that you have finally bested that specter and then you die anyway. And it's so tragic, but that felt so right to me for that to be the choice and to stick with it

And it's just real. Like, bad things happen in life and they're painful, right? And they happen at inconvenient moments when you'd rather they hadn't. And I really just admired the show for making decisions like that. I think it was important for Alice to face that fear, to better understand her own family, her mother, to pass her trial. And I don't think that those things are diminished by her death, but...

You know, like Lillia said to her in episode four, sad is better than angry. And Alice got to the point where she was sad instead of angry. And so that's a meaningful thing for her to have achieved and meaningful clarity for her to have reached. And, you know, we and she grieve that she didn't get to live in the glow of that progress and that new clarity for longer. And that pain is something that I think just speaks to effective storytelling. And I just recently watched The Wild Robot, and I got to talk about this with

Sean and Charles on Big Pick. I thought this movie was beautiful. It destroyed me. I was a wreck watching it. And I won't spoil the specifics here, obviously, but something that's really present in there that I've been thinking about a lot is the idea of completing the task. And like...

we're very task-oriented as humans. And the way that our emotions and our connections to each other are tied up in when we are able to complete a task, but also the idea that there are some things in life that cannot be completed or that you were taken away from before you think you have is just very compelling to me. So I really loved all of this. And then even just the way they walked into the mist together, the visual element of the sense that there's the green, but also...

This was very, like, beyond the veil Harry Potter imagery to me as well. But, like, this idea that there's something unseeable and unknowable, even in a story where death is a literal character who plays a role, and it's, like, not meant for us to see. Like, there is still something there that we cannot glimpse or understand, and that's part of the point. And also this way that, like, you know, given all of her various costume changes...

That like the experience is tailored to the person to a certain degree. Yes. That death will meet you sort of where you are. And if you're Alice, it would be like with the thigh slit all the way up sort of gothed out. I haven't gotten a chance to listen to that episode of The Big Pick, which is you and Charles and Sean talking about

Two Cinematic Plastics. Your favorite movie of the year. Wild Robot and Venom. But I'm excited to listen to that because I saw Venom and I didn't love... No, you know that. I saw Wild Robot and I didn't love Wild Robot, but I feel like I'm the only person alive on this planet who didn't love it. And as you know, oftentimes when I hear you talk about something, I learn to love it more. I talked about you in that pod because I felt compelled to speak at length about the icon Kit Conner.

And you were not there to share that with me. I'm devastated. But I wish you had been. Pedro and Kit Conner in one vehicle. Incredible. Yeah, Wild Robot, and we'll get back to that in a second. Wild Robot...

is visually beautiful. And I think I was just thinking a lot about The Iron Giant and I think I just like, it just paled slightly in comparison to a film that I think is perfect. And was like, maybe like, it felt a little over-Sakuran to me, but I, again, often need you to like help me get over my cynicism and give myself over to emotionality. So, I,

Coming true. Okay. So to go back to Alice, I will say. Yeah. To think about taking profound messages away from, be it like a children's film like wild robot or, or this show, I walked away from this, these two, both of these episodes with this sort of like resolution, not to waste any time for like Agatha and Nikki, which we'll talk about later, the limited time that she was gifted and,

Or for Alice, like she had a reason to live in fear. The curse wasn't fake. Right. But there is also a sense of time wasted in her life of like, my life will start when X happens. And I'm so often guilty of that, of like, wait until X, wait until I achieve X or I've done X or whatever. And then my real life will start. But that's not the, the, the,

The clock is ticking. The grow lights are going out one by one. So let's just keep it moving. All right. So you're keeping it moving. Um, so that Rio and Agatha can have a private moment on the road. We've got Jen and teen, uh, ruminating on Lilia, uh, and on Rio, uh, in, in the stairway leading out of the last trial. Um, um,

And again, we've got Jen in a bit of like a leadership mode, a bit of like comfort guidance mode here. Her genuine despair, though, over Lillia's loss, given how recent their sisterhood bond was forged. This was very moving. Was no less. And I think Sashir... No, I know Sashir is a star of episode eight for me. Sensational performance. Really good Jen stuff in this episode. Yeah.

But what I found kind of chilling is, you know, she's banging on the doors of this like Iron Maiden, essentially, you know, and they're processing this in the stairwell and the door disappears. We've seen the doors disappear elsewhere on the road. But the idea, knowing that that's like Billy's mind that sealed up that door while he's in the middle of like,

grieving for Lilia is like somewhat chilling to me. You know what I mean? What do you think? Yeah. This is so interesting because I was, I completely agree. And I was, I think because actually I felt that I was really latching on to Lilia

I was like, my guy teen talked about free will. And, you know, he asked, like, Lillia wanted to stay behind. She chose it, you sure? And I think there's this aspect of consent king. Consent king. Processing everything that is happening and trying to make peace. But then we will see, of course, later the torment, the way that he is absolutely tormented by confronting what happened. My mind did this thing. And it felt to me really important,

To hear him voice that before he has to confront in full the reality of what his magic wrought, to show that he cares, that he is a person who values the fact that other people should be able to make decisions about their own lives. And because that's something that he prizes and takes seriously and considers, if he has to face the fact that that was exactly what you said, what does it mean then that that door sealed?

it's all the richer because he actually is invested in people being able to forge their own path. So I thought an example of like a quick little beat in the, in the episode that carried a lot of weight. Billy has been listening to Mallory on the pod confirmed. Okay. So a deal with death. So Rio and Agatha encounter each other on the road. I just think that nobody has ever been this hot. I'm sorry. I know we're talking about a lot of what's wrong with me. I know.

It's Paddington fan 69. It's very Paddington fan 69 of you. It's just overwhelming. I,

I have to like pause and catch my breath. Wait, are you Paddington fan 69? If only. Frankly, I wish. I mean, having not read a word from Paddington fan 69, I wish that I were creating a Rio Agatha fanfic for people genuinely. Just astonishing stuff. This like, you know, the return of the kind of like lace bralette and leather pants and now adorned with a little headdress. Astonishing stuff.

Carry on. A friend of the pod, Matt Midovich, who is a TV journalist, a professional in his own right, sent us a screen cap of... He was like, this is one of Marvel's favorite tricks, but they had CGI'd out the death crown. Because there's the clip from the trailer where Ryo says the bodies are really starting to pile up. She doesn't have the death crown in that shot in the trailer. So just classic. Classic Marvel maneuver. So...

So they talk about, you know, death thanks Agatha for the promised bodies, the payoff of sort of the episode four conversation. But they also talk about Agatha tricking Rio, which had me on the lookout for a trick that I think never comes. It's still a little bit murky to me. Mal did ask Jack about this. So, you know, Jack did sort of track Agatha's motivations and the when and the where of it. But also Jack was...

Quick to point out that the ambiguity of it is was compelling and interesting to them. So if you are having trouble at homes or tracking what exactly is Agatha's game when, I think that's kind of the point. Would you agree, Mallory? Yeah, definitely. One of the things that I've found...

stimulating and just titillating and thinking about the show, but also one of the things that makes it really interesting to talk about with other people. Stimulating, titillating, two favorite words from Paddington Van 69. I'm building my case. Have you asked in the same room? I'm building my case. Okay, go ahead. Oh, man.

So I was thinking back to that scene in episode four where Agatha is running one of her many cons by activating the mic, right? But there's like what happens before the mic, what happens on mic. And as is often the case with Agatha, there's the truth and the con and how they entwine, right? There's the ruse, but there's like the heart of it, the heart that's driving it. So like just saying something to Rio like you're too early, right?

Agatha knows that Rio is there to reap the bodies, right? That's clear. When we revisit that, that is clear. I just need these witches to get me to the end. It is only ambiguous at the end of this series that Agatha intended to kill these people. She intended to drain them. She says that flat out to Billy and we get to see in the astonishing montage sequence that I'm very excited to get to that that was the plan, right? When she's on Mike, when she acts as the Absalom, it's not like she's potting.

When Agatha booted up her Riverside link. When she fires up the Scarlet. Checks her levels. Yeah. What you do best, kill all the witches around you one by one. That was what she had Ryo say for others to hear. Then what? You get your power and I get my bodies. And at the time we were really interested in, okay, this seemed in both directions, like the actual substance of the thing. What was Agatha gaining by having people hear this?

it served her that they would be on guard with Rio, who was not a variable that Agatha was prepared to contend with at that moment in time. But the thing that she revealed about herself there was genuine. So I think this has been there for us to consider in terms of

This question of, like, when and how often and always are Agatha and Rio in cahoots? Yeah. Like, when are the bargains struck? And when is somebody operating outside of them is really interesting to me to think about and something I'm going to be, like, watching for as I revisit the text. And I think that, like...

In terms of your question about the trick, we'll talk more obviously about the choice that Agatha makes with Billy. I guess the other thing on my mind there is Tommy. Because Rio flat out says to Agatha,

He can't do this. This can't happen. It can't happen. And then Agatha helps Billy do it. I know. And that's a choice she makes. And I'm interested. I'm really excited to discuss the various reasons why. But I think that that is happening deliberately outside of the bounds of her arrangement here with Rio. The question in terms of like Rio's, like what can Rio's, you think that death is all seeing, all knowing? Yeah.

like are they hidden inside of that in that like that morgue space like you know why isn't Rio I don't mean to pick nits I just agree with you it's like she does the exact thing that Rio says can't happen yeah she helps Billy create or find or reincarnate Tommy however you prefer to put it say soul shard it'll it'll feel good do it do it

Unlimited soul shards! I can't. But then, like, does seem ready to sacrifice Billy in the next moment. So is it, like, reincarnate Tommy but sacrifice Billy until she doesn't? I don't know. I don't mind my confusion around this, actually, to be honest with you. Because I think...

The beauty of Agatha. This is something that Jack said, but I already had in my notes, so I feel fine saying it as well, which is like that this is not a redemption story. It's not a redemption arc. A lot of times we were trying to parse what we thought might happen. A lot of our interpretations were far more charitable to Agatha than she deserves because I think we were searching for a redemption arc of some kind. We love a character on an arc, and that's sort of like what we were sort of narratively searching for or expecting. The revelation will be that

she could never control it or this, that, or the other thing. That's not really the case. And so, um, and I like that. I like how dense, complicated, unapologetically villainous this character is. Um, it's great. Um, all right. So Rio calls Billy an abomination that he describes the quote sacred balance. And then Agatha tries to pretend that Billy doesn't mean anything to her. Rio's like,

P.S. I watch you. I follow you on Insta. I know everything that you do. You can't pull this shit with me. And then she says, quote, this walk with another woman's son on a road that doesn't and me at home, Joanna Robinson sitting on the couch. Yeah. Surrounded by people said, exist. And I got so excited.

I like literally threw my fist up in the air. Like, you know, like it's the fricking end of the breakfast club or something anyway. So, and then, yeah. And then this part where Agatha claims that Rio never gave her anything. And that's just not true at all. Right. You gave me nothing. You took Rio's like, that's your Julie, your move, isn't it? But like, it's so untrue that,

Like, Rio is, for all intents and purposes, certainly in a cackling, sitting on a roof kind of way, the antagonist, the villain of this episode. But when you look at... I mean, Rio actually has that sort of like, it wasn't, she didn't do anything wrong arc that we were expecting for Agatha. Because her story earlier when she was like, I was just doing my job, it's true. And not only was she just doing her job,

She gave Agatha something she literally never gave anyone else in this world. And Agatha cannot see that blinded as she is by her grief because as much time as she gave her, six, seven years, it wasn't enough time. She needed more. And...

I don't know if she'll never be able to see what Rio did for her, but I don't think she gets there inside the span of these episodes. Yeah. I loved this conversation, and this was one of my favorite sequences of the finale. I'll just call both episodes the finale. That's fine, right? Just to say finale for both of them. Let's do that. Can you call them finale shards if you want to? Finale shards. Shards of the finale? Yeah.

That dismay on Agatha's face when she says that she knew Rio would figure out who Billy was. To me, those moments, especially because we have been talking about this all season and are guided toward studying Agatha's face and the truth that we can glimpse there.

She does not want harm to come to Billy. That feels to me very clear and very true. And I think no matter what she tries to convince Rio and even herself that she is willing to accept, she does not want that. And I kept thinking of the moment in episode four after the, you know, our guy went through an entire jam session with, again, not the Ringer podcast of the ballad, with a glass shard in his abdomen, nearly blown out. There's shards, shards again, shards in all forms.

nearly bled out, and Agatha was in a fit of panic and despair thinking that he might die. And of course, the key is on her mind there. The way that she said don't when she looked at Rio is one of the lasting moments of us being able to see something true about Agatha of the experience to me. So...

The fact that like, Agatha knows the road is not real. Rio knows the road is not real, but those things are real. The things that they're bringing to it are real. And I love this link with Wanda too. Like when Rio was saying this walk with another woman's son, this idea just more broadly of recreating something, recreating a family, a version of a family in a way that

is driven by a true, pure thing, a thing that we can relate to and understand grief and longing, but like that maybe you shouldn't have done or shouldn't have done in this way. Right. And how stolen it feels for her to forge this relationship with Billy when she's the reason that,

for better or for worse, probably for better for the members of the residents of Westview, that Wanda's family fell apart the way that it did. Yeah. And I think on the special treatment front, we have our logical brains that we bring to this stuff, right? It's just a part of why our pods are eight hours long. We genuinely love to parse every single word. This felt so right to me that...

Agatha is wrong when she says that Rio only took and never gave her anything, like you said. She gave her something that no one else had received. We have the Alice thing there to establish that clearly. Six years would not be enough. It would not feel like enough. Of course you would feel like you were still robbed of this great gift and great love of your life. And this idea of the truth being so awful, like of Rio granting Nikki some time, as we will get to see in episode nine,

Rio then taking him as she told Agatha she would have to. Agatha saying she gave her nothing even though she got that time. And the fact that then we understand that Agatha almost feels like not only was it not enough, it was almost like crueler in a way. Like she got to know her son and love him. I think she clearly cherishes that time. I don't want to imply otherwise, but she spent, as we see, every one of those days waiting for him to die, watching him fade and having to then

because of that confront her own inadequacy. Like her inability as both a mother and a witch, and I don't think this would be a fair thing for her to feel about herself, but I do think it's what she feels.

Her inability to thwart that inevitability, her inability to save him. And she says as much, right? When she says, I can't protect you. I can't heal you. I can't divine these like key roles in the coven. I can't, I'm not a protection witch. I'm not a healing witch. I can't divine when she's going to come back for you. It's so heartbreaking. And like this idea of,

So the awfulness, there's a, there's a couple of questions that people have. One is like,

Why do you let them believe these things about you, about Nikki? Because the truth is too awful, right? The, the, the, the legend print, the legend, right? Which is that she traded Nikki for the dark hold versus the truth. And, and having watched episode nine, I've seen some people say like, what do you mean awful? Like her kid died. It's not her fault. Why would she think that's awful? Well, I'm just like the, just hearing the truth of the tragedy, what happened to her,

It's something she would prefer to put that in a box and not look at it and not think about it. And then also, if you want to parse it further, you could say, because later, of course, she says she can't face him. She can't face Nikki. So what is she ashamed of? Is she ashamed of taking this beautiful song that they composed together and turning it into bait to vampirically feed on

Surely hundreds, if not thousands of women. So many she lost count. And like, and we know that Nikki was like, hey, what if we didn't? The last thing that he did was...

make the choice on his own to run away so that they didn't hurt those people. I mean, he's like, we'll kill again tomorrow. It's fine. We'll kill again tomorrow. But yeah, I think it's, to me, it felt like a combination of those two things. Feeling still, of course, she would be desperate to see him and to be with him again in this new way, but also feeling the shame of not having been able to

protect him. Yeah. Which again is not a fair thing for her to put on herself but I think something she would feel. And then also the shame that the things she knew he didn't want to do even before he makes the choice to run out of the pub with his little hat on he asks her like do we have to kill these witches? Right. We couldn't just like live with them instead? And she...

she would, I think, be mortified that she had to face him and receive his judgment. Or that would be the thing she feared that she would receive. And that's, of course, part of why it's so meaningful to her when Billy says, he'd forgive you. I think he'd understand without knowing for what. And she says, it's like those moments when you remind me of him, which is beautiful. And that was also why on the, to circle back for a second to the Rio saying like, that's your move, isn't it, front? I think that's why that's,

Just such a damning indictment. And as we have these moments of like understanding Agatha and examining her and moving toward this sense of like, okay, this is why this person lived this way and did these things. We also are carrying with us, like you said, you shouldn't have killed all those people, these indictments of her behavior and the choices that she made. And Agatha, this idea of Agatha as...

a taker, like a drainer, a pillager, and a thief taking power, taking lives, taking the trust on which sisterhood and coven. Dude, these people who are on the outside of society have found, have found safety and sanctity in each other. Maybe inside of a circle. Yeah. Like for, for death of all people to be the one who says that to you,

I mean, holy shit. Well, but I also really like, so I love the connection. If you go back and rewatch episode one, which we have many times, but if you circle back after you hear Rio here say, why do you let them believe those things about you? And then in episode one, she's, she asks Rio, asks detective Agnes, is this really how you see yourself? Yes.

