‘Agatha All Along’ Recap: Lilia’s Head-Scratching Backstory Leaves Many Questions As Coven Faces Tarot Trial
SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from Wednesday’s episode of Agatha All Along.
Now that we know Teen aka Billy Maximoff’s motive, he and Agatha are back on the Witches Road.
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To catch up on Episode 6, click here. Otherwise, let’s dive into Episode 7, which begins not with Agatha or Billy, but with Patti LuPone’s Lilia. She and Jen (Sasheer Zamata) were also thrown off the Road by Billy, and they’ve yet to be seen since.
Lilia is falling when she first appears on screen, wearing a pink gown and a crown, dressed much like Glinda the Good Witch. But that’s all for now, as the scene fades to Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) and Billy (Joe Locke) trekking down the Road again.
Agatha is trying to taunt Billy into talking to her, but all she gets out of him is, “Where’s Rio?” — a valid question, as Aubrey Plaza‘s Green Witch has been missing in action as well. Agatha deflects.
“Any other queries of your old babysitter?” she says. “I’m your mom’s ex best friend.”
He shoots another tough one at her: “Is Wanda Maximoff really dead?”
“Yes. No. Maybe,” Agatha replies, coyly.
Agatha claims she saw a body, though she’s not sure if anyone else did. Soon, they’re upon the next trial, as they spot an eery mansion