‘Agatha All Along’ Creator Jac Schaeffer Breaks Down That Emotional Finale

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Agatha All Along.

All roads eventually end.

Marvel Television’s Agatha All Along wrapped up with an emotional two-part finale, following Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) and Billy Maximoff (Joe Locke) as they braved the end of the Witches’ Road. Agatha ultimately sacrifices herself to save Billy’s life, willingly submitting to a literal kiss from Death (revealed to be Aubrey Plaza’s Rio Vidal) before rising from the grave as a ghost.

Series creator Jac Schaeffer tells Marvel.com that she always wanted Agatha All Along to dive deep into Agatha’s psyche, exploring how she came to be the clever, self-serving witch we’ve learned to love. Throughout production, Schaeffer and Hahn would playfully refer to the character as an “onion,” and the finale peels back those layers even further.

“What I love about episode 9 is that we go all the way to her truth,” Schaeffer says. “This is a character that was introduced as a walking lie. The show is in many ways a lie: It’s very theatrical, and so much is performative and about wearing masks and costumes. So at the top of [episode] 9, [I loved] to have Kathryn’s performance be so raw and unobserved. The way we approached it was that she always feels watched, like there’s always an audience. But this would be the one time that she doesn’t feel the audience.”

The final episode ultimately reveals the fate of Agatha’s son, Nicholas Scratch. Death first comes to collect Nicky at birth, but Agatha begs her for more time; and so the mother and son get to spend several happy years together, scamming other witches to enhance Agatha’s power. But Death comes for all in the end, and in a heartbreaking moment, Agatha has to say a final goodbye to her son.

From the very beginning, Schaeffer’s goal was to keep Agatha’s relationship with Nicky as grounded as possible — a stark contrast to the more theatrical, high-stakes drama of the Road scenes.

“Something that struck me so early in the development process was the idea that Agatha’s truth would be something very small and very human,” she explains. “It would be the pain of losing a child, and there wouldn’t be any MCU or supernatural magic on top of it. It would just be a human woman and a human child that had died, and that’s the end of the story. And that is tragedy enough to fill the universe.” 

Schaeffer particularly praises the finale’s director Gandja Monteiro and cinematographer Isiah Donté Lee for making Agatha’s scenes with Nicky feel so down to earth.

“We wanted the Nicky sequence to be very intimate, lyrical, warm, and authentic,” she says. “The photography is sort of like Terrence Malick. It’s up close, but kind of drifting and floaty. Kathryn and Abel [Lysenko], who plays Nicky, were very tactile with each other. There’s a lot of touching and interesting closeness. That’s what my heart wanted the whole time.”

The final two episodes also explore Agatha’s relationship with Death, revealing that the two once shared a romance. Early in the development process, Schaeffer and the writers’ room knew they wanted to introduce an antagonist who had a romantic history with Agatha. They soon fixated on the “totally irresistible” Lady Death, a key figure from Marvel Comics with a “deeply witchy” vibe.

“Then, when Aubrey took the role, it blasted off into outer space,” Schaeffer says. “It became so much bigger and more perfect than we ever could have imagined. Once Aubrey was on board and I knew that we had this gangbusters chemistry, it felt unstoppable and uncontainable.”

The centuries of history between Agatha and Death also made for compelling narrative possibilities, and Schaeffer says she loved watching Hahn and Plaza navigate that tension on screen. “What interests me now is the enormity of the feelings and how toxic it is, how they can’t click into any sort of functional place,” Schaeffer adds. “That is sad for them but fantastic to watch.”

The series ends with a bittersweet moment, as Billy sets out to find his lost twin Tommy with a ghostly Agatha at his side. Schaeffer says that she always knew the series would end with Agatha’s death and return as a ghost — a plot point from Marvel Comics. “It wasn’t about killing off the character,” Schaeffer says. “It was about the evolution of this character: What is her next phase?”

As for what the future might hold for everyone’s favorite scheming purple-magic user, Schaeffer is remaining tight-lipped. But the narrative possibilities, she says, are endless.

“I still feel like there’s more road to explore with Agatha as a ghost,” Schaeffer teases. “Get ready.”

Reporting by Larissa Rosen.

Agatha All Along is now streaming on Disney+.