So this idea that in her Mare of Easttown delusion, her hex-fueled delusion, that she's put herself in this grieving mother, unliked by anyone, sort of hardscrabble space, that she has not envisioned some sort of glorious, glamorous, powerful role for herself, but this thing. And Rio's like,

you've, you've, you've allowed the world to pay you a villain. You are a villain in, in many regards. And that's true, but you're not as, as dark as they paint you. And, um, that's just self punishment. That's self loathing manifested through that, that Mare of Easttown thing in episode one, but also just like throughout her life. It's really, um, it's really upsetting. Um, um,

Okay. This is a moment that I found a little weird and I'm fine to like smooth over it. But...

the show is not yet ready to reveal to us that the road isn't real. So the tricky thing is Agatha and Rio have to have a conversation about the road that is like cut off and sort of whatever to continue that illusion. But when Rio says that what Billy wants from the road is a quote violation. And then Agatha is finding his brother is borderline wasting the road's time. I'm like,

Everyone here knows the road isn't real. So what, what exactly do you mean by that? You know? Yeah. So I think for my interpretation of this is that for, for Rio, right, obviously the violation is stealing the life. And in terms of Agatha and how she's always saying something true, but running her con and those things are inextricable from each other at a certain point. Um,

The magic of the road is real. Yes. Like, even though Billy made it, the things that happen happen. People die. People get their powers back. Every time you say people die today, are you going to do it in The Last of Us voice or are you going to wait until the key moment? I mean, it's too late. People die all the time, Henry. It's dying. It's dying. Oh, man.

Melanie Alinsky, you are always with us. Always. The professor is always welcome. So is Melanie. If it's a coven of two and it's Melanie Alinsky and J.R.R. Tolkien, oh my God, that's very powerful. Put it on the house of our totes, honestly. Okay, so let's hear this clip of sort of them talking about the deal. I can arrange that. I can get him to the finish line and deliver him to you.

in exchange for if i deliver billy you let me go you will eventually die agatha but i want you to stop pursuing me i want you to stop making my life hell and when i die time from now i don't want to see your face okay i do i i do i want to see your face

Do you want to see Bug's face again? Yes, please. That was amazing. Bug! What's up, Bug? It's a very witchy podcast, though. You might as well. Is Bug happy you're home? She's out of her mind. She's thrilled. Last time when I was trying to do the notes for this podcast, she was so angry that one of my hands was not petting her at all times. She just was sitting on the laptop. Anyway, hello. Sweet Bug.

Aubrey Plaza is incredible. They're both incredible in this moment, but Aubrey Plaza showing us Rio's absolute devastation that this is the bargain that Agatha wants to make is tremendous stuff. But I don't want to see her face... I'm trying to fully connect how that pays off. Is it connected to the fact that Rio turns her face into a skull at the moment of Agatha's death? Is it connected to...

Agatha is staying as a ghost. Like she doesn't get reaped. She gets to hang around as a ghost. Like what, what exactly is the connection there? I'm not a hundred percent sure. I am sure that Rio is devastated and I am sure that I laughed out loud when she took her knife and,

and cut a hole, a door in the MGM backlot set that is Billy's Witch's Road. A very Truman Show moment. That's a great one. It was giving me Will and the Subtle Knife. The Truman Show is probably more appropriate, honestly. Anything you want to say about this exchange? I have some more thoughts on the...

emotional state between these two, but I'll, I'll, I'll save them since we have a, Oh, a couple of moments to consider them. Yeah. Uh,

All right. So Tien and Jen are wrapping up, teenager Billy, are wrapping up their conversation about Lillia. And he insists that Agatha is capable of feelings, which is something I think he like leverages later. Because Tien is inherently, I think, a good guy, but not without his own ability, I think, to manipulate. Yeah. Also, clearly has just watched Marvel movies. This is real proof that Tony Stark has a heart. Stuff here.

And he says, I'm fully aware that Agatha Harkness can never be anything but a covenless witch, which at the end of the day, I think is just true unless it's a covenant of two. She can do a covenant of two, not much more. That's like, that's like me, what I find for myself and other people, as you grow older, you just want fewer friends. You're just like, I just want,

two, maybe just a few. And I can't be dealing with all these other people, honestly. So I said out loud at core week last week to a group of our wonderful colleagues. I found myself in a conversation with, um,

I don't need any new friends at this point in my life. And that was not actually about any rigor people. We were talking about something else. But I was like, why am I... Why did I just say that out loud? But I... Sometimes I feel that way because I'm like, I have these people in my life who I cherish and I'm good. I'm good with a few people who mean a lot to me. But then also I'm like, well, if I had said that a few years ago, then you wouldn't be in my life. So I'm going to try to keep my heart open. That's the promise I'm going to make. All right. All right.

Wow. And here comes the worst thing that happens in this two-part finale. Yeah. Which is that Agatha, wildly out of pocket, takes some cracks at my personal favorite vegetable, kale. And I just need to... We need to pause for a second here. Okay. Yeah. What did she say? It's like eating a doily, I think is what she said. A doily, yeah. Okay, let me tell you a couple things. If you're eating...

Kale raw. Like in a salad. Yeah. You have to massage her before you eat her. Okay? Or it. Let's just say it. Steve, can you just clip you have to massage her before you eat her and save that for future episodes? Thanks. Thanks. With some oil. Oh, okay. So like, okay, if you're gonna make a kale salad, you need to massage the kale. If you're just eating it like

Ron, you have not put the time and the care and the love and the oil into the situation. You're not doing it right. Round two, if you're going to cook the kale, you should use lacinato or dino kale. It's better in the cooked process than the other kale. And last but not least, there's a recipe I recommend everyone and it never misses. You can make it with vegan sausage if you prefer. It's kale with white beans and sausage. It's from Simply Recipes. You Google this.

and you make it, it's super easy. It's like a real tummy warmer fall situation, okay? Kale is the best. It might shock you to hear that I actually love kale.

I'm sure you're floored by this because my- I didn't know you knew what vegetables were. My bloodstream is basically all Twix bars at this time of year. But I can't say I have ever had the pleasure of massaging kale myself, or if I'm being honest with you and the bad babies, preparing kale in any way myself. But I do have it delivered to my home from sweet green sometimes in a salad. That's great. I love it in a smoothie.

Wonderful. I think that sweet cream does. I enjoy some like braised kale and a side dish. This is essentially what that recipe is. It's essentially you're braising the kale. Listen. Yeah.

If you get it in a salad from like Sweetgreen or something like that, what they have had to do is like microchop the kale, which is its own sort of massage method. Anyway, let's move on. There's a great kale, a side of kale at John and Vinny's here in LA that I love. Okay. It's wonderful. Seek it out. Is it garlicky? Yeah. Yeah. That's the stuff. Very well seasoned. All right. Now I'm starving. Moving on from the kale.

which again is the best vegetable. It moved forward. It is. Yeah, sure. I mean,

The best? I like kale. The best. Okay. Do you need iron in your life? Kale has you covered. Almost surely. One time I googled, can you eat too much kale? And the internet said, as with all things, yes. Okay. They move forward towards the Earth's trial and they find themselves back at the start. We should note, Billy says...

Without an earth wish, we're back to square one. And then all of a sudden they're back at the start of the road with their shoes. A reminder that Aga fully knows that all of this is bullshit.

And so when she says, then how exactly do we get off? And he goes, well, maybe, maybe. And if she says, if you don't know, then keep quiet. She knows that the witch's road isn't real, but also it is up to Billy's like subconscious mind to figure out how to get them off the road, which is what she would like to do post haste. Cause people are dropping like flies, witches are dropping like flies. So she's both, there's both theater involved here, but also like serious, like,

What the fuck, Billy? Like she can't tell him that he created the road for her own purposes, but like she needs him to figure out how to get them. And then she puts the shoes on and it's very like Dorothy Wizard of Oz. Click your heels. No place like home there. Bam.

Back in the morgue. A different morgue, but still. No place like the morgue. No place like the morgue. I mean, we literally get it. There's no place like home, quote, at the top of the scene. Wonderful stuff. The morgue setting, we were sort of trying to figure out, we saw in the trailers, and we're like, what's going to happen here? I don't think we had, like, Earth Trial on our menu for this, but the idea that it's like,

given that we now think about Rio as, as the green, which like death, this idea of like the morgue as a place of importance in the life cycle in the first place. Uh,

where Rio and Agatha met earlier, not met, but hung out together, where we rebirthed Agatha in episode one, where Billy belongs if death has her way about it, and then also this sort of very medicinal, sterile quality, the gleam of it has to make us think about the doctors that...

Without moral borders who paid Agatha to find Jen. Yeah. Yeah. And I like that just in general, you know, the crack in the, it feels like this totally contained like space and then the crack, which leads to soil and this idea that we'll hear actually spoken and it's very present here. We hear spoken elsewhere and it's present here, like from, you know, from death life. It felt like a very appropriate setting for, for all of those reasons. I also just got,

That's such a kick out of Agatha's saying. It certainly has the irritating sting of a witch's road trial. That was wonderful. And also, like, the grow lights, but no soil or water. Certainly has the irritating sting. Great stuff. Great stuff, Billie. Keep them coming. Keep the hits coming. Don't steal her struggle also really made me laugh, like, a lot. Really good.

Agatha grabs her cameo. Jen's like, the potion's bottle is empty. I don't need it. Billy throws his book, which looks ruined to him, back in the door. Later, he will pull it off the shelf. So they're in Agatha's basement. Yep. And so he has just basically put his book on a shelf inside of this Hex version. He'll grab it off the shelf later when he goes back there. Okay.

And then Jen in this like leadership role, right? I'm thinking, oh, about what? How to save your ass. I couldn't save Lilia. I didn't even try to save Alice. I'll be damned if I let you two idiots die. So this is like, you know, Jen on her, on her merry little way along her arc of going from living inside of the protection circle to trying to be all things protection, which and healing, which and divination, which and all of that.

Ready to turn Agatha over to the punishment immediately in episode five, et cetera. I really love this too, because it's yet another way to think about, even though Agatha had her secret intentions guiding her along the way,

When something like the you can be that witch again, they can take your power, Jen, but they can't take your knowledge moment happened in episode three. The impact of that, no matter what guided it on Agatha's part, was real. And even though the two of them together make a different sort of progress than the really emotionally rending bond that Lily and Jen eventually form...

They had an impact on each other. The coven has an, like, I needed you, my coven. When Lillia says that in episode seven, every character has, whether they embrace in full or not, the coven, a version of that, a version of what all of these, of the impact all of these people made on each other. And so like Agatha imparting that lesson to Jen, you cannot take, they can't take your knowledge. And then that manifesting here from Jen in a way that is meaningful for all of them was really cool.

We didn't talk to Jack about musicals because I am a hero and restrain myself. Not me. I was like, off-boner and senor scratchy. Well, I mean, I brought up Buffy, so I was at least partially myself, but...

My favorite song from Wicked, it's not the most famous song, my favorite song from Wicked is a song between Glinda and Elphaba, where they were friends and then their friendship sort of fractures and

they sing this like sad song at the parting of like about their friendships and it's, it's called for good. And it's just like, basically the refrain is because I knew you, because I knew you, I have been changed for good. Like, and so, you know, Jen and the, in the Glinda role and Agatha and the wicked, which is the elf of a role. Like I've been changed for good. Like, um,

And the constant play of the idea of good in that show is one thing, but just sort of like forever. I have been changed. And in Jen's case, like, Agatha is the one who, unbeknownst to Agatha, bound her in the first place, but Agatha is also the one who freed her. And so... And then Jen frees herself. And I really love this sequence. It made me think a lot of...

I thought the revelation that Agatha was the one that Bounder was a little clunky and a little rushed, but I thought that...

the way that Sashir plays this ritual, this unbinding, it's very, the craft, capital T, capital C, I bind you, Nancy, from doing harm against yourself and others. Like, all of that. And then just her emotion, her bent over and like clutching her chest and like,

sobbing with relief, with release. And this idea, this very Wizard of Oz idea, it was inside you all along. All of that sort of culminating in what happens for Jen here is tremendous stuff. Really love it. And I agree with you all around on the, I was like, oh, wait, huh? Oh, wow. But then the emotional impact of watching the unbinding ritual and I think

This is yet another moment. We get a lot of draining full covens stuff to still come, but this is yet another thing. And I think the one thing about the kind of casual nature of the reveal, the almost like offhand nature of the reveal, it does serve to almost further cement like the list is so long.

of the atrocities that Agatha Harkness has committed and the wrongs that she has inflicted on her fellow witches that it wouldn't have even occurred to her that she could have been involved in some way or a party to this horror. Among so many people. How could I possibly know it was you? And just like the taking their power. Also for us to have to think about the fact that she takes, took power from them in so many different forms and for different reasons. Like this is just a payday, right? It's like to keep people off her ass. Right.

All without concern for them and because it suits her. And so then when we saw the... First of all, the look on Agatha's face during the you hold nothing, you hold nothing, you hold nothing recitation really, once again, forcing her to confront a thing that she had done, that was very effective. And...

When she's watching and we're watching Jen clutch her chest and weep, what we're seeing there is a person restored and full. And that is a thing that Agatha took from her. And so even though the, yes, you had it there all along and you could have tapped it all along thing is true,

It's still on Agatha that for a hundred years, Jen felt that she was missing some part of who she was. And that's hideous. It's hideous. And again, the show is not interested in...

or excusing that from Agatha. I mean, the line, the flip line of like, I don't know, the patriarchy really shelled out the shush a lady. Incredible. Great, really funny. Love it. But like, it's very serious. And like, the you hold nothing reminded me, I've already mentioned the labyrinth a couple times when we talked about this, but there's this part at the end of the labyrinth where Sarah, as played by Jennifer Connelly, says,

says, through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back the child that you have stolen for my will is as strong as yours. And then she says, and she always like forgets this last part, and she goes, you have no power over me. And that destroys the villain. That's the thing. That's the spell. That's the thing that just like you have...

All along, this was all an illusion that you had power over me. You have no power over me. You hold nothing. You hold nothing. You hold nothing. Wonderful stuff. She gets her pink back.

I love that her color is pink. She crawls up from underground. This is the trailer shot that we had been sort of like, well, someone's underground in Westview and it's Jen. We got this email from Leroy that I really liked calling Jen a classic horror movie quote final girl.

They wrote Jen's trial and how she healed Billy after Alice's trial proved how intelligent or resourceful she is in her craft. She is unable to use magic until the very end. With Final Girls, this usually translates to virginity or avoiding sex. And she always made the smart decisions that we want people to make in horror movies. Leaving the trials first, staying inside the circle, being willing to sacrifice Agatha, basically putting her own safety and well-being ahead of the group. I didn't love that. I mean, I think that the message is actually, that's not the way, but

maybe she didn't kill the murderer, but she does get her own victory and taking her magic back. Jen is the hero of the story and she should be recognized for it. Something that Jack says. I think what's true is that Billy and Agatha, given that they are seemingly part of an ongoing MCU story, are mid some kind of arc.

But Jen completes her arc in this story. And that is the classic hero position. Like we start here, you end here and you have freed yourself, learn something grown, gained your power, all this sort of stuff like that. And that's not the story that we're getting with Agatha and Billy. We did get this, uh,

comment, email from our listener, John, who actually met the other day. He owns Mega Brain Comics in Red Hook in New York. So, which is a great comic book shop. I really recommend it. Bought some books there. Tremendous. But John wrote about sort of the depiction of Jen and just sort of lamenting

I think with a lot of these characters, we just did actually work just greedy for a little bit more time and a little bit more information. Jean wrote, my problem is that early on they tell us that Jen is a root worker and I really wish we at least got a flash of who she was back in her early days like we did with Lilia or even a tiny bit more backstory to offer some texture. This idea of like being a root worker and the specificity of that, this is me talking, the specificity of that

as a, as a backstory and wanting to engage in that specific branch of magic. Yeah. Give me a gen, give me a gen show. I would watch it or give me a, and give me a gen comic. I would read it. I mean, she's in the comics, but give me a, this gen comic. Yeah. Okay. Then she tells Billy, we're going to find Tommy, right? That's what we're going to do.

And he says, I don't know how I did it. And she says, you never do, right? You never know how you make these goddamn death traps we have to get out of, Billy. And yet you do. So here we go. And as much as I loved what happens with Jen, I also really loved this part. So we're going to hear it. This was great. Yeah. Almost in its entirety. Steve, will you play this? You keep it.

Even if you can't hear him, you don't have to open your eyes to know how close he is. Breathing together. You breathe for yourself. You breathe for him. You breathe for everything he is. You hold it all inside of you. But it can't stay there. The memories. The feelings. You can't keep them. Keep your eyes closed, no matter what. No.

You can't keep him. So where does he go? I don't know. Find him a place. It's black. There's nothing. He floats. He looks down. What does he see? He's afraid. Oh, but he has you with him now. I can't find a place. Ah, don't give me that. 120 bodies at the out every minute. Find one. Ah!

