‘Agatha All Along’ confirms Aubrey Plaza’s true character

Warning: This article contains spoilers from Agatha All Along episode 7, “Death’s Hand in Mine.”

Prior to the release of Agatha All Along episode 7 on Wednesday night, star Patti LuPone told Entertainment Weekly exclusively that her character, divination witch Lilia Calderu, would be instrumental in piecing together some of the puzzle pieces laid earlier in the season. She just purposefully withheld a pretty big part of that tying-together.

Aubrey Plaza is not playing comic book character Rio Vidal, as the WandaVision sequel series previously laid out. She is, in fact, playing an entirely different — and an entirely more powerful — role: Death herself.

“Death’s Hand in Mine” was told largely through the perspective of LuPone’s Lilia who, as supportive friend Jennifer Hale (Sasheer Zamata) put it, is “going through it.” The flow of time, Lilia explains, is an illusion. And because of her intense power to see events throughout time, Lilia is now in a situation where she’s experiencing her own life in a non-sequential order. The audience then gets to see through the episode how her perspective bounces around her own timeline, which explains her inherent “ramblings.”

For example, Lilia’s throwaway, unfinished line “Alice don’t…” in episode 4 was the beginning of her warning for Ali Ahn’s character, while Lilia’s seemingly random “…try to save Agatha” bit in episode 3 was the ending of that sentence. Lilia was trying to warn Alice of the moment in episode 5 where Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) would perhaps inadvertently steal her magic and kill her.

Because of Lilia mentally bouncing around time, episode 7 also lays out how she’s been secretly predicting the answers needed to succeed the divination trial on the Witches’ Road. That leads us to the Plaza reveal. After much soul searching across time, Lilia reads her own fortune through tarot cards and pieces together the clues for the rest of the coven.

When they conjure a new green witch on the Witches’ Road, Rio appears and declares herself to be “the green witch.” In the Stevie Nicks-inspired fourth episode, Rio tells Agatha, “You get your power and I get my bodies.” In episode 5, the ouija board informs the witches that “death” is present in the room, causing Rio to cackle maniacally. And then there’s the telling line from Rio herself, “All roads lead to me.”

The moment shows Plaza’s Death in her true form, which is much closer to the Death that Lilia foresaw in the oceanside setting of the witches’ trial in episode 3. To quote a familiar Marvel Cinematic Universe tagline, it’s all connected. We then have to deal with the emotional baggage of Lilia now meeting her own death by sacrificing herself to save the remaining coven from the Salem Seven.

Much like Joe Locke’s Teen getting the unveiling as Wanda Maximoff’s son Billy, this was a character reveal the diehard fans saw coming. Thanks to some toy leaks, Plaza’s Death was already out in the ether. But, again, to quote Agatha All Along showrunner and lead writer Jac Schaeffer, “It’s about how we peel back the layers. It’s our job to make the reveals exciting and satisfying. Now when I see the theories, I still get a little nervous, but I have the experience of WandaVision, a voice in my head that’s like, ‘Well, no one knows the how.'”

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It’s also an interesting spin on the character of Death from Marvel Comics. The “Mad Titan” Thanos (ever heard of him?) long courted Death as a romantic interest, but Death was Death and did not give the kind of affection Thanos was expecting. The Marvel Cinematic Universe now remixes that material, while maintaining its spirit, by having Hahn’s Agatha have romantic history with Plaza’s Death. As the power-devouring sorceress declares cheekily in episode 7, “If you want a straight answer, ask a straight person!”

We now have one more week to go before the end of Agatha All Along, which will conclude next Wednesday night on Disney+. On the eve before All Hallows’ Eve, when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead are said to be at their thinnest, we’ll see what the show does with this latest character reveal.