Agatha all the time

Death’s hand in mine

Season 1

Episode 7

Editorial review

5 stars

*****

Photo: Disney+

I was watching the whole time Agatha all the timeI’ve been thinking about the time I saw Patti LuPone star in West End’s Company. (Bragging.) (Stay with me!) There are so few performers of her level that I didn’t care that I was sitting so far up in the balcony that I could barely see. I knew it wouldn’t matter as long as I heard that voice that commanded the room from the stage to the ceiling.

When the show finally reached its big number (“Ladies Who Lunch”), which the entire audience was clearly dying to see all along, LuPone did the whole thing without even getting up from her barstool — and she crushed. When she ended the song with the shaking command, “Everyone RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISE!”, everyone immediately obeyed. I mean, when Patti LuPone shakes a martini glass in your direction, you really have no choice but to do exactly as she says. And so we all dutifully stood and clapped and cheered and lost our minds until the only person left in the theater seated was LuPone. We didn’t have to use the full force of her power to understand it.

Until this episode, it felt like I had been cheering for a still-seated LuPone. It’s not that she hasn’t been great, because of course she is. I just knew there was no way this show was going to cast her to just shake a maraca and have random “crazy” outbursts. No, if you hire LuPone, you better have something amazing waiting in the wings so she can grab it with both hands and make it her own. I expected Agatha to give her that moment, but didn’t expect how.

Which brings us to ‘The Hand of Death in Mine’. It’s an incredibly ambitious chapter, and not just because of the non-linear storytelling (which makes it impossible to summarize from start to finish, so I won’t even try). We’re at a pivotal moment in the show’s overall arc, as we’ve just discovered Teen’s dual identity and connection to the greater Marvel Universe. This episode manages to integrate that and unravel a very different, but no less personal story that spans centuries of fear and pain. It seems that Lilia’s lifelong fear of her own fortune-telling has been building for so long that she has reached a real breaking point, and the only way out is through.

After a brief interlude in which Agatha and Teen mock each other again, the episode largely follows Lilia on her scattered journey through time, from the dirty tunnels beneath the Road, to her own Tarot process, and even back to her very first tea leaf reading. lesson with her Maestra (Laura Boccaletti). As written by Gia King and Cameron Squires, it’s a brooding mess of revelations, as well as a maze, and a series of psychological psych-outs. It spins and rewinds to fill in all the “holes” in Lilia’s memory, which is a porous place on a good day. However, on the road it has become even worse.

It turns out that Lilia has experienced the Way in complete disarray, moving back and forth between trials with just enough knowledge of what awaits her to be afraid, but never staying long enough to really take advantage of it . To Lilia’s own horror, the last time she felt like this was as a teenage witch who had no real control over her own powers and could only watch helplessly as her family’s witch died of a fever. She has been a prisoner of her own fear for so long that she can barely remember the form of her powers without fear; The Road forces her to embrace everything she is, with spectacular and ultimately fatal effect. “Your job is not to control, but to see,” her Maestra tells her. It’s permission to unleash a power she has long feared and resented, but also to look at herself with the same sudden clarity with which she has turned on others for so long.

Lilia reading her own Tarot spread is an important piece of the overall Road puzzle, but “Death’s Hand in Mine” also does a particularly elegant job of making it Lilia’s final act of mercy toward herself as well. It’s the LuPone spotlight episode I’d been waiting for, and she never sings a single note—an unexpected move from an otherwise very musical show, but one that’s worth it because her acting is just as nuanced and powerful like her voice. .

That kind of confidence in the strengths and vision is the result Agatha all the time such a strong surprise overall, and “Death’s Hand in Mine” elevates that on more levels than just storytelling. At this point in a franchise like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it is so difficult to develop its own visual language for each project, but AgathaI have achieved it and I have no choice but to respect it. The set design alone for Lilia’s process is so lush and creepy that it’s easy to forget that they’re all dressed up as Disney characters. (Jen, crudely made to look like a gnarled version of Snow White’s evil stepmother: “I don’t want to talk about it.”)

Perhaps it was inevitable that this show would have to evoke its all-powerful parent company, but Jac Schaeffer (who also directed this episode) has found a way to both embrace its Marvel origins while still taking a different kind of path. We haven’t even gotten into the fact that Agatha just goes ahead and confirms that she is strange to everyone without eyes and/or basic deductive reasoning. When she can’t answer Teen’s biggest questions about Wanda (“is she really dead?”) and Rio (“where is she?”), she shrugs: “You want straight answers? Ask a straight lady.” Once again, I have to ask if the Marvel Powers That Be have actually read the scripts for this show! They just know How gay is this long-awaited spin-off?! It’s just bizarre to see Marvel’s official social media accounts posting such overtly queer #content at the same time that the all-powerful Disney parent company is apparently (allegedly) scouring movies of anything that could be remotely gay, but I guess that, again, it doesn’t work on the witches they couldn’t burn to get through. Disney villains have always been strange anyway.

With that, we truly say goodbye to Lilia and LuPone, who both brought something different to this series that will be sorely missed. While Agatha and Teen’s emotional turmoil have largely been the show’s defining emotional journeys, LuPone jumps at the chance to highlight Lilia’s here. Her ultimate sacrifice scene is suitably grandiose, as Lilia literally turns the entire process on its head, flipping the Tower card to send her and all the Salem Seven flying into the swords waiting on the other side.

But it’s her confessions to Jen underground that really stood out to me. LuPone and Sasheer Zamata both join, immediately creating a paired dynamic that I’m already missing. When Jen sincerely asks Lilia why she would ever want to hide her own power, she opens the door for Lilia to be honest with herself for perhaps the first time in her long life. If I had been sitting on the top balcony for a moment, Lilia snaps that she is ‘not’ confused‘, then I would have prepared myself for the standing o. What a joy to watch LuPone let Lilia rip, whether she was covered in dirt, in Glinda drag, or exchanging quiet wisdom with her Sicilian eldest. It’s a thrill to finally see both LuPone and Lilia in their elements, making the episode’s final twist of the knife even more effective. “Death comes for us all,” as Lilia has already told us, and indeed, Rio comes looking for her.

• So yes, confirmed: Rio is Death, and I have to say: hot! I love her entire Grim Reaper via Dío de los Muertos almost as much as I love Agatha, ‘what can I say? I like the bad boys.” (This is also my choice for Kathryn Hahn Line Reading of the Weekbut I’ll mention further nominations in the comments as always!).

• Very funny to make everyone realize that Death is “the original Green Witch”, while Agatha literally looks at them through lurid green makeup. So much for being the most infamous witch on the road.

• Teen wants to know “am I Billy or am I William?”, and while I’m pretty sure the answer is “why not both dot gif”, I’m going to keep calling him “Teen” for now out of respect for his journey of self-discovery .

• I’m glad Lilia insists that Jen represents “the path ahead.” I feel even more strongly that Jen’s apparent potion trial only surfaced after the deeper emotional revelations of Lilia and Alice’s trials, and I hope Zamata gets the attention she deserves in the two (!) episodes to come.

• Another episode, another banger of an end credits song. Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle” is the perfect, bittersweet way to send Lilia and LuPone off (“There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do, once you find them / I’ve had enough looked around to know that you are the one I want to pass through time with…”) RIP to a real one, may she be able to read tea leaves in the garden forever.