Underwater! There's a boy! It's a prank! They tricked him! He's gonna drown! It's a bad place! Oh, it usually is. The people, the family, there's no one to love him! He's got no one! He's a hackathop! Am I killing this boy so my brother can live? No, Billy. Sometimes, boys die. Ugh!

Tell me your takeaways from this. What stood out to you? Oh my God. I have so many. I thought this was beautiful. Me too.

This is one of the scenes of the season. So this connects to a little bit of what we were talking about earlier, just quickly before we like parse the, the, the exchange, just why she's doing this in the first place. Why do this at all? Why help to put Tommy's soul shard into a soon to be empty vessel? Is it to help ensure that they keep going through this road that Billy has forged and she can get to her eventual point of escape, get him to Rio, all of that, like all of that is in the brew. Um,

She doesn't have to do this part, though. She doesn't. Like, to actually give Tommy and help Billy give Tommy a new life, which is what she chooses to do. And so that feels extraordinarily important and meaningful. It's, first of all, because it's just specifically what Rio did not want, right? Yeah.

She's not just following that script of that bargain and that agreement, but also in terms of the emotional aspect of this and how it connects to the character's history and their trauma and their loss. She's giving Tommy life, which Nikki did not get, and she's giving Billy a family member, which she did not get. She is giving them something that she did not get, and that is, with a very flawed character who has done terrible things...

a level of empathy and understanding entwined with self-interest that makes the character work. It's the Agatha Harkness way. All of that. Just deciding to do this in the first place. And the way it comes with sarcastic barbs inside of it, you know what I mean? The like, you know, he has you now, right? Or, I don't give me that, 120 bodies empty out every minute. Like, what a horribly callous way to talk about life and death and all that it means. Yeah.

I really agree with you. It's just like, it's all the things at once. And that is who Agatha is. And that this to her in this moment feels like the right thing to do. That she doesn't have the power to do this...

But as is often Agatha's role in the comics, she has the power to teach someone how to do it. Yeah. She can't. It's another version of the Jen knowledge speech, right? Her tutelage and guidance. Yeah. I like that we start with this vision Wanda exchange, which actually didn't happen in front of Billy and Tommy. So this is just like more things that Billy has access to, right? But we've said goodbye before, so it stands to reason we'll say hello again. Yeah.

Vision Quest coming to Disney Plus in 2026? Something I do know, I've heard from someone, I mean, Paul Bettany gave an interview about this to THR over the weekend, but Vision Quest is starting filming in February, March next year in London, and they're filming it concurrently with the Avengers movies. So do you think we're going to get, is that a early 2026? Ooh. Or...

late 2025. Ooh, no idea. Early 26? I would say early 26. Yeah, that seems more likely, I think. Yeah. But who the fuck knows? I can't wait. Very exciting. Can't wait. Can we talk about Sherlock for a second? Or no, you want to stay on the Wanda, the Wanda lines that we heard? No, let's talk about Joe Locke, who's incredible. Dude, that's...

That last line, Agatha, am I killing this boy so my brother can live? Holy shit. Like the delivery, but also just the idea behind it. So we're talking about Joe Locke, but we're talking about the writing too. We then, we hear the clip, the agonizing note from Agatha at the end of the clip that we just listened to.

And so we know that that boy in that pool was going to die. It's not because of what Billy did here. But what feels so crucial is that Billy is a character who asks himself that question. Right? Like, that just feels massive. And I thought the delivery there, the anguish behind it, but also the terror. The terror that he could be capable of that was, like, so impactful. I like it, man. Yeah.

Absolute chills. Yeah. Yeah. And also like this was a, this was earlier, but this was another, like I thought a bit of gorgeous writing and the, the, the delivery, like it really hit me when he's describing the breathing, Tommy's breathing. And he says that feeling when your body knows it's safe, like, Oh my God, there's just something so evocative about that. I thought it was incredible, incredible, incredible.

I love it. It was Billy in life. It's like the counterweight to Rio and death, you know? I love that. It was, it was also just incredibly, it was beautiful and incredibly violent at the same time. We're watching a teenage boy die. There's also some comic lore in here about the way that Tommy is raised versus the way that Billy is raised in the comics. So this idea that like, you know, there's no one to love him.

he's got no one. Uh, so we're going to meet Tommy in a very different space than we meet Billy. So that's something to think about. And I think it was a brilliant way to do all this without having to cast Tommy, right? Like that could be anyone in those sneakers in the, in the water. So, you know, exactly. Um, I, I just thought all of this was incredible. Um,

I didn't include in the clip here, but the line, boys, thanks for choosing me to be your mom, which sort of opens a sequence. Sting's so close to Billy rejecting Wanda as his mother, right? I choose Rebecca Kaplan as my mom, actually. And then we got this email from Alex, which I thought was absolutely beautiful. Alex wrote, what an achingly beautiful idea.

That Billy loved his brother so deeply that he quite literally held his essence with him over these last few years of grief and separation. And thanks to his reality warping power, he can now take that essence and reincarnate it. For Billy, this makes literal the idea that when we lose the people we love, we carry them with us.

with us in our lives through our memories. It allows our love to figuratively keep them alive unless we are a reality warper, in which case it would allow us to literally keep them alive. From the people that brought you What Is Grief But Love Persevering, this is the ultimate manifestation of that theme. What a beautiful email and idea. And the other line that this made me think of

was in that final parting between Wanda and Vision when he asks like, what am I? And she says a number of different things, but the line that always sticks with me and it's one of my favorite lines from WandaVision is you are my sadness and my hope. And like, that's what, that's what Tommy is here for Billy, right? He says sadness and his hope. And like, that's like devastating, but also really lovely. Yeah.

Really good scene. What do you want to say about Agatha's trial here? She, you know, this idea again, that like the road isn't real, but the threat of death is. And like Jen's popped off the road, Billy's gone. And it's just her in this counting down clock.

The way the lock of hair pays off, the cameo pays off. The little fiber of the dandelion that we had seen them playing with in episode nine. Yeah, it pays forward. And then the fact that it was like her tears, right, that grow it here. Okay, so...

Agatha gets out and Rio is in full cackling Wicked Witch of the West mode on Agatha's roof. And I gotta say, this is not my favorite thing that happens. This confrontation, it does evoke a bit of the Wanda versus Agatha fight at the end of WandaVision, which we didn't necessarily love every second of. But it's also just like Rio as a character...

I think because we then don't wind up getting like more of her in the flashback, which I think a lot of people, including myself, sort of hoped or expected we might. This winds up feeling kind of flat villainously for her here versus the exchange we got on the road just mere moments ago inside of the same episode. What did you think of this? Yeah, I feel similarly. I think that actually having the...

residents of Westview look up at the sky and, you know, obviously they, like we are thinking of, okay, now it's a green sky. There's a red sky, but that, that direct, um, call back to the, here we go again, the sky between, uh, Agatha and Wanda was, uh, it was, was interesting to me. Um, so,

So I think like my favorite, I loved a lot of the Rio and Agatha moments across the series. A lot of them as we chronicled together at length over the season. But my favorite still is the end of episode four. And that specifically is why I put episode four like up in the top tier specifically for the scenes between them at the end. It wasn't the 70s wigs that put it over the top for you? The damn sash. The 70s.

The Shrieking Demon. I mean, honestly, it was all of it. And so, yeah, also that would have been my preference for more of the quiet, raw confrontation that is just...

absolutely saturated, not necessarily in the blood from the thousand cuts from the shards of glass, again, shards in many forms, but saturated in their regret, like saturated in the lament that they are so drawn to each other still, but also there's this real...

there's, there's when, when Agatha, when Rio says, realizes what spell Agatha is working with this, this analog magic that is taking place, expel this evil. You're calling me evil. I am the natural order of things, baby. And you love me. And then we, we build toward the, why don't you want me? So like, those are the moments inside of this that those hit. And, and I thought that the way, and this is what I said earlier was, well, I would save and hit here. Like,

Rio being so genuinely pained that Agatha despises her and resents her is so delicious to me. We can glean, you know, despite not seeing, not getting to see their pre-Nikki history, which I would love to see one day, that what originally drew Agatha to Rio, you know, her might, her power, her role in the natural order, her

would now be the exact thing that repels her. And how for Rio, that would seem really unfair. Like, because the thing that Agatha once revered about her only became a turnoff and a source of resentment when it impacted Agatha negatively. When it hurt every other person in the world who ever lost somebody, Agatha lusted after it. But it's when she's on the receiving end of it that she grows to resent it. And that feels to me that not that something...

between them, but that it didn't. That the thing that once drew you to somebody is actually the thing that you begin to like despise is so scenes from a marriage to me. Like I honestly just love this about their relationship. I love it. No, I mean, I love it too. And I love that you're calling me evil. I'm the natural order of things, baby. And you love me. And like Aubrey Plaza doing an incredible job with some of those lines. I just think it, it,

Side by side with her sitting on the roof, like literally cackling, just like really undercuts the beautiful ideas that you're putting forth here. You can, I think you can still have flying glass and flying sinks and all of that sort of stuff. And I like the very much like,

Wicked witch having a house dropped on her, like having parts of the house thrown at her is like, you know, works really well for me, but it's just like... Another really tough beat for Randy Boner's property value. Yeah. You need the sink. The sink is... And you need the weatherproofing on the windows. Um...

Sondheim Corner, I have to take us all to. Please, please, please. Agatha screams, because the road isn't real, but the promise of riches are potentially real. Jen got her power back. I Want My Prize is straight out of Assassins, a lesser known, lesser loved, but loved by real musical nerds. Tell me. Tell us. Oh, Assassins...

if you're like, Hey, you know, it'd be a good premise for a musical, a bunch of America's most notorious presidential assassins saying about their lives and woes and what got them there. Um, that's Jen, Jen, genuinely the plot of assassins. You've got like, I see. Uh,

Hinkley and Lee Harvey Oswald, blah, blah, blah. But anyway, they're talking another national anthem. I mean, because what would cause someone to assassinate the president of the United States is like profound dissatisfaction with the American dream or the promise of America. So this idea of like, I want my prize, like another national anthem. That song is about sort of like being duped by the promise of America. I want my prize. I want what I was promised to me, which was, you know,

picket fence, the whole thing. So anyway, I think that's why she's shrieking, I want my prize there, but it could be anything at all. But how do you square you can't kill me, it's not allowed? I think this is a question mark we have. You can't kill me, it's not allowed is what Agatha says to Rio at the beginning. And then how do we square that with the kitchen sink maneuver and all that sort of stuff where Rio is directly trying to kill Agatha? Yeah.

thought my pals who I was watching it with had was like, you can't kill me with magic, but you can kill me with a physical object, but

but using magic to, I don't know. It all seems a little, but in episode one, she's holding the knife to her throat and like, doesn't slit her throat with it. She just draws some blood. You can't with a weapon in your hand, kill me. But if a kitchen sink, you said flying through the air happens to kill me. Maybe she just thinks it's going to badly concuss and injure her. I mean, we do get a, I have not seen the Saw movies, but as I understand, people are having like their Achilles snapped left and right. And there we go. Like an Achilles tendon slash. That's got pretty violent. Um,

So there are definitely some unanswered questions after the finale. I think that why exactly couldn't, why exactly did Agatha say, you can't kill me, like, is an open question still. Yeah. What is the magical contract that in

that was true. Also like the dark hold, right? Because we have, yeah, these were on our list. Ask Jack. She just gave like the incredible long answers that we didn't get to ask about the dark hold or the timing of when the dark, when exactly. Yeah. But we did ask about senior scratchy. So don't worry. We had our priorities in order. Yeah. But yeah. So I think maybe we could still get the answer to some of these things in time.

In the Death by a Thousand Cuts moment, when she gets the shards, mini shards, the sharditos all over her face, it was giving real Sam Neill an event horizon. And I told you very specifically not to Google that when I put it in the doc. And I believe you have it. So, yeah. Nor will I be. Here comes Wiccan. Yes. I liked this scene.

Better than most costume reveals I've ever seen in a Marvel show. Or maybe even a Marvel movie. Certainly better than the Hawkeye reveals. Kamala Khan is a little different. I liked it better than Wanda's costume. I just thought this was sick. Thought this was incredibly sick. And Joe Locke, for all of his virtues throughout this whole thing, also has good personality.

Good hoverfly form, I thought. Yeah. I liked on the Wanda front, I liked the parallel that, you know, they both conjure their fits in these key moments with Agatha and then kind of like hover and float down. One to save. Yeah. Exactly. Has bested Agatha in that moment and Billy is there to try to help. Okay.

Okay. So here's what, so I've been tracking obsessively refreshing Daniel Sellens, uh, Instagram, the costume designer on the show as of like last night when I wrote these notes or maybe like midday yesterday, he hadn't put anything up about Billy's fit, but I knew he would. So I just kept checking it. And then like, eventually it did go up. Um,

so if you, if you drill down on the design of the costume here, he says, uh, in our design of Wiccan's heroic look, we pulled important elements from existing comic art. The galaxy print on the side of his pants starts as the white doodles on Billy's jeans and becomes a luminescent scattershot of stars. When he's fully powered up, we,

We embedded the runes that were used in the WandaVision battle into a laser cut trim, vertically framing him, protecting him. The texture of leather on his chest is intricately printed with concentric waves that reverberate around the symbols that were embroidered on Billy's sweater. Wanda's crown, the mind stone, pentacle, moon phase, to name a few.

Wiccan's powers are often seen in circular rings. So we built on that concept by looking at the way Damascus steel looks like magic ripples on a pond and brought that shape language into the crown sculpted so beautiful by Daryl Maloney. And then this is the part that like genuinely made me cry. Uh,

Making sure we accomplish blah, blah, blah. To organize the design and tell his story of self-actualization. One of my favorite subtle tricks we used was slowly introducing the crimson color into Billy's hoodie. Pause. We had tracked this a little bit that his navy hoodie was slowly turning maroon back to Daniel. Quote, the chaos magic in his blood literally transforms his sweatshirt into Wiccan's cape. I wanted to represent his origins and his cape. So we dimensionally printed the texture of,

of the Scarlet Witch's costume from Doctor Strange on the outside and printed Vision's iconically graphic cape on the underside so that his parents would always be with him. It is important to honor and keep our ancestors close. I hope I get to continue to follow Wiccan on his journey through the MCU. And elsewhere, I really recommend, I mean, this is beautiful and like you don't really get a lot of

good looks at the inside of Billy's cape, but you can see it on this Instagram post. It's very cool. Daniel also, I really recommend going and looking at this post on Daniel's Instagram because he also just talks about like as a queer creator, what the character of Wicked means to him. And I just thought, I thought it was really beautiful. So just like,

all the effort that they put into all the looks this season. And just to like, I love inside of the, it reminds me, you know, this, all of this reminds me so much of Sansa Stark's coronation gown at the end of Game of Thrones and the way that that dress carried bits of Ned and bits of Catelyn and bits of this and bits of that. Just the opportunity that a costume designer can have to put so much story inside of

I love that. Incredible. All right. Tell me about this power exchange between Billy and Agatha here. So earlier, we have a moment where Billy is repeatedly calling Agatha a liar. Right. And so, I mean, and that's happened many times previously, but inside of this episode, he's a liar, a liar. And he says it was such venom. And so for him to- Like, last dance venom or-

Oh, man. For him to hover down. Yeah. And we get the you look good, you don't, and then a beat, and don't take it all. We get trust. We get a few things, right? We get...

Something that really struck me about this entire thing was this idea, because we talked a lot about how devastating it was in episode five when Billy said, don't touch her. She was protecting you, but you don't deserve it. The idea of like, who deserves what? And do you deserve to be protected? Do you deserve to be saved? Do you deserve to have other people put their faith in you specifically? And so like for Billy to do that here without knowing anything,

for sure what would happen. That's what a leap of faith is, right? That's why they call it a leap of faith to get into Spider-Verse. That was really... That was powerful. That was impactful. And...

I think one of the cool things about this is probably if you polled every Agatha All Along viewer, everyone would have a slightly different answer about what they expected to happen. Like, that's how you know you've told a story well, that the outcome can hold up and feel believable, but also you could have believed other outcomes too. And I felt, like, sure that Agatha would cut off the exchange before it was too late, but still, we see, you know, we've got this, like...

He's being drained, right? We're the fluid. We're getting like the like desiccated flesh kind of look. And then she's just like on the rise. Like so. And like the bizarre angle at which she like kind of comes up off the ground. Yeah. It feels so good. And so the fact that she decides not to take it all to her,

protect him to be the... I think that the... Again, I'm calling it the finale. Episode 8 opens with a conversation between Rio and Alice about the idea of protection very purposefully. And it comes in many different forms in this episode, and this is one of them. We get a little bit more information from Jack and sort of like what's going on in this power exchange here. Tune in to the conversation. Okay. Our listener Michael also sent this incredible email where Michael pointed out in this battle with death,

Quote, Agatha first does a circle of protection, Alice, then uses the hit the deck prediction, Lilia, then tries to heal herself with a water potion, Jen. She needed her coven. I love that. That's just an incredible observation and a beautiful, a beautiful stroke in the episode. Were you struck by the kind of almost like faceless man-esque nature of Rio's agreement with them? Like it can be either of you. She's basically like, I need a name.

