‘Agatha All Along’ Episode 7 Comes Face-to-Face with Death

Episode seven of the Disney+ series Agatha All Along, “Death’s Hand in Mine,” begins with Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone), dressed as Glinda the Good Witch and falling in purgatory similar to the Sunken Place of Get Out, showing that Billy Maximoff’s (Joe Locke) show of force in episode five was not as fatal as it initially seemed.

We return to Billy and Agatha on the Witches’ Road where Agatha begins to disclose some of her complicated history with Wanda Maximoff, calling herself “your mother’s ex-best friend” in a very liberal interpretation of the concept of friendship. Billy, no longer eager to be Agatha’s zealous little helper, shuts down the idea of Wanda being his mother but still curiously prods into her current state and whereabouts.

As the two travel down the Road, Billy makes it clear that their partnership is coming to a close and that he may have overestimated Agatha’s skills and abilities before they come upon an enormous castle for the next trial, unlike the previous episodes’ more quaint trial locations. Upon entry, Billy and Agatha get turned into iconic stereotypical witches—Maleficent from 1959’s Sleeping Beauty and the Wicked Witch from the 1939 classic Wizard of Oz, respectively. Agatha, ever the self-important witch, proudly smirks that the Wicked Witch of the West is based on her, seemingly reveling in the idea of being villainous.

The Disney icons bump into a tarot table with “your path winds out of time” engraved on it. Immediately after Billy picks up the card, the hourglass begins to flow, signaling the beginning of their latest trial. Billy begins reading the cards for Agatha, who is dismissive of Billy’s underdeveloped tarot card reading skills. As swords begin to fall from the ceiling, Agatha takes over the cards, haphazardly placing the cards on the table and hoping to speed through the dangerous trap instead of divining the cards’ true nature as Billy said.

After numerous cards, the sword-studded ceiling begins to descend upon the duo, rapidly ramping up the stakes. After Billy wishes that Lilia was still around, Lilia seemingly snaps out of her falling state, where it turns out she and Jen (Sasheer Zamata) survived their encounter with Billy and have been traveling underneath the road.

Lilia’s precognition has helped guide them after their descent, but her disconnection through time leaves her with gaps in her memory with her being unaware that she revealed that Billy was the son of the Scarlet Witch. A glimpse into her powers shows her experiencing her life in a non-linear way, going through multiple life events over centuries at once.

“Am I wispy or am I kooky?” Lilia asks Jen, calling back to the question she asked Alice back in episode 4 while in the music studio. In a revelation of how her powers work, Lilia is transported back in time to Sicily during her first ever tea-leaf reading, while her former teacher urges her to believe in her abilities despite the tragic nature of her skills.

Lilia explains that her flashes were constant in her childhood and she experienced her youth out of order. “The flow of time is an illusion,” she tells Jen after confusedly lashing out, explaining that the gaps in her memory are getting worse, potentially signaling that she’s “at the end.” After her lesson, Lilia awakens in the castle with Agatha on top of her, having saved her from the falling swords and certain death. Calderu and Jen dressed as the Evil Queen from 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, arrive just in time to take on the trial.

After gathering her bearings, Lilia turns to Billy who begins to apologize, saying that he didn’t know he had the powers and that he would have used them to save Alice, after which he realizes and apologizes for reading Lilia’s thoughts saying they were loud. Without the sigil sealing away Billy’s identity, Lilia begins to recall their previous meeting at his bar mitzvah years ago and puts aside her anger knowing that her expertise is needed to solve the trial. Billy then gets her to confess that she was the one who put the sigil on him, saying she knew he would need time to prepare for what was coming his way.

Suddenly, she begins to experience a series of flashbacks, first to the previous trial in the cabin with Evanora Harkness, where she ominously uttered “I hated this the first time,” then she flashes back to their original meeting in her office, where she turns away to scream, the back to the table with the old lady in Sicily.

The elder asks a series of questions to Lilia, including if she still works with nature and if she’s in a coven, all of which Lilia fervently dismisses. Lilia then returns back in time to the tunnel with Jen and explains that her power went away by ignoring it. Then the duo of Lilia and Jen stumble into the room where Agatha and Billy are clashing over the correct method of tarot card and their genuine distrust of one another in the wake of Billy’s superpowered outburst.

Lilia realizes that the coven has been going about the tarot the wrong way and that it is Billy who needs the reading, not Agatha. The impetuous Agatha tries to speed up the process as Lilia tells Billy that he needs to think hard and ask a relevant question to the tarot cards to find his true purpose. After a close call from the trap above, he finally asks “Am I William, or am I Billy?” causing the table to stop. Lilia begins to seriously assess the cards despite the fact she and Agatha called it a “con” earlier in the season.

Despite swords falling, Lilia is confident in her abilities and after narrowly avoiding a second sword, she flashes back to her tea-reading lesson, where her elder asks why she is on this journey. Lilia responds, “To get my power back,” but her instructor knows that isn’t true, and Lilia confesses that she hasn’t made peace with the fact that she accurately predicted her coven’s death but could not stop it from coming to fruition. Her instructor brushes off the fear of death saying that “it is what we all have in common” before asking her the most important question, “What will you do with your remaining time?”

Once again at the tunnel, Lilia awakens more lucid than she’s ever been, telling Jen the story of Billy’s background and warning her that this will all be gone in moments. As they head toward the trial, the Salem Seven—unleashed by Rio’s summoning in episode 5—catch up with Jen and Lilia, forcing them to hide. Instead of following the Seven, Lilia is adamant about going to the trial to help Agatha and Billy despite being mad at both.

Back in the trial, Lilia realizes that she is the Queen of Cups, an empathetic figure with a trustworthy inner voice. After placing it in the center and no swords fall, Lilia is at full strength, playing the Three of Pentacles which represents her new coven as a part of What’s Missing, then the Knight of Wands representing Alice Wu-Gulliver and the Path Behind, then the Path Ahead flashes back to Lilia’s first meeting with Jen, where she called her “high priestess.” Lilia flips the Three of Swords for the Obstacles portion showing Agatha hunkered over Billy after his life-threatening wound after escaping the studio. At the last moment, she finally reaches the Destination portion of the reading and before solving the puzzle, falls back into the tunnel with Jen.

Except this time, she’s not with just her cohort Jen as she has been previously. At the door to the tunnel, she sees a robed figure who asks, “Don’t you recognize me, Lilia?” before it all begins to click for the precognitive witch: The rising from the ground after being summoned, asking to claim the bodies in the studio, and the Ouija board spelling out ‘death’ when asked who was with them in the cabin all begin to paint the full picture. That robed figure is revealed to be not only Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza), the newest member of their coven, but also Death incarnate.

Right before their demise, Agatha takes the card from Lilia and plays it, thus stopping and retracting the ceiling and opening the way back to the Road. Agatha reveals that she’s always known about Rio’s true identity, callously brushing it off saying, “What can I say? I like the bad boys.”

Lilia helps the coven escape through the iron maiden and returns Billy’s spellbook to him as a final gesture before she closes the door to stop the Salem Seven, seemingly having snuck into the trial. Confident in her abilities and no longer afraid, Lilia plays the Tower Reversed on the table, causing a sudden upheaval that sends the Seven into the sky to be impaled on swords. Lilia holds tightly to the table before realizing that the fall from the beginning of the episode was at this moment. Freed from her self-doubt, Lilia lets go as the screen cuts to black. Afterward, a young girl dressed in yellow runs toward that old woman for her first tea lesson in Sicily.