I need to balance the scales. But like, again, I have questions about death's abilities to see because... Okay, the balance of the equation was already off with a plus one of Billy, right? So she's like, take Agatha for Billy. Okay. But now we've added Tommy. Tommy is also here. So the scales are still off. So I would just say, if this is an ongoing story, I would say if I were...

projects at Marvel, I would keep Aubrey Plaza's number handy. So we've got some reaping to try to do for sure. Oh,

You're not bad. Neither are you. You're the only one who thinks so. And the tickling of the chin, which is a callback, of course, to a more sinister moment where she did that. I loved this. I think that... What's your interpretation of this? What's your interpretation of everything that happens in the next few moments here? Okay. I mean, Jack took us through it a bit, but the first time I watched it, I was a bit... I would say the first three times I watched it, I was a bit confused as to when she decides...

to sacrifice herself. And again, I'll let sort of Jack answer that. But I had sort of made up my mind that even though she softened here, she's still, this is still part of her con that like, it's true to your point. And Jack talks about this too. There's truth inside the con. Right. So she's like, she, it does matter to him.

You're not bad. Neither are you. You're the only one who thinks so. Like that really matters to her. Yeah. But I don't think it changes her mind fully. And what changes her mind is what happens.

telepathically in a second, which I, you know, and Jack will talk about why all this felt a little muddy to me. And I think Jack agrees. And so I don't feel guilty saying it, you know what I mean? There's like some decisions that they made in terms of how to execute it that made it the whole exchange wind up feeling a bit like, um, abrupt to me, but the abrupt is part of the intentionality too. So what do you think?

Yeah, so I think in this first part of this, the, it should be me. Yeah. No, it should be me. And then the way that she says it should be me and the way that she reaches out and touches him there ahead of the you're not bad part. I think that, like, this being part of the con. Mm-hmm.

But also sticking with that season-long logic of reading the face and the emotion, that seemed... I thought it should be me seemed sincere, and I was almost aware of how I was... Maybe giving Agatha too much credit in a way, but I think she does know and feel that it should be her. She definitely believes that she does not want it to be him. That feels clear to me. But it's almost like she's then...

When he makes the offer, in turn, she's like, it felt to me like she was pulled back into her own duplicity. Almost like reflex. It reminded me so much of the way that she began to claw at Alice's power as soon as it was in front of her. It's like once you have a chance, you can say I can be good, but once you have a chance to be bad again, that's the choice that you're used to making. So that part of it was interesting to me. I think that's all right now.

And I'm always thinking about hot Sauron. You have to choose again tomorrow. Oh, man. I'm always thinking about hot Sauron, as you know. This is my penultimate musical reference of the entire season of coverage here. This I promise you. Which is we're back into the woods territory. There's this part from Last Midnight, which is the Witch's Swan song in that show.

that I keep returning to because it's so like, do you silly perfect for Agatha? But the part that comes right before it

is in that moment in the play, Agatha is trying to give over a boy, Jack of Beanstalk fame, to a giant who's sort of rampaging the kingdom. And she's like, give me the boy, right? Like it doesn't, oh, this lyric, I really know. Of course, what really matters is the blame, someone to blame. Fine, if that's the thing you enjoy, placing the blame. If that's the aim, give me the blame. Just give me the boy. Like, I don't, make me the villain. That's fine. But I'm going to do the thing,

I'm going to pansy Parkinson this shit. I'm going to do the thing. Then he's be done. Take the boy. He's right here. Take him. And the other characters in the play protect him, right? Because they're just like, you know, hmm.

But ultimately, if they just gave the giant jack in the beginning, probably more people, definitely more people would have survived act two of Into the Woods. But we don't trade lives. I don't know if you've ever heard that before. And and so I love this, like, you know, give me the boy like is is what's on the table here at the end of all things for Agatha. Yeah.

And then Billy does his telepathy moment, right? Breaks through into Agatha's brain. Agatha, who has since WandaVision been sort of an inaccessible mind for him. So there's this notion of him like leveling up in power. And then she, she kiss of death. Le petit mort, I guess, between Agatha and Rhea. So, yes. Yeah.

Is this how Nikki died? So no, it's not, as we'll see in the next episode. But the specific nature of Nikki's death and how similar or dissimilar it is from what is unfolding here with Billy is not ultimately relevant. What's relevant to Agatha in the moment of this choice is that it pulls her back into that loss and that regret, and she has the opportunity here to do something different. I mean...

On the one hand, that doesn't really... I mean, I like it as like a remember Nikki, remember how you feel kind of maternally towards me, something like that. I just don't think that the choice she makes here is different, really, from any choice she made around Nikki. Yeah.

Because if the choice around Nikki was more overtly connected to, like, to drain or not to drain other witches or something like that, which is not really the argument that episode nine makes. Mm-hmm.

I don't feel it as quite a flip of that, but I don't mind it as a remember your son, remember how you think of me in the same bucket as your son sort of thing. Exactly. You have the chance to make sure I don't die right now the way he died. Yeah. Totally. The kiss.

The pulling of that magic, we can see the black veins creeping across her flesh and the swirl of black around her. Gorgeous. That's what happens. Is that what happens when you kiss Happy Plaza? Worth it. Worth it? As they say on Billions, worth it, Bo!

You mentioned how we start the episode with this sort of like camera tilting around Alice's body. This shot of Agatha falling. Agatha making us maybe think of Lillia a bit as she falls. And as she falls backwards in the frame, revealing Rio standing there. Rio looking shell-shocked and devastated over this. And it's real...

Is a baffling character in her own right because she is, on the one hand, actively trying to kill Agatha a few times. And on the other hand, is devastated to watch her die. Right? Like, all of those things are permission! Your mom!

I always think we've been talking a lot about the Wicked Witch of the West throughout all this, but shout out her sister, the Wicked Witch of the East, as Agatha shrivels up and turns into flowers and mushrooms. Made me think of the Wicked Witch of the East's little feetsies shrimping up and receding under the house. Mm-hmm.

We had a lot of emails from people who are upset about how things panned out with Agatha and Rio. And I think specifically queer people excited to get a queer love story. It was perhaps a little bit... I don't know if triggering is the word I want to use, but I don't think this quite falls into the barrier gaze bucket trope, but that idea of...

for a long time in storytelling, this idea that, and still happens, um, that a queer couple, as soon as they're find each other and are happy together, one of them dies. That would happen again and again and again in film and television and fiction, um, across the board. So to watch these two women finally kiss and for have to have one of them then die, I think pinged for a lot of people in a way that I understand. Um,

Our listener Kaylee wrote, as a queer woman, it was just yet again another disappointment after feeling so indescribably high on the beginning of the season. I just am feeling a bit deceived that this woman-centric story is to serve as a launchpad for a male character. Also, maybe I'm just gay and in my feels, and this is what happens when your ex is actually dead and wants you dead, but I do not like it. Yeah.

So on the one hand, there's that. And again, we got a ton of emails expressing the status satisfaction. I heard it from people in my day-to-day life as well. And I don't want to ever tell people to ask for less. Always ask for more, especially I think when it comes to representation, like ask for more. I'm not telling anyone to ask for less. I think it would be a shame for that reaction to completely obliterate

the fact that Agatha all along is by far the queerest story we have gotten from Marvel. Like, in a way where we, who have been tracking Marvel's unwillingness to engage in queer stories, were shocked by how much Agatha all along, like, I don't even want to say got away with, but, like... Our listener Adriana wrote and said...

Even though the show's handling in one of its big queer relationships disappointed me, Agatha herself is one of the best queer characters I've encountered in film or television in a very long time. I love how complicated she is, that she gets to be a fully dimensional person, flawed and messy and often pretty damn vile, and also deeply tragic and damaged. She'll thrill in taking a life, but is also someone capable of empathy, mercy, and a willingness to help others come into their full potential and embrace their authentic selves. Plus, she's funny as hell and is incapable of not serving looks, even in death.

I love her and it's still fairly rare for a queer character in a big IP project to be this deliciously complex. And I never in a million years thought we'd see a character like her in the MCU, let alone as a protagonist in her own show. I'm so happy Agatha all along turned out to be such a success. Hopefully it leads to more risk taking in the MCU, both creatively and in terms of approach to representation. So I think all of that is true. And I really understand the point of view of the people who are

disappointed or wanted something else from this relationship or these characters. And we did ask Jack about it. And Jack, I think, addressed it in good faith and at length. So you can hear all of that. But I just thought it was worth also mentioning here. Anything else? Anything you want to say on that front, Molly Rubin? I'm grateful for our listeners who are always very eloquent in all things. Always grateful to the bad babies for...

sharing so many of their thoughts and how they relate to the stories. So Rio in death skull mode with like the most enormous fake eyelashes I've ever seen in my life to preserve her femininity even in her skull mode tells Billy he can go and he walks back through the townsfolk and in costume get into his car and drives off. And it was like really funny to watch him in his cape open the car door and drive off. Incredible. I thought that was great. Good look for that Subaru. Subaru. All right. So

The Kaplans do not get that sort of like catharsis that you were sort of hoping for. If I were them, I would have a larger reaction to Billy being gone for 24 hours and coming back covered in cuts and bruises. But Jeff and Rebecca have their own lives. They're, they're, you know, they're not helicopter parents. Concerned, but very relieved that he was very relieved that he was home. Yeah. Yeah.

And then we get this, the Kaiser Soze moment, which is what I said in my notes before Jack said the exact same thing in the interview. So I'm not stealing from her. Um,

And they're putting it all together. How did this revelation, even though we talked about this a couple weeks ago, this idea that Billy is the one who created the road, how did the... What we talked about in all of these theories, knowing who Billy is in the first place, knowing that Rio was actually death before that reveal, how did this execution of the reveal work for you? Yeah, I really liked this. I thought that the...

the stitching in of prior moments in pairing with certain objects. In the room, we're seeing the posters, Lorna Wu and Oz and the Yellow Brick Road model and the Oz figurines and the trees and the leaves and the beach painting and the Ouija board and all of the things that then appear on the road and he's piecing into the shoes. And we're pairing that with the various...

lines. It's exactly how I pictured it. It suits you. You know, the wink after you didn't think who had what in them. On and on and on, right? You're the magician. This is the house right off your vision board. So it...

I thought was impactful for both us as viewers and for Billy as a character to confront the truth of what had unfolded. And I love the... I do like... Because we talked about when we were discussing the theory a couple weeks ago, would it feel strange perhaps if the show structurally was that similar to WandaVision?

And what we said at the time was like, it's going to be in the execution, right? Because if it's executed well, which I think it was ultimately, then...

it doesn't feel like a repetition. It feels like a parallel that is there specifically to heighten the things that the characters share or the things that they share, but then the moments where they're able to do different things and make different choices about their lives. So I thought this idea of like magic on autopilot for both mother and son, Agatha is the only person, including the participant, the generator of that magic who is able to clock that. I mean, I guess Rio, as we said earlier is aware as well. Um,

And then what the layering of those reveals unlock and what it forces Billy in this final stretch to have to contend with about the things that happened in a reality he...

unearthed was great. I thought it worked as a compelling way to stick with the, like, we love a pop culture reference and here it is. It feels like the kind of thing that, like, many of the people watching the show would want to be able to do. It feels the kind of thing we would want to be able to do. You watch these stories, you read these books, you love them, and you want to, like,

find ways to incorporate the strands of DNA and the stories that meant a lot to you into the thing you make, but you do it in a way that feels specific to your universe and then becomes a bit of connective tissue, like between the characters who inhabit a similar space. So I was a fan. Yeah. How about you?

yeah big fan i was a big i was a big fan of this also just great yeah just great to be right you know i'm so often wrong that it does feel nice to be right sometimes uh and especially when they picked clips that were like exactly matched a lot of the clips we played on that episode here's the main thing about theory crafting and being right and being wrong and holding things loosely and all this sort of stuff like that the only time i get like sort of

feel that like vindicated thing is when people call me dumb for having a theory in the first place which they did with this one so i was not dumb that's all but i was wrong about some other things and we'll talk about that in a second um and then we get the boo and then and then we're uh off to the races for the next episode so we will yeah our little epilogue here we'll dive into that

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of the year. Jake El Gallo Paul will go toe-to-toe in the ring against Mike Tyson, the baddest man on the planet, really since I've been a teenager. This is the fight the world has been waiting for. Watch Paul versus Tyson, Friday, November 15th, 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific, live on Netflix. Yeah. All right. So I like that you called it an epilogue. I think there are ways in which this almost feels like a...

especially everything that happens after the flashback feels almost like a post-credits to a certain degree. But we, we watch a very pregnant Agatha giving birth. We got this email from Callie that I really liked this idea that like,

when Agatha earlier said to Jen that the work that she, she left Jen alone because the work she was doing was so important was maybe fueled by, um, I mean, she didn't leave Jen alone, but she thought she was leaving Jen alone. Um, because Jen's work in midwifery was so important because we watch Agatha alone with only half a lemon and some tree bark, uh, to lean against, uh, in the traumatic, uh, birthing of Nikki here. Yeah. So, um,

First of all, I have a few things to say, one of which is to ask you if Kristen Cole was on your mind once Lemons turned story. Maybe that's a good thing. No? Ask Chris Ryan if he was thinking about Kristen Cole. I will. I'll text him. Okay.

Long, long, long flashback to open the finale. We had speculated about whether we might, again, similar to WandaVision, kind of travel through Agatha's memories with her. Ultimately, I think this feels like a more appropriate choice because the difference is Wanda needed to confront those memories actively. Mm-hmm.

Agatha thinks about this all the time. It is the guiding truth of her life. And so the people who needed to see it were the people watching at home. So that felt right. And then we should just note too that in terms of the timing, we get the 1750 time mark here. When we saw Agatha suck the magic and the life out of her horror of a mother, Evanora, and the rest of her coven, that was 1693 in Salem. So...

Nikki's birth is after what happened in Salem and what happened with the coven. It matters a lot to me that Mallory figured that out by

BBY-esque date, and I figured it out by looking at digital DH-ing. And that feels very on brand for both of us. Okay, yes, go ahead. I quite agree. I think so that timeframe feels that's just, that's there. We know that. I think if we wanted to very quickly just, because we don't actually have an opportunity to talk about the dark hole in the finale, we can very quickly, while we're talking about timeframe, just say our assumption is that

The dark... Agatha does not have the Darkhold yet. And I think this is just, like, worth very quickly hitting because when we... Since we brought up that Salem flashback from WandaVision, one of the things that Evanora says there is, um...

That... Stole knowledge. You stole knowledge above your agent station. You practiced the darkest of magic. And so we wondered, was that like a reference to the Darkhold? But then what we learned from, obviously, Rio, right, is like, how long has it been, Agatha? Not sure. Since you acquired the Darkhold, hid behind all that magic, but then you lost it and now touch your vulnerable. So we...

are assuming that she does not have it in the 1750s stretch because otherwise Rio would not have found her that that maybe came later. We don't know for sure though. We don't actually, we do not get the answer to this. And also theoretically, she would have like, blackened fingers or whatever from using the dark gold. She would have used it somehow. Yes. I think, again, uh,

this is going to be up to Paddington fan 69 to write this, but like if I were Agatha and I lost my six year old son and I was devastated about that's maybe when I would go looking for the dark hold, but like, that would be what, I mean, like that's what Wanda did. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Um,

Rio, we should say, we see many, many different looks on her, even over the course of these two episodes. But I really liked this when she appears to Agatha here and then to Nikki later. She's wearing this like light green, sort of springy, sort of innocent maiden kind of version of the Death Cloak. She's wearing the Eagles throwback Kelly Green uniform. It's like important to mix up the colorways. And we got that from Rio here.

Right? That's what you were thinking too? That's the exact reference I was going to make. I'm going to send you a picture of the regular Eagles uniform and the Kelly green throwback, and you're going to say, exactly. Yes. And I'm also going to text Chris about that. I wonder if it's meant to denote like this was a more, I don't know, innocent version of death, like before she had her heart broken and she went through her goth phase. I don't know. I have a heart that's black and it beats for you. Yeah. Yeah.

The baby's born, you know, real promises are only time doesn't say how much the baby is born. Agatha says, I spoke no spell. I said no incantation. You, you were made from scratch. Yeah. Nicholas scratch, I guess that's like a way to give him his name. But like, I guess that means she had sex with a dude would be my guess of what that is saying there. And we have no information about Nicholas's paternity. Um,

I think that's an interesting... It's something to itch at my brain, but fundamentally not key, but it's sort of like, why... Was it something that Agatha was planning? Did she want to have a kid? Like, is that something she wanted to do? How open is her relationship with death? Like, you know, all these sort of questions. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if we'll find out at some point, but I thought the...

Rio appearing, you know, something is obviously wrong, right? Agatha is in pain. Something is wrong. And that you do this and I will hate you forever. And then of course that makes us think of episode one. Like, do you even remember why you hate me? And that this moment, like of saying my love, but the begging, the please, please, please. And the pained way that Rio says I can offer only time. How, how much time, how much, how,

And she doesn't get the answer. And so again, like every day then is spent wondering whether it will be the last cherishing the time she has, but also waiting for it to end. Like it's, it's a gift and a torment all at once. We have this moment when she enters a protective circle of stones, as we alluded to earlier. And, and you know,

sucks a bunch of witches dry of their power. It's tough. It's very vampire coded because she has to be invited in first before she's able to go in and then she does all of that. They're playing Greensleeves there and like I don't know if I'm reading too much into this. A friend of mine told me I might be but like I was wondering if so Greensleeves is the first example that I remember of understanding the way in which folk songs are

transmutated over different cultures. So like Greensleeves is a song that exists, but there's also the Christmas song, What Child Is This, which is to the same tune.

and so this idea of taking tunes and putting different words to them and changing the meaning or the setting or the fact that like ice cream vans play green sleeves. It's just sort of like the way in which these like sticky melodies, uh, you know, can show up, uh, you know, or like across different languages. Um,

I was just watching an interview the other day where David Bowie was talking about how he was the first songwriter who was asked to translate the song that eventually became, I did it my way, the Frank Sinatra standard, was originally, I think, either a French or Italian song. And Bowie did a version of it and they didn't like it. So they got another, I think it's like Paul Anka or someone, they got someone else to do it. So you get the Frank Sinatra standard. But Bowie was so pissed that he took

the tune of my way and essentially made life on Mars, which is essentially the tune of my way. And he was just like, that's how he decided to do it. So just like the way in which music is sort of mutable in that way. Um, I, I really liked six years later.

Yes. Agatha and Nikki have perfected their con. We see Nikki and Agatha use the same shoplifting gambit that she did with Teen in order to snag Alice. That's like the little bell, too, that she's using, right? The one you're getting me for the holidays? I'll be making it for you by hand. You're taking metallurgy? Metalworking? I am. As of this moment, I've decided...

Okay, Nikki. I love a craft. I love this. Nikki wants out of the wandering con life, he wants a coven. And we know why Agatha wouldn't want a coven and wouldn't trust a coven, right? Why do you kill witches to survive? Could we not stay with the witches and survive with them? No. Why? Because then they will try to kill us. Why? If you want to survive, get used to this feeling. If you want to survive, get used to this feeling.

It's something we hear Agatha say inside of this sort of like same episode to Billy. We also heard her say a version of it to him before. I also really like the why, why, why repetition, which is just very, if you've had a small child, like, you know that this is how they talk to you often. Why, but why, but why, but why? Yeah, I really liked it. So when Nikki was a baby, like he was, he was,

And Agatha says, oh, I know you're not feeling well. And so we understand that right away he's like sickly, right? And after the first, the vampiric killing inside of the welcome mat, she says like, oh, you like that? Hmm. Like he's like happy then and sucking his thumb, right? And I think we're going to be very good at it. So that applied to me at least that

The power-up fueled him, too. And so that was interesting for me to think about. Is she doing this because she actually thinks it's keeping him healthier and keeping him alive in addition? But obviously that's not in the mix when... Was this also on our list, Jack? It was. And did we? No. But the other popular theory going around is that she was stacking up all these bodies to distract Ryo.

from like Rio has to reap all these dead witches uh similar to like the road when Rio's like you distracted me with these other witches from Billy is Agatha distracting Rio from Nikki by killing all of these witches Jack I think Jack kind of half answered this for us in her answer about like how the power suck works so that's sort of where I found my

satisfaction in all of this. But yeah, the infant Nikki scene is interesting to think about. Yeah. Yeah. And like, I think in general with what you were noting about the...

the note about survival and how that will be a part of what Agatha says to Billy and obviously also was previously something she said to Billy but in a different way. You know, don't you dare feel guilty about your talent back in episode six. So, of course, when she's saying because then they will try to kill us here to Nikki and we know that that's true because of what happened to her and the horror that she suffered and like...

how, again, this is one of the fascinating, compelling things about Agatha Harkness as a figure is, like, that was horrible. You know, we hear her mother in episode five of this show say, like, you were evil. I should have killed you before you left my womb. You were evil from the start. And, like, what her coven tried to do was

pin her and kill her. That was what they tried to do to her. Does that justify every atrocity that she then inflicted on other people? Of course not. And so it's like the fact that when she said in episode six to Billy, like, so you broke the rules, big deal. That's what kept you alive. That's what makes you special. That's what makes you a witch. There was this kind of like pep rally, like let's fucking go aspect to that for us, but also like a little...

A little pull of weight. This is how she justifies...

the horrors that she commits to herself. And I think here we see that unambiguously, right? Like when she says this to Nikki, like the things that she's doing are not forgivable and not excusable, but she's surviving and she's ensuring she thinks that he can survive, at least for a little longer, trying to convince herself that that's true. And so she'll do anything. And no matter what, and no matter how many people it hurts, she's going to get to the end of it and pet his head at night and sing a song with him and say, we survived. And there's something...

enduringly Loki about this when I think about Agatha and I totally yeah our listener John tweeted at me yesterday and he said considering how Sondheim I lied one more Sondheim mentioned considering how Sondheim coded this show and especially these last two episodes was he was talking about I want my prize being an assassin's reference but he says especially now since the show itself is not an anti-hero show

but a story of the human pain that creates a villain like assassins. So thinking about that, this is not a show that's making excuses for what Agatha has done. And that's part of why like this question of like, how do we feel about Agatha and all these other women sacrificing themselves for a male character and launching him into the MCU? I'm like, on the one hand, you know, Agatha is going to talk about that in a second, but like on the one hand, sure. On the other hand, Agatha Harkness,

someone who was owed a reckoning you know and so like this is not a case of like a Lilia is different but an Agatha Harkness you know she's got her ledger is drenched with red you know what I mean it's just like an end she's not necessarily sorry at all and that's interesting to me

Then we get a bunch of musical theory. We're going to talk about this. Nikki begins composing the ballad of the windy road. I really like this. I versus we exchange between this covenant of two as they're modifying the lyrics. Um, I'll be there at the end. Very Lorna, uh, and Alice. Um, but of course, Agatha's with Nikki when his life ends and Nikki will be waiting for Agatha when she finishes her ghost era. Whenever Catherine Haun is decided, she no longer wants to be Agatha Harkness, I guess. Um, yeah,

I was, it's, when Nikki asked why Agatha can't make him food. Yeah. Were you thinking about Gam's love, Transfiguration? I was. I was delighted to see that in the notes, yeah. Of course I was. But I just got this pain in my heart when he tells her to use her purple because, of course, that's what she calls her power in episode one and it's just, like, so sweet. This kid was great, by the way, and I thought Catherine's, like, chemistry with him was so good. But let's listen to this clip where she talks about her power set.

I can cast illusions. I can control a feeble mind. I can move objects using my will, but I cannot heal you. I cannot protect you from what's coming and I cannot divine once she will return. When who will return? Devastating. I can't heal you. I cannot protect you. I cannot divine. He'll protect divine the aspects of the coven that she seeks out. Um,

We'll try to speed through this journey to musical theory quarter. We got some in-depth emails. One was commissioned by me, so I feel guilty. So a friend of the pod, Taylor Cole, shout out Taylor, who wins a lot of trivia games I play with, wrote in about the meter, the difference between the Ballad of the Windy Road versus the Ballad of the Witchy Road. And this idea that...

There's something called simple meter versus compound meter. And when Nikki sings the ballad, the ballad of the windy road, he's singing it in compound meter, which is just basically like a more, a trickier can be more subdivided kind of a meter to use in music versus simple meter, which is always divided. I believe always divided by two. So Agatha is whenever, when they're doing back and forth, when Nikki's still alive and they're sort of like co-writing the song,

Agatha will write it in simple meter and he will answer in compound meter. And Taylor's interpretation of that is that Agatha wants the simple coven of two and that Nikki wants a more sort of like complicated, filled with other beats and other people, larger coven. And eventually the verse that Agatha eventually wrangles it into is,

is in Simple Meter, is that Covenant 2. I sent that whole email to friend of the pod, Jenny Owen Youngs, who I love. And I was like, and who is a musician? And I was like, Jenny, do you agree with what Taylor is saying here about Meter? And she was like,

Meter, sure. She was like, I love that interpretation. She was like, I think the meter has more to do with trying to evoke something old-timey. The compound meter sounds more sea shanty-esque. And maybe that's sort of what they were going for. But then she says...

She says, the compound meter along with the arrangement gives a distinct feel that might call to mind sea shanties or other music that cues our brains to think, quote, days of yore. Jenny wrote, personally, I was more struck by the harmonic variation from Agatha's version or chronologically speaking, sorry, Lilia, the departure of Agatha's version from Nikki's. Whether a chord is major or minor is determined by a third. This is a lot.

I'm going to skip through. Please accept my apology, Jenny. But she says, Nikki's versus accompaniment is a violin, which has four strings and which in this arrangement, I think is mostly playing two strings at a time. It isn't dictating whether the chords are major or minor much of the time.

But I think largely due to how it is sung, his rendition hits my ears leaning very major in stark contrast to Agatha's, if I'm hearing it right. That means that in its original form, this song was more lighthearted and joyful, which makes a lot of sense for a walking song composed on the fly by a happy child having the time of his life journeying through the countryside with his mother who he adores.

Then in the wake of her loss, wracked with unfathomable grief, Agatha alters the song to take on a minor modality, evening out the phrasing and meter, taking the jauntiness out of the equation, helps the song double down on its newfound somberness. Hearing it this way retroactively altered my experience of the ballad each time it was performed earlier in the series. One wonders how much her graveside eulogy is on her mind as she sings the song in subsequent moments throughout time. But if I may...

I would like to offer one slender ray of light to this pitch black void. Music is its own kind of magic. Every time Agatha leads a new circle of witches in singing the ballads of witches road, a part of Nikki is alive in her again, which I thought was really beautiful.

I love that. Thank you, Taylor. And thank you to Nikki. And last but not least, we got an email from David who wrote in about an old interview that Kristen Anderson Lopez, the co-composer of the ballad, gave when she and her husband wrote Coco, which has the ballad Remember Me. So we were talking a lot about the lullaby that the...

Anna and Ilsa's mom sings to them in Frozen 2 and the way that that's used as like a map and all this other stuff. But Remember Me is sort of a similar like key to unlocking something. And Kristen says the sort of inspiration for making it was when they would travel, they would teach their like nannies and babysitters certain lullabies that their kids would always hear like the same lullabies even if their parents were gone. And I just think that that is like extremely...

Beautiful. And so David wrote, certainly songs having more than one meaning for the writer and being perceived differently isn't new or unique idea, but I loved Coco, this interview that Kristen gave in your podcast and Agatha. So I thought you might enjoy this. So yeah, thank you to all the musical theory information from folks. I really appreciate it. I loved this. I loved watching the origin of this. I love knowing that this was like Nikki's song.

that becomes this other darker thing for Agatha to use as bait. Before we get to the montage of the con, the contage, Nikki tries to quit the con. We talked about this a little bit. Anything you want to note about this? Bravo, child! Astonishing! Here it is, yuppie!

So funny. So funny. I mean, this was such an intense two-part finale that like a moment of levity. Really, they were like, oh boy, we need to laugh. We're crying. We need to laugh. I loved this as well. I loved watching the lyrics evolve over time. And like you think about how the beauty of her then carrying Nikki with her in the form of the song. But again, when she says, I'm not ready to face him, like...

This song that was the manifestation of our bond and our journeying and our shared experience, like I used to lure the people who you wanted to team up with, yeah, join into serial killing traps, basically. Like, yeah, of course she'd be unprepared to have to confront that yet. But when Nikki quits the con and she goes, like she chases after him and...

We get the kind of camp setting and they're apart. She's in the water. She's like, this was not the way this was supposed to go. But then immediately, just the look on her face as she sees him and he's saying we can do it tomorrow and the kind of little grin and look. You just feel the depth of devotion between them so keenly there and the snuggling up and the way she's smiling at him and stroking his hair before bed. It's just absolutely...

Beautiful and devastating. And then Rio appearing in the night and calling to Nikki, you know, gesturing. But then went, stop, and like... Go kiss your mom. Say goodbye. Give your mother a kiss goodbye. Something Agatha will never know happened because Agatha was sleeping through that. So that moment of, like, tenderness that Rio gives. And also just, like, a tenderness for Agatha, right? That's for Agatha. Kiss your mother goodbye. Yeah.

devastating. But also just like the way she is with him, you know, just like very sweet, a little playful, like, and just sort of like, and just kinder than she is for someone like Alice. For sure. And also to contrast how Nikki is in that scene versus Alice, like,

Like, he takes her hand, you know, and walks across that bridge. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and obviously that was, you know, we do actually see eventually, you know, Alice and Rio walk side by side into that mist, but the contrast there was really keen. And then watching Agatha, you know, bury her child and sing over his grave and the lyrics continue to evolve and...

this road is cruel and wild. I bury my own heart here with you, my child. I mean, it's like just completely, completely heart wrenching. Last stop, a musical corner. My promise to you, which is that, um, there's a song in rag time, uh, which is a musical that's getting a, a really cool revival right around now. Um, but this character, uh, buries her child and, uh,

she says, I buried my heart in the ground when I buried you in the ground. It's a very incredible song. Um, and I was thinking about it a lot. Um, okay. So then we get this montage, the con is on. Right. And like the fact that like we see the moment, the, the witch's road is invented in that scene when Nikki's in the tavern singing and all like women aren't, these women are paying attention. And it's just sort of like, that's the origin of the witch's road. Um,

We get this incredible fashion montage. Every look better than the last. Not a single one of them straight. Just all...

incredible. The hat and like the platter, was it platter, hair, the suit and the like shrug moment for Agatha. That was just incredible stuff. Man. So this is, also the instantaneous nature because as you said, like word starts to spread right after Nikki's little capped performance in the pub and this witch who finds Agatha and Agatha's like, what are you doing here? Get away, right? Like she's in this moment of supreme grief. How dare you? Immediately. Immediately.

she sees an opportunity and she takes it. And it's like for Agatha, this is the way that she copes. This is how she's dealing with loss. It's not trying to find some new connection or new source of belonging, but destroying that when other people have it. Man. Our listener Rachel wrote, so basically Agatha goes on a killing spree because her son got ye old timey wheels on the bus stuck in everyone's head. Honestly, I get it. No further explanation needed.

I love it. Sensational stuff. Then we get, so this is what happens. She just is draining women through the ages. Yes. Great. Specifically women in need. That's the other thing that was really on my mind is like when we think about how insidious this is, when you're, and we know this because of how our coven formed.

When you're seeking the road, it's because you're seeking something you've lost or that you think you need. And like that is specifically the thing that she's preying on. Yeah. But also like sprain of sorts, right? Heartbreak, sorrow, grief. That's the, I think that's who Agatha is. It's not an excuse, but it is who she is. Yeah. Her pain led her there. I think it's also interesting to go back when, when I was trying to like piece together the like, is the road, um,

Billy's invention or not theory. I went back and like watched all of the moments that Agatha mentioned the road to Lillia, to Alice, to Jen. And there were two things that were said, like Agatha says, and we see that clip in the Kaiser Soze moment. She says the road doesn't exist, right? That's what she says. But everyone else says the road is a death trap.

Because it is. Because everyone who goes seeking the road dies. And the reason they died is because Agatha killed them. So, yeah. It's like, you know, it's a death sentence, a death trap, blah, blah. And it is. The road doesn't exist and it's a death trap. Both of those things are true. Okay. So then we get out. We cut to Agatha, ghost teacher. And again, this is Agatha's...

not infrequent role in the comics. She dies, her ghost hangs around, she teaches people things. This is a... Tough one for Rio, Joe. Rio hates ghosts. She's canonically established in episode five. Hot bummer. Hot bummer. We got some emails with some notes on Agatha's ghost form. Ah!

I loved the wig. I really loved the gray wig. I thought it looked great. As a person who is rapidly going gray, I found this really inspiring. I like the connection to Evanora, like all of their stuff. Like I liked the wig.

I really like, I agree with our listener who felt like they could, Becca said, bump up that ghost-pacity, the opacity, bump up the opacity on her a little bit. Turn off the ghost fan. That's my number one, that's my number one recommendation for future Agatha ghost appearances. I think it works as like an initial appearance, but then I was just like, okay, now I'm getting distracted. The billowing is distracting me personally. So, but I love the wig. 10 out of 10 on those. Yeah.

How do you feel? Okay, so we had fielded emails before about people worrying that this idea that if Agatha sacrifices herself for Billy and Lillian, Alice, in their own way, did as well, that people would not enjoy that as a story when they felt like they were being sold another story. Agatha says, by the way, I did not sacrifice myself for you. I took a calculated risk still figuring out the rules here, but... Yeah. So does lampshading it, does calling it out directly, like...

dissolve that as a thing or not? Or how do you feel about that? I don't want to talk any, but try to, I'm not interested in talking anybody out of that. If that's how they feel. I'll say that at the start, but like, you know, I don't feel that way about it. As I, as I said, in kind of anticipatory fashion last week. And I, I do feel at the end, like the, the,

So a couple things. One, I loved Agatha saying, by the way, I did not sacrifice it myself for you. I took a calculated risk because it feels so true to Agatha to me that like she actually –

did want to make sure Billy was okay and protect him, but kind of like can't say it. To quote my former Ringer colleague and pal, Shea Serrano, can't say it with her chest. You know, it like requires accepting something about herself that she's not quite ready to accept, but also it is actually messier than that. And the idea that Agatha would like

do something because she did want Billy to be okay. And I believe that, but also she's like, well, maybe like I could just be a ghost now and I can hang on to like existence in a totally different kind of way. And who knows what that'll be like also feels like right to me. Like, I don't think Agatha is in the, um,

Tony sacrifice play. That's where this arc went. MCU space. I don't, but I think that more than one thing can be true at once. And that that's, that's what, what it felt like to me when Agatha made the choice in terms of the Billy part of it and like launching his journey and

and the, you know, the concerns or questions about like fridging the other characters for that. Again, I mean sincerely that if people feel that way about that, that is like absolutely like they're, they're, they're right as viewers. And I don't want to tell anybody not to feel that way about it. It just didn't hit that way for me at all because like,

I think it's because they didn't, that's not why Lillia died. Lillia died for herself. Yeah. Fridging, just fridging is not the word I would use across the board here. You know what I mean? I actually don't think this is fridging. And I think, like, narratively, these women die so this boy can live, but on a character basis...

these women died fulfilling an arc of their own that was their story and not Billy's story, you know, which is like... Yeah, and I don't think that those things were mutually exclusive. Like, you know, Billy emerging from this in this connected universe as Wiccan and the character who's obviously going to be in Young Avengers and probably in Vision Quest and all these other things, like, that's...

that's an arguable, that's a thing that happened. And one was one of the obvious missions of the show. And I think, I think a mission that was successfully achieved, but I don't think that that came at the expense of watching Agatha, uh,

go on a journey where, like, we were able to better understand the character at the end of it and where the character learned new things about herself. And, like, that was true for many of the characters in the story. And so if Billy had been, like, centered over them...

at the end, then that would be different. But I think actually for me, again, like one of the achievements of the show is that we were able to watch a meaningful journey for so many of the characters. And it didn't actually feel like they came at the expense of each other. Ultimately, like I think amplified, like the fact that Agatha is making that choice and feels this way about Billy at all and has to lie when Rio says, I know how you feel about him. Like,

That's not coming at the expense of us understanding Agatha. It's coming because we understand Agatha. It's coming because we understand what happened with Nikki and what happened in her life. And for Lillia to get to be the badass in control of her power, to see her power as a gift, not a curse, all of that that happens for her. Alice, there is added tragedy to what happens with Alice for sure, as is...

you know, as is established at the beginning of episode eight. But there is also that, like, that freedom and that, you know, however brief that she gets to enjoy. Again, I don't want, I agree with you. I don't want to talk anyone out of it if they feel that way about it. But for me, it did not smack of that. It smacked of, and Jack will talk about this, not specifically on this beat necessarily, but like,

they really had everyone's character arc in mind as they're crafting this, weaving this story together versus, you know, if I can think of more, as I think of other egregious examples of fridging, I'm like, the person who died is not on their mind when, you know, they killed this person or the other, those writers. It's how it's going to impact the person left behind is usually how that goes. So, yeah.

We're going to speed through some of this stuff because Jack covers it and I would rather you guys listen to her talk about it than us. But back in the basement, Billy tries to banish Agatha.

Apparently, she, like me, is a fan of Patrick Swayze's film Ghost and knows that sometimes if you try really hard, ghosts can move objects. You mentioned TJ Klune earlier. This made me think of Under the Whispering Door. So Agatha, as we mentioned a couple times, Agatha says she can't face Nikki.

which is why she's hanging around. In episode five, we get this explanation from Lillia about ghosts. So what do we do? Do we banish her about Evanora? And Lillia says, emotion ties them to this plane. They have unfinished business.

So, Agatha's unfinished business is uniting Billy and Tommy? Uniting the entire family? Or is it just, I don't want to see Nikki? In which case, that's more avoidant than unfinished business. I think it's a lot of that, but also to me, it'll shock you to hear that I was thinking about

Order of the Phoenix here. I was thinking about spoilers. I know, I know. Astonishing. Spoilers. Hit fast forward twice if you don't want to hear something about the end of Order of the Phoenix. This made me think so powerfully of one of, I think, the most heart-wrenching moments across the story, which is like,

after he finds Harry finds the mirror and then he goes to you know he seeks out nearly headless Nick and he is you're a ghost and he asks about Sirius and Nick is just like he would like he would have gone on he would where on

and like what it meant for Harry to have to confront that Sirius is a character who would have moved on. And I'm like, I believe that Agatha is a character who would not have moved on. Not yet. And I actually think if she had, it would have felt... The Midnight Boys had a great debate about this on their pod, but I fall in the camp of... And I think all the interpretations, again, are valid and that's part of the fun of it. But Agatha deciding in that moment to go...

kiss Rio and do the things she did and then come to Billy and say, I took a calculated risk. I didn't sacrifice myself for you. And then, hey, I'm actually going to hang on and

it's like, I'm going to try to like game the system and then use this for as much as, as long as I possibly can. But also I'm not ready to face him yet. There's like the con woman and the emotional truth as always present there. And so that felt really right to me. And it also just like, of course means we don't have to say goodbye to Agatha yet. We can take Catherine Con with us, but like,

I think that I really agree that Agatha, in this moment, there is a virtuous sacrificing herself or protecting, let's say, rather, Billy. But there's also like a...

yeah gaming of the system I really like that's exactly how I was thinking about it she's just sort of like let's see what I can pick up I'm a quick study let's see how I can whisper in the ear of the most powerful you know being in the universe right now sorry with love and respect to Amelia Clark and Secret Invasion but like I have to say frankly how dare you sorry one of the most magically powerful of the moons yeah

And like maybe Billy can find her another body. You know what I mean? Like I, you know, I'm sure that is all on her mind as she does this. So yeah, absolutely. She would stick around. We got a ton of great emails. I don't have time for them. I'm so sorry. Like, because we've got a really long chat with Jack, but I just want to read this one last thing from Sharon, just cause it cracked me up. Sharon wrote,

Billy Teen William began the season looking for his brother, accidentally killed some witches along the way, oops, carved their names in brick like they were graduating seniors, then continued on with leg two of the journey. Graduating seniors is incredible. Oh, man. Someone put that sequence with Green Day's Time of Your Life over it. Dude, I was just going to say that. What were the other big graduation songs? Oh, like Eve Six? Oh, yeah.

Of course. Sarah McLachlan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, man. But yeah, Green Day. Green Day, top of the list. Of course. Of course. All right. Well... Oh, boy. Coven 2, Joe. Coven 2 here at the end. Coven 2. I'm excited. Spirit is my guide. Same. I'm really excited for more Billy and Agatha. This is a great... I mean, however people feel about it in terms of the job of launching Wiccan, I think...

This is even, for me, even more successful than the kid, the Bishop, a character who I loved, but like, I am, this is a great, very invested in Wicked. And I like that there's this, like this danger to him, this darkness to him that, you know, he gets from his mom and by his mom, I mean, Rebecca Kaplan who enjoys grounded horror. So here we are. Okay. Um,

All right. We're going to go now to our interview with Jack Schaefer. That interview was like an audio interview. So if you've been watching this on Spotify or YouTube or whatever, you're there's do not adjust your screen. This is now an audio experience going forward. Um,

And you will hear us describe certain things, what she's wearing, what's in the room, just trying to bring you into the experience with us. So that is what you're about to hear next. So we just want to say our goodbyes really quickly before we go to that. We want to thank everyone for their work on this pod. It takes an entire village to put this pod together. So thank you to my beloved Mallory Rubin. Thank you to Stephen Allman. Oh,

on the soundboard. Thank you to Arjun Arun Kapal for his production work here, there and everywhere. Thank you to Jomia Dinnerman on the social. Thank you, Stefano Sanchez for the video work.

and to John Richter and probably to Cruz. Like, who knows? Everyone's working on this together. Everyone. Our coven is vast. Yeah. So that's our goodbyes. We'll be back next week, obviously, with Penguin, et cetera. So thank you to everyone. Please stay tuned for our conversation. Stay. It's only our goodbye on video. Stay. Audio only conversation with Jack Schaefer.

I want to start, I have to, on behalf of every single lesbian who has emailed us, ask you, you were sort of prepping your viewers in interviews in recent weeks. You're sort of like, a little bit of Aubrey Plaza goes a long way. A little bit of Rio is a treat for all of us sort of thing. But the, you know, the question we got the most is sort of,

Was there ever a version of the story that had a little bit more Rio, a little bit more of like Rio and Agatha's relationship before Nikki, a little bit more of their backstory? Was that ever in the cards for you? It was never on the page. It was much, much, much discussed in the room. We talked about their meet-cute. We had this like fantasy of them living in a cottage together. Like we went deep. It was really fun. And we cared very much about...

The happier times, the falling in love times. But then when we were really breaking the story, it's not that it felt extraneous. Like it felt very necessary to our process, but it didn't feel a part of.

the spine of this story to actually dramatize that and it also anytime we sort of looked at it it was like it felt like okay well we do that and then we go into Nikki and we wanted the Nikki sequence to be Agatha and Nikki alone so then it just sort of made that sequence sort of too expansive at the risk of like sinking the larger episode um and and honestly I

I knew that people would respond to their chemistry and I knew of course people would respond to Aubrey Plaza as Rio Vidal slash death, but I, I didn't anticipate like the clamoring for them. So, so I, a little bit at this point have, I have some, some regrets, but there are many things in this story and in WandaVision that I feel are

stories for another day that are chapters for another day and it's it's part of the thing that I love about our non-linear approach is you can visit these characters and these stories all over the place at any time so um that's my answer but I apologize to the community

We'll stick with Rio for a second, but also bring Billy into the chat here. How should we be perceiving Agatha's motivations with Billy and Rio at the end of the road? Because one of the things that we love most about the show and love most about Agatha as a character is the complexity. You know, we love that it felt completely and utterly sincere when she looked at Rio and so imploringly said, no.

don't as Billy was bleeding out and we loved how despondent she seemed when she was faced with her mother's vitriol in episode five and we also love that she can't remember Sharon Davis' name even now after she died. Right? We love all of that. We love all of those contradictions. The gardening lady? The gardening lady? By the way, it's Katherine Hahn improv line. I mean, psychotic stuff is always from a true legend. So,

You know, this is obviously something that we're analyzing and parsing and really loving chatting about with each other, but we have the opportunity to ask you directly, and so we can't resist. What level of progress has Agatha actually made as she moved through trials with the Coven rather than just immediately sapping them of their power? She had this opportunity not only to share this journey with them, share the road with them, but also to look inward time and time again. And so how much of what unfolds regarding the question of whether Agatha or Billy will offer themselves up to Rio is Agatha's active scheming until that final

moment and even through that final moment and how much is about proving to us but also to herself that she can in fact as we have heard her say before be good and how much is just this very Agatha specific blend that even she is not always able to stare plainly in the face and understand and

No surprise. I love so many things that you just said, specifically just your turns of phrase like the Agatha blend. Yes, ma'am. So you asked about sort of her level of progress at the very beginning of this process. You know, we we held hands. We meaning Mary Lovato's me and Brad Winterbaum. And we decided this would not be a redemption arc.

that we weren't interested in taking a villain and turning her into a hero. However, I do believe, to use your term, there is progress. And I would point to the final scene, the moment in the basement, where she...

says to Billy, it's when you say things like that, that you remind me of him. That is, that is Agatha Harkness speaking truth to a person and knowing that they are hearing the truth. She speaks truth a lot, but she usually does it when she knows someone will assume she's lying.

But this is emotional truth that she is showing to another human person. And so I believe she's making herself available to connection with another person. So that's what I point to for progress. This lady did not arc out. Everybody else in the show arcs out. So the moment that you're talking about...

with this sort of like big moment, does she save Billy? Does she not like, you know, putting our, our big characters in this crucible moment? Um, I,

First of all, I would say, I feel it's a lot to personal interpretation. In terms of our process, this was something that we went over and over and over again. And it had many forms. And we were always sort of talking at it and talking around it. And what are we saying? And what's happening here? And the pieces of it, the mechanics of it kind of remained the same. But the conversation continued.

And so that's just sort of to point at, I think, our ambiguity and Agatha's. And the thing that I always held on to was I wanted the kiss to feel like a rush, like that it's like a reflex, that it is, there's an element of emotion and attraction and reflexiveness. So it's not, I'm

I'm Agatha, I'm saving Billy. It's that she has to kiss this woman in this moment and it means all these other things. And then later she says it was a calculated risk because I think that's about, she's like, I knew I would turn into a ghost. She didn't know for sure. Like it's all the things, all the ones, you know, it's her, it's attraction to Rio. It's her caring for the boy. It's her knowing she's doing the wrong thing. I think,

you know, that moment on the road when she is saying, you know, I can get him to turn himself in. That's like muscle memory, right? Like that's Agatha Harkness neural pathways being like, I see an opportunity. I am going to grab onto it. But then when the rubber hits the road, she makes this choice. I will say, sorry, you're gonna get long ass answers from me. I'm not sure if you've seen the runtime of our podcast. We level. Yeah.

I will say that the telepathy moment was a Megan McDonald idea that wasn't on the page.

that she was like, you know, we make this big stink about how, you know, that Billy can't read Agatha's mind. And this seems like the moment to like where he levels up and he can, you know, his telepathy can work on her. And so I always sort of had that in the back of my mind, but the actors didn't perform it with that beat. We created that beat in post. And we, and like, if you look really carefully, it's a little squirrely. Like it's like the eye lines are like,

And we did a little sort of positioning of things. And it was... It took a minute to figure out what he said. We knew that he would say something, and I was like, "What's the thing that this boy would say to stop her, to make her reconsider? What would he say to touch Agatha's conscience?" And it took a long time to get there, and I do feel happy with that line. And also, one of the problems we had-- sorry to spin this out to another thing--

One of the things we had is it was a bit of a fight to sort of retain episode nine in its form because it's kind of a non-traditional finale finale. And of sort of buttressing that, sort of supporting that within Marvel to sort of help...

help them understand my vision was by having Billy say in that moment, is this how Nikki died? I was like, that's, that's the question of our next episode. You always want to, I always want a question in an episode that you answer. And so I'm like, that's that, that we're putting this piece here because this is successful in getting her to stop. But it also, it springboards us into our, into our next episode. I, the defense rests.

That's incredibly clever. I love that. As you mentioned, and as Amalia mentioned, she said blend. I always prefer it when she says brew. She likes it when the Baltimore accent comes out. Yeah, when the Baltimore accent comes through. Go down to the ocean with a nanny bow and whip up a brew. I enjoy that very much. Getting someone from that part of the world is good. But...

We've so enjoyed trying to parse, to your point, when Agatha is telling the truth and when she's lying and when we get to see her put on her performance and when the mask slips and only we, the camera, get to see what's going on in her face and all of that. That's been really, really fun to parse. A question we have at the end of this finale is...

We really believed her when she said to Billy that she couldn't control what happened with Alice. And then we see her have some measure of control over it when it comes to Billy here. Can you track the truth in any of that or to, again, use a Mallory word, the progress inside of her when it comes to controlling that power? Yeah, I do think there is progress to her power. And I sort of see it on like,

on sort of an instinctual level. You know, it's not something that we like put on page or even pitch to Marvel. It's sort of my impression of it. I think that she, there's something kind of animalistic about her power. To me, it's very tied to appetite. Like I see her as a woman who can't get full. And I think when she takes Alice away,

so hungry at that time. And it's such a surprise. Normally she cons witches, they blast her, she takes it. But she gets blasted out of nowhere and it feels so good and she's powerful. This is the source of her power. So I do believe her

And in our discussions, that was the thing is when she says to Billy, I couldn't control it. She, she means it. I also see that as a, as a moment of vulnerability. And it's, it's tragic to me that Billy doesn't believe her, you know, that that's one of those, you know, they're, they're sort of disconnect. Um,

But I think, yeah, I think she is able to turn it off with Billy. I also think just to get in the weeds about, you know, MCU power, he has chaos magic. So she gets fuller with him like she gets so much from him and it's a bottomless well.

So, you know, she I think in that moment she can stop and I think she does stop because it's him. But I think she's gotten enough where she can, you know, be in her full look and her full glory and feel like feel herself. I also would extend that to the moment of the kiss of death, which I.

There are many things I love about it. It was an idea very early that I was obsessed with, and I'm so glad that we were able to get it on screen with these performers. But to me, I also really loved that in every other instance, she has to be blasted in order to take power. And this is the first time that she's taking power and it's from a kiss. And to me, that's very fertile because I think a kiss with Rio at this point in their relationship is...

and sexy and sort of ravenous, but also toxic and violent and a death blow. It's all those things all at once, but it is different. We've never seen Agatha take power in that way. And I would point that to, I wouldn't really call it progress as much as I would call it kind of evolution. I love thinking about Billy's magic as like a complex carb, you know? It's like a Gatorade gel. I was thinking,

I was thinking like a deep dish pizza. I was like, I was like deep dish Chicago pizza. I don't really engage in like exercise or unnecessary physical exertion. So I don't know what people actually consume during like marathons that helps fuel them. But as I understand it, that's. Is it not pizza? Okay. Let me know if you want to hear the amount of candy I ate last night on Halloween. That's what I can offer to this. I think if it is pizza, it's deep dish, right? I think it's like really, it's a substantial meal. Saucy, bready, cheesy, meaty. Delicious. Yeah.

I'm getting close to being ready for 11 Zs here. My goodness. So let's broaden and hit the rest of the coven. This was just one of the absolute joys of the show for us.

And we are so curious to hear how you achieved what is, I think, really, really rare in particularly, you know, the streaming era of shorter seasons, this amount of impact and balance across an ensemble, across a character set. You were able to establish Billy as, in essence, a co-lead. Sparked, as we have recently chronicled with you, this just absolutely rabid obsession with Rio across the viewing public. Yeah.

we really, really fully invest in Jen, in Lilia, like that Lilia episode. I mean, it's an instant iconic television episode, all while still centering Agatha in her own story. So,

Did how the question is how, but like did casting these specific performers unlock something for you structurally? Was the goal always when you were embarking on on sketching out the story in the first place to be able to give us something like the Lilia episode inside of Agatha's story inside of Billy's story?

Yeah, it was always the goal. I mean, of course, I can't credit the cast enough for their talent and what they brought to these roles. We would not be here. It would not be anywhere near what it is without them. But it was our agenda from the very beginning. And it was, you know, in this room in particular,

It was a very, very loving room. I mean, all the rooms I've had are loving. But, you know, just really big goals with what we wanted to put into the world. And it was, you know, we knew if we were going to bring brand new furniture

characters into this story and we were making statements about witches, then it was our absolute responsibility to make them fully fledged characters that, you know, I mean, you know, Mrs. Hart is as close to a red shirt as we get, but even Mrs. Hart, you know, is Deborah Jo and we had already, you know, we were already familiar with her character. And so, you know, she feels full, but as far as, you know, the coven and their arcs,

Like it was almost like we weren't going to do it if we couldn't do it well, because that felt disrespectful and,

And our point was, we had such big goals about representation and our way in was everybody has to be a complex human. That's what we're doing. We're doing complex humans and then however they identify, whatever they look like, however old they are, whatever their lived in history is, that is vital necessary texture, but they have got to be fully fledged humans first and foremost.

So that was really our process. Um,

And I had another point that's totally escaped me. Oh, that I think, you know, I know that the WandaVision team, you know, we all have our favorites, but we all felt so strongly about episode eight, which was like our sort of therapy episode. And, you know, all the writers that I work with, you know, are very interested in mental health, emotional life. There's a lot of therapy chat. You know, there's a lot of,

sort of perspective in that way. And we really wanted to ground the trials in personal growth. There was a line about that. There were a few lines that we cut out of the, in episode nine, I'm talking about Agatha all along now, in Billy's bedroom when he's like, it was me, it was me. There were a handful of additional lines from Agatha to sort of contextualize and explain. And we cut them because it's that thing of,

It starts to feel like the writers are congratulating themselves by checking all the boxes. And I have a little bit of regret, but I actually talked to Brad. I'm like, can we release that as part of deleted? Because they were great. There was a line where Agatha was, he's like, I couldn't have known. I couldn't have known Nail's Wife Revenge. I couldn't have known about Alice's mom. And she has a very funny line, I think that is Laura Donnie about Alice's mom.

unless you had access to certain witches, subconsciouses, this is like Catherine did like a whole, this is, it was great. Um,

But there was a line about where she makes a joke about like the trials, like being exhausting because they involved personal growth. And but that's really what we wanted. We were like, yes, yes to the floods and the fires and the singing and the costume and the yes, yes, yes. But the backbone of every trial is personal growth.

So again, long-winded answer to the question. It was always the agenda to do as, as, you know, as best as we could by these witches. I'm not ready to leave the covenant. I want to say, I want to ask you specifically about Jen and this idea of Jen is like the path forward of,

we had one of our listeners write it and he called her like the classic final girl from a horror movie. Like what it is, what is it about Jen, her evolution from, uh, thinking only maybe of herself to being a leader, uh, a leadership role in the coven to making it out to what do you envision she's flying off to do, uh, at the end of the show? What was it? Was it you all,

made the point of like maybe she steps into the leader of the coven was that you was that i did such a great idea um by the way i mean i i like i was like do i keep a list of all the ideas that they have that are so good that i wish i'd put in the show i'm like can i do it again but like with the feedback and like can i just do another one but incorporate these awesome ideas um yeah so i

It wasn't always the design that Jen would be the survivor of the coven. It was a very long conversation of do we do these witches die or do they not? And it was one of the few things that was still a conversation and we were shooting. Like I had to tell Patti LuPone on set that she was going to die for real because everything was set. All the episodes were set, but we had a scene in 109 where we reveal they're all

all fine and having brunch together.

And Laura Donnie wrote it. It was very funny. It was at this crab shack called Crabby's. It was a deeply funny thing. It was so good. And again, hard to cut when something's really funny. But it never hit us right. Like, it just felt disrespectful to them, disrespectful to the audience, you know? Like, putting the audience through all of that and then being like, just kidding, they're fine. You know, and it also, in a lot of ways, feels wrong that they did die. But I'm sort of like...

Stories for another day. Stories for another day. But we need to walk this road together and take it seriously. We said for the beginning, it's a death wish and the road is fatal and it is. And now I've forgotten. Oh, Jen. So we had always been looking at it as...

you know, do they all die for real or do they all live? And then once we committed and kind of bit the bullet and realized it was for the good of the show that the deaths are real. And also it's for the good of the Nikki story that the deaths are real. That, that,

that it suddenly occurred to me that they didn't all have to die. And I was like... Also because we had this notion, somewhat like Wanda, that as Billy is going through the road, his subconscious has emotional opinions about the Hex.

With Wanda, it was sort of more plainly articulated visually and in her experience. But for Billy, it's entirely subconscious. But, you know, when he's like, I wish we could go home, that's the first time he starts to second guess the experience. But by the time we get to the last trial, that trial is bare bones, right? Like there's no hair, makeup, wardrobe in there because Billy is like, Billy.

this is not great. What's happening? He's like, he's also like, it's killing people, you know, like we gotta be like, this is, this is getting serious. Um, and so that's when his subconscious ejects Jen. Like, you know, a lot of people had questions about why, why weren't, you know, Alison and Lilia ejected. And why didn't Alice, you know, why didn't she, um,

be ejected, you know, when she finished her trial. And truthfully, I mean, it's hard not to be truthful with the two of you, given how incredible the discourse has been on the show.

It was like that was a piece that we were just talking about and talking about and talking about. And it is hard to square all the logic and get it all right. But where we landed on it, it's like a little it's a little messy. But we were like, it's his subconscious. Like it's him learning as he goes. So so anyway, so that was the discovery of like Jen. Jen will.

arc out and then be ejected. And we had had ejected ideas in the sort of, like, coming out from the ground, and the early ideas were, like, comedic, that they were sort of launched more like Monica Rambeau, but in a funnier way. But then it just became so powerful with Sashir and her approach to the character. And, like, I was there, you know, like, that day for that piece of it. Yeah, she just...

That really, I do think the casting of Sashir lined us up in a way for just a much bigger story and far, it was just far more potent once she was in the role. Let's stick with characters who people have spent a lot of time speculating on the internet about whether or not they're actually alive or dead. So let's bring Wanda in. Yeah.

Hey, girl. Hey. Hey. But she's always here. She's always here with us. I mean, come on. So Agatha and Wanda were opposing forces in WandaVision, but obviously they have a lot in common. That's part of what makes this not only such a rich text, but such a rich connected experience. What is it about these immensely powerful, often misunderstood women who are

routinely find themselves at odds with both their own history and some aspect of society that draws you to them as subjects. Like, why do you love telling stories about Wanda and about Agatha? And even though they were once...

foes. What about Wanda's journey unlocked something for you and how you wanted to explore Agatha's experience? And even though that is, of course, the sequence of the shows, we're curious about the, you know, the vice versa aspect of that as well, because Agatha was such an amazing part of the WandaVision experience as well. What about Agatha unlocked something about what you wanted to explore with Wanda? Yeah. I mean,

It's only sort of like after the fact. Well, it was sort of like mid-fang that I realized that I was just...

having a ball telling stories about women and power and their relationship to power. But it was, you know, so I had experience. And they all, like, so Carol Danvers, Natasha, Yelena, Wanda, Agatha, Rio, all of them have different relationships with their power. But it was on Wanda, I think, because that was the first show, TV show I had ever done. I had never staffed.

So I really, I was really scared. My children were very young. I had had exposure to like a writer's room as an assistant at the very beginning of my career. And it was like the hours were so long and there was so much chaos. And I was like, I sort of, you know, like I got the job and then was like, oh God, I can't like, do I have the stuff to do this? Like, can I make it work with my life?

how do I hire people who have more experience than I do? Like almost every single person in that room had had more room time than I had ever had. I mean, I did an incredible job hiring people, you know, for whom that was not a problem. That was like one of the prerequisites is like, hey, are you okay with your boss not knowing what's up? And they were like, yeah, yeah. So as that kind of unfolded,

It sounds so cheesy, but listen, pals, it's the truth. I stepped into my power and I felt this kinship with Wanda because she was the showrunner of her show. I did not write Wanda as me, but I felt...

it was it was a heady time for me like thrilling ecstatic like I would come home you know sometimes like we we rarely had all-nighters because that was my policy we didn't do that but like we had I think two and the first all-nighter that we had first of all my room loved an all-nighter which I didn't know I'm like I'm respecting you by not having all you know all-nighters and they were like oh get the snacks

And I came home at like five in the morning. Chuck Haber drove me home because everyone realized I should not be behind the wheel. And I like crawled into my bed, you know, with like 45 minutes left of sleep before I had to get up and do the kids. And I was just like vibrating. Like I was like the ideas and the thrill and the team and the, and it was like, it was just so enormous. And, and, and,

But, you know, Wanda has so much misgivings about her power. And, like, when she steps into her power, it usually doesn't go right. Like, she steps, like, all the way in...

And and and and forgets her humanity. And I'm fascinated by that because like it is a constant dance of like being like, I am very powerful, but remain aware of your surroundings. But then also making yourself small and like that's not good. And then so then with Agatha, she is the only well, I guess Rio, too. She's the only one.

character that I feel like not only is unapologetic about her power, but is like her unapologetic about her lust for power. And that I was like, let's get into that psychology after having been with Wanda for so long, you know? So, so I think the short answer is it's, it's not in my life. It's not, I'm in my power. Look at me the end. It's just a constant flow and a constant learning. And, and I, yeah. And I love the conversation with these characters. Yeah.

You describe yourself sort of vibrating, you know, and not sleeping at 5 a.m. when you should. That's me when I have gone way far too deep down a theory rabbit hole and I get like, Mallory sees me, I get like, I'm high off of it. But if you listen to our podcast, you know that my philosophy is like, hold these things loosely, right? Don't get overly attached to something because, so...

Yes, I did jump off the couch and cheer when it turns out that this was Billy's hex all along. That made me really happy. But the thing that I am holding loosely is this question of Billy's identity, the am I William or am I Billy front. So this is an idea that I got particularly enamored of towards the end.

I know that we're not done with Billy's story, that the MCU is not done with Billy's story. Where are you on that question? How much is that planting a seed for a future quest for Billy outside of the quest for Tommy? Or was that something you considered...

dealing with in 8 and 9 and didn't really have room for. First of all, bless you, Joanna Robinson, for the hold your theories loosely. I would like it tattooed across my forehead. I would like it blasted before and after every episode. So just bless you for that. And

And I'm so delighted that your response to the, like Billy all along was to jump off the couch and cheer. And it wasn't a wah-wah for you. I was so worried. I was thinking of you, Jeff. I was like, will they be happy? Which is just great. Also shout out to my editor, Libby Kunin, who that original, that sort of Kaiser Soze moment, it did not have the clips in it in, on the page. And,

And so it was just him putting it together and it was just the VO, just the sound clips.

And Libby, in her gentle, brilliant way, was like, I put together a version with the clips. Would you like to look at it? And I was like, no, that's wrong. It's terrible. And like to her, but I didn't say that. But I was like, internally, I'm like, nope, she is incorrect. This is wrong. And then I watched it and was like, that lady is so right. This is so much better. So she is a genius and we love her. And then your question was William and Billy. Oh, I loved your...

conversation, your ongoing conversation about William slash Billy. We talked about it endlessly in the room. And I felt at the time of the room, I felt like we needed to have an answer and we needed to spell it out. And the more we sort of went forward and listening to the writers, they all, they all, they just were more fluid with it.

Because I said, I kept saying to them, you know, is it, so is William Capulink dead and gone and nothing, nothing, and then this new consciousness comes in and that is it? And all their answers were always like murky, not in terms of like you can't see the truth, but it just was, I don't know, they kept sort of sidestepping the question because they seem to understand it on a cellular level. For me, I believe that, yeah,

William did die, but it sort of went into the bucket of this thing of fate that we ended up holding on to, like the way the coven is fated and things are fated, that this was a boy. Because another question that we had is like, he is Jewish. That is his lived-in experience, Billy Maximoff entering his body, not his lived-in experience. We talked about that previously. So because of that, we sort of embraced this notion of fate.

fate and kind of a co-mingling because we didn't want the get out thing of which Malik Mallory you talked about about like William's consciousness being side-carring like that is like scary and unpleasant we don't like that

But it was one of the reasons we wanted to show William's room because we wanted to see that he was a kid who's really into magic and really into quest stories and really into Wizard of Oz. And that he's 13, but we have, I think, is it the photo that we used has the pride flag in it or was it not the photo that we used? Anyway, we were like, this was a boy who was on a path and then there was this

lifeline split, but it's still this path and there is sort of a commingling. And I think that Billy is in the process of the show was making sense of that. I think there is still story to tell because of the Kaplan's because of Jeff and Rebecca. And it's my hope that there's more to tell. I think it's like, it makes me very sad that they don't know the truth. It also makes me like, I think it's bittersweet and, and like,

Like, I think, you know, my children are very sweet. One of my children is, like, especially concerned about people's feelings. And so I see that with Billy adopting this...

um identity to spare his parent these parents like he can see that they're good right because like billy's that character he can see he is good he can see good yeah so he just immediately can see that they're good and they and they love their son and so he steps into the role for them

And that they're so relaxed, you know, the like, when, you know, Maria Dizia as Rebecca Kaplan is like eating the ice cream, they're also relaxed. Like they're in this light. They are a family, but it does, I would love to see it unpacked a little further, but still with the embrace. And to me, that's also why it's important that Billie has,

has feelings about Wanda. I know that that's kind of controversial on the interwebs, but it makes total sense to me, man. Especially with a mom like Rebecca Kaplan, who shows up and is accepting and loving and there every day and not blowing anything up. This is where everybody gets mad at me. But did I answer that question? Yeah, you did. So for us, Jo, to answer it even more pointedly, for us,

When he appears in his Wiccan kit, that was our, like, he has synthesized himself. Like, I feel like so many of these stories for me is about integration. And so he has integrated and embraced. But I welcome more story on the Williams slash Billy and the Kaplans.

Let's stick with mothers and sons for a minute here, actually. You've hit on a lot of this already, but we do want to dive deeper into this, both in terms of the character arcs, but also like

structure of the show and the concept of the show. When deciding that Billy would create the road just as Wanda had created the hex, what was most top of mind for you when it came to pursuing that parallel between Wanda and her son and also between the series WandaVision and the series Agatha all along? Was there any trepidation about that?

Wanda and Billy sharing a tale, as Agatha says. And then on the flip side, like what appealed to you most about it? What felt the richest for the characters, for the narrative, for the world building about the idea that mother and son both generate this, again, to borrow an Agatha-ism magic on autopilot? And also in terms of Agatha, what felt the richest about her being uniquely positioned to recognize that tie between them? Mm-hmm.

So much trepidation, so much trepidation to this day, so much trepidation. Um, and that was because I didn't want to do WandaVision 2.0. Like I, you know, I wanted to evoke the same feelings and thrills as WandaVision. Um,

I wanted to provide a similar viewing experience. I did not want to duplicate what we did and I didn't want to be lazy. Luckily I hire people who are not lazy. But what convinced me, cause I, so it was weird too, cause I had the idea. I wrote it in my little journal and then I was on the phone with Mary and she was like, what if Billy made the role? And I remember being like, yeah,

That's the noise that came out of my mouth, even though it's this great idea. And I acknowledge that it's this great idea. But I was like, oh, gosh. We have to do it well. Yeah. So then it was like, how do we do it well? And the reason that I went with it...

Because also we had done all this really gorgeous work on the road as a real road. And listening to the two of you analyze the road as a real thing, like even when you thought it was Billy's version of the road, was heartbreaking. Because my team, they're all, they're poets. And they, like, so we were circling this thing that like, that Agatha and Nikki had walked the liminal space that is the Witch's Road together. And Peter Cameron had this like weird idea of like,

on, on, um, on Agatha's arm that when she walks it with Billy, like she gets increasing number of scratches. I can't remember what it was tied to, but it was just really visual. And, and Jason Rostovsky, like he did this big presentation on that book about how trees are alive and, and,

which like you know they cry and they have yeah a pain and and so we were like okay every tree on the road was a witch who died so we had to like surrender oh we had a thing where that that what agatha was after she had buried nikki on the road and we had all these real things that we had to then abandon because the road had never existed prior to this moment um

What made me go for it was, was a handful of things. One, it was the opportunity to justify all the different pop culture filters. And it was the, the opportunity to like do the WandaVision thing again with a new color and, and to do it from, from Billy's psychology. And we, we were building that. So we got to be like, he's a horror fan. He's a goth kid. He's like, we got to like, it was bespoke to this project. And so I was like,

That's pretty good. Really, it was about it was about Agatha. Like from the very beginning, I'm like, it's got to be Agatha at the end of the story. Like Agatha has to have the most knowledge or the biggest con or the biggest twist. Like it's always got to go to that lady. That's where we're headed. And so the idea that that it was a con, there was a lie that this kid made true.

Absolutely irresistible. Just like as a sentence that is Agatha's lie that Billy makes true. I was like, I'm so in. And then, then underneath that, that it was Agatha's sweet child who just came up with like a lullaby, like a little song walking together. I like, I can't, I cannot turn my back on that. So we went for it.

That's so good. Beautiful. Okay, so I want to ask... Okay, so coming out of WandaVision, a show that I loved, there was a lot of reaction to that show. One thing that I really remember was people having this...

moral objection to Wanda walking out of Westview after everything that happened in Westview. And of course, that was not the end of Wanda's story. So I'm curious, and we hope fervently, we are still not done with Wanda's story. That is our hope here. But anyway, like,

Thinking about Billy and how Billy is reckoning with what has happened as a result of his creation of the road, his conversation with Agatha, both in his room and then in the basement. How much were you sort of anticipating 2.0 of that conversation of sort of like, what is the consequence of this? And how much, you know, should we or you or anyone be holding Billy responsible for what happens on the road? Yeah.

Well, what I think is important is that Billy holds himself responsible. Yeah. I think, you know, in these sort of fantasy spaces, in the MCU and other genre spaces, the death toll, you know, the sort of, like, repercussions of things are different than in the real world. You know, like, Agatha's body count is...

Yeah.

And like, you know, I think Wanda is is far more villainous than people give her credit for before Doctor Strange 2, like not even talking about Doctor Strange 2, looking at WandaVision.

You know, I think if Billy had been made to realize on the road what he was doing, he would have stopped it immediately. Yeah. I think he also, his rage at Agatha in the basement when he's trying to banish her, I think is about that. That she knew and she didn't tell him, you know. But Wanda...

Totally knows full well. She's told. She sees what she's doing. And she continues. So I'm not calling Wanda a villain at all. I think she is...

wildly like complicated and fascinating and I love her um I think she she also has an enormous amount of trauma not that trauma is an excuse for anything but I also look to Billy and that Billy has had three years of a calm peaceful loving home

You know, and I think these things are important. Agatha has never been loved by parental figures, ever. She's never been told she's good or valuable by parental figures. Like, as far as we know, Rio's the only person who's told her that she's valuable, that she means something, that she's special. You know, so anyway, so back to your question of the sort of morality. I'm not super concerned about people's, about fan reaction to it.

It's like what I see as my accountability as a storyteller and my team's accountability is making plain the internal life of these people when they make these decisions. Yeah, yeah. I love that. I can't resist just staying for a moment on one of the ties between the two series. Mr. Bonerific, please join us. It's time. I honestly can't believe it took me this long. I can't believe I had this level of restraint. You're restrained. I'm astonished.

I'm so proud of you, Mallory. Thank you. Thank you. One of the true master strokes in recent TV history. When did you know you wanted to bring our guy, Ralph? And I would like to just say and apologize. I can't call him Randall. Not yet. I'm not ready. Maybe one day. When did you know that you wanted to bring him back in this way? I would love to know that specifically, but also use Mr. Bonerific as a lens into understanding the

how you think about the way that your stories and your texts are in active conversation with each other and also with the internet because...

This is really one of the things that we, you know, admire most about the series. The way that it was aware of the conversation around WandaVision, but always in a way that served the characters and its mission. Never that felt like it was there just for the sake of it or just to check a box. To like kowtow or anything like that. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I guess while we're on it, you are wearing some boner merch. Yeah.

And just would like to express our deep and abiding jealousy and say that we intend to cloak ourselves in pitch-a-tent baseball tees for the rest of time once we procure some. Yes. Yes, I am wearing the shirt. I love the shirt so much. I had them made, like, immediately because I was like, I'm going to forget and I don't know what's happening. And so I had some made and then I

have been hiding them because I was, I gave, I gave one to Mary Lovano's and she wore it in public. And I was like, Oh, Mary. Oh boy. Oh yeah. My dearest.

She was wearing a jacket, but I was, it was, yeah. That's so funny. But she gets to do whatever she wants. Queen that she is. Yeah. So, oh my gosh. I'm so, it fills me with so much joy, your reaction to the return of Ralph Boner. I'm sure you are lovely and I know you read some of my press, so you know how strongly I feel about Evan Peters as a performer. I love working with him. I love all of these folks, but Evan is like,

He's a, I think he is a solo writer. Like he has incredible ideas all of the time and he takes the work so seriously, but he's so playful. And, and so, so just like that sort of, I just want to work with Evan is the thing. But I knew when I, when I returned to Marvel and I was like to, with the, like under the deal to make another show,

I was developing a number of different things to sort of figure out what we wanted to do. And I wish I could tell you about those things, but I cannot. But I can tell you that in every single one of them, all the conversations, the two things everyone included was Ralph Boner and Agatha Harkness. Incredible.

Rightly so. Wait, so what I heard is that you're about to make the Ralph Boner or the Randy Boner, if you prefer, one-man show as a standalone Marvel Studios spotlight presentation. I will be there on night one. Yeah, we will come. We will be there. All of it. I would put it up in the black box that's like across the street, like down the road from my house. I

Yeah. So I, so did that, to answer that question, like it was always in the cards. Like, I think I would have like walked off the project if someone had told me, no, you can't have what I'm doing. You guys. Yeah. And, and, and it's funny because like, you know, the, the,

The things that happened with WandaVision that, you know, ruffled feathers or didn't go as well or disappointed people or made people mad or whatever. I do... Like, those... It does hurt me, you know? Like, it does... Not that I need anything from anyone, but, like, I feel it. I do feel it. And I think that one...

I, I wasn't motivated by that to bring Ralph Boner back. Like I wasn't like everybody had a bad reaction to that. So I'm going to show them. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was never that it was actually the fact that we had written a lot more for him. Um, and the, um,

That's right.

So I wanted to bring him back because I believe he is a vital part of this corner of the MCU. So it's my personal taste and my personal desires. But I also I'm like this this world, this corner, he is in it. He is important. And it also was like a masterstroke. I wish I could remember how the idea came up. But the idea of him being the the vehicle of the exposition dump.

I was like, perfect. Like, cause he can make anything entertaining. So like in the hands of someone else, that's just like, you know, bullet points of information, but he, you're like, can't, you don't want to blink. And he's adding so much, so much texture to it. So it just, it felt ultimately really, really right for the show. And I will say like, if I, if I was, if I had been unable to find the correct way to deploy him, I would have had him like,

this is sort of, I don't think I've talked about this, but I really wanted to include the character of Madison from She-Hulk.

And because I think that she's a fan. I love Madison. Yeah. Oh, yeah. She's so deeply funny. Yeah. And she talks about Jake the goat. And we were like, that's it. Jake the goat. Like, the line where Patty's like, you know, talk to goats. That's because I was like, we were all like, reading our heads against the wall trying to figure out how do we make the goat our gateway to getting, like, literal and figurative gateway of getting, like, Madison's.

on the road and it just didn't work and it was shoehorning. And so like I had to let that go. But I stand by our use of Ralph Boner. And then you, oh, you're talking about like fan service.

That is something that I learned from Marvel, that I learned from Kevin and I learned from Brad. Early days in my time at Marvel, I would read something online and I would say to Brad, we should do this, we should do this. And they have a very...

sort of circumspect way of handling that. Like they don't, they respect the fans and they're not eye rolly and they're not resistant, but they're very measured. You know, they, they understand the ebb and flow and the rising tide and the like, and so they, they, they are patient and they are, they, they take a moment to consider. Um,

So I learned early not to have any knee-jerk reactions to fan service ideas. When you got to say the word Mephisto out loud in your show, though, did it feel like you were Agatha just soaking up the internet's power? Yeah.

Once again, once again, I so wildly underestimated the appetite for Mephisto. Not again. Like in WandaVision, I didn't know about the wine bottle. Like I was like, what are we talking about? Wait, who, what, who?

And I was like, oh, no. And we, like, all of us on the writers were like, what are they? And, of course, the comic people in the WandaVision room were like, yeah, yeah, Mephisto. And I was like, okay. And then this time I was like, oh, right, Mephisto. I, like, approached it and, again, I just am such a fool. So that – and one of you said, was it you, Jo, being like, Jack Schaefer is at this point, she's going to have to put Mephisto on the show. And I wanted to crawl under my desk. No, let's pretend I didn't say that. Okay. Okay.

We only have like a few more questions left and I have like a really, really important, the, the, the world needs to know question, but I have a really important, I need to know question. So, um, uh, you know, you're wearing the, the, the boner family reunion shirt. Also, I spy in the background, the Fleetwood Mac poster. I am like Easter egging the very room that you're in the beach, uh, painting. Yeah. Um,

Who is responsible for the Buffy Vampire Slayer Once More Worth Feeling poster in Billy's room? Because it filled my heart with such personal joy. And also, just curious, in your auspices, I mean, if that was you, great, wonderful. If not, was there an item that you specifically placed in Billy or William's room that, like, meant the most to you?

So to answer your part A of your question, that was Mary Lovanos. I like to call her Lovanovich because we worked with someone who couldn't get her name right. So I call her Lovanovich. And she's a she is a Buffy obsessive. Yeah.

it informs everything she does. It makes her who she is. So that, that was her. And also we love, you know, Emma Caulfield Ford. And so that is also a little nod to her. I just like, if it's okay, I'm just going to do a little shout out to my neighbors, the sunshines who just went to the prop house where they were

that poster and they bought it. So they're now in possession of the poster. Wow. Jealous. They're huge fans of your podcast. Huge fans. And they're lovely people. Hello, Sunshine. Hello. Can I come visit your poster? Sunshine, thanks for listening. Bye.

How about you? How about you? What's your, what's your placement? Um, so I, there wasn't anything that I like specifically put in there. I, I, you know, I, I wanted the craft poster in there. Um,

And Ganja, our director, she put a lot of music things in there that were important to her, which I was happy to have in there. What I did do is my children came to set just one day because I think it's important for them to see what I do. And they each chose something from the room. So they're just like one has a it was this little sort of crystal pyramid. And the other one has like a freaky kind of like gnomey thing.

like little statuette that are, and they are in their rooms. So it's a nice thing. Yeah. Beautiful. Joe, what else do you want to hit in our final couple of minutes? I mean, we have to ask about vision quest. We know you're not, uh, we know that Terry's running vision quest. I'm really excited for that. Cause I think Terry's a genius, but, um, I know that you were working on it, you know, in some hospices for a while. Uh, there's obviously, you know, uh,

a launching point off the end of this show into that show. We were just wondering any crumbs you can give us about vision quest or anything at all. You could tell us. I'm sadly, I can't tell you anything. I wish that I could. I mean, not, I also, I know very little, but I, I love Paul so much and I wish that team well. And, and yeah, like as a fan, I'm so excited for it.

Okay. So we're going to end instead then on something you probably can tell us something about. Yeah. The most important question, I think. What's up with senior scratchy. Where's our guy? Is he okay? Is he okay? Is someone feeding him? Is someone nuzzling him? Yeah. Um, that is a, that is a bunny named peanut butter. Um,

and, uh, we love peanut butter. Um, uh, yeah. So you, you too, with your attention to senior scratch, um, it was another, so I like, you know, I, I, I have the scripts ready early cause I don't know how else to do these shows without doing that. So we like go into prep with very complete episodes, but there's usually like logic issues or, um,

you know, or, or like Lillia's bops were needed sort of like a pass. So I, so like in sort of pre-production, I will have like a master document. Like that's essentially a punch list of like shore up this logic, you know, more, more characterization here. There was a lot of Alice work because her, um,

like the Lorna Wu backstory, it was really robust. Like we had a big story there, but like getting it all into the dialogue was very hard. So, because it just, it's like, you're not randomly going to be like, well, when I was 13 and then when this happened and when this happened, so it became a, like, we have to streamline it in order to inject it appropriately. So it's like that kind of thing where I'm like, we have the story, we have the episodes, we have the scenes, everything is essentially where it needs to be, but here's my list of things to do. And,

And there's like a couple things that I never got to in terms of like, not that I didn't finish my to-do list, but I didn't ever have an answer for. And sweet Senior Scratchy. We had so many ideas for Senior Scratchy and he was supposed to go on the road. You guys saw that, that like that Joe was holding Senior Scratchy. The early idea was he was going to run on the road with Senior Scratchy.

but we, it becomes a thing of like, if I can't, if we're approaching the time and we have to shoot the thing and I haven't figured out how to pay it off, then it goes out the window. So we had like a, um,

Laura Donnie had this idea for episode two where Agatha puts together what we call the witch kit, where Billy is still, like, bound in the closet. And he watches Agatha, like, go through the wreckage that is her dining room and pick up, like, a candle wick and a piece of rawhide and a petal. And she's putting it all in this little witch kit that she, like, tucks into her bosom. And we loved it. But Brad Winterbaum was like, so when does she use all those things? And I was like,

oh, okay. And I was like, oh, no. So, like, the witch kid goes out the door, even though, like, it was so compelling to watch Agatha do that and it was such great texture and it was born of our research and, like, so Scratch was the same reason. We got to the point where we were going to shoot Billy running into, we had shot the stuff up top because that was in LA. So we had shot him on the street holding Senior Scratchy and then, like, two months later, we're in the basement and he's supposed to run down and,

And I'm like, yeah, I haven't. Like, we don't have them. Like, there's nothing for Scratchy to do on the road. There's no payoff. None of this is working. Animal wranglers are expensive. So it went in the column, my favorite column, of Story for Another Day. Okay. You heard it here first, folks. Senor Scratchy spinoff confirmed. With, I think, Evan Peters.

Ralph Boner. Yes, and three-hour deep dive breakdowns on every episode. I have a good story sesh, you guys. I feel really clear on my next project. Thank you. Can I sneak in one last question, which is we did get an email from a listener asking for recommendations for other witch properties, be they books or movies or TV shows. If you were to recommend one other witchy thing to keep the Agatha vibes going, what would you recommend people check out? Um...

witchy stuff. I mean, I think The Witch, the Anya Taylor-Joy Eggers movie, I can't watch it all the way through. I find it terrifying. But I think that the ending of that movie is so incredible.

Like what the statement of that movie is, I find very powerful and important and interesting. So I love Witches of Eastwick, but that's a little bit, I was young, but it's still a little bit more generation, my generation. And Mary Livanos, I made her watch it. And she was like, how dare you? She found it problematic. Oh yeah.

Oh, yeah. And she's like, and I'll never eat a cherry again. Like, I'm done with cherries. Yeah. And she's younger than I am. So she's like, she's Hocus Pocus generation. Yeah. She was like, you just subjected me to something awful. So I recommend it because I think

the performances in it are incredible the hair story is incredible the perms oh my god yeah so i love it but but a little bit of a like problematic disclaimer on that i would also recommend i mean everyone i feel like most people have seen practical magic but also another like if you're in it for the hair please see yourself to practical magic i also i really enjoy um

Return to Oz. Like, if we're going to... Because, first of all, it just is a witch. So I count that as a witch movie. Of course, The Craft. And is there anything else that I would... Yeah, those would be my witch recs. It's a great starter pack. We love it. We love it. Thank you so much for your time. This was blissful. And your stories. We really appreciate it. Truly, I can't thank you both enough. I mean, you...

I'm sure you have some notion of like how, how hard it is to do this work. And, and the fear isn't really that people will hate it. It's that no one will care. That's always the fear. And the amount that you both care and that you have dedicated your time

sizable brain power and analytic skills to turning over all the details of our show is just an enormous gift. And on behalf of my writers, on behalf of my team, like the editors, everybody, everybody listens and watches. We, we thank you so, so very much. So this has been an absolute joy. Thank you for saying that. I didn't just start crying. Thank you. That's so sweet.

It was genuinely a treat for us to talk to each other about the show every week and to share it with all of our listeners with the bad babies. It made us feel every week and it made us think every week. We are going to miss it, truly. And I know the show wasn't made for me, but it really did feel. It felt like it. It felt like it was made for me. So thank you. I listened to

podcast i was like did i make this show for joanna maybe i think i might have also i say this all the time my kink is women being their jobs so so thank you for your service thank you thank you so much for this yeah what's so much fun thank you both thank you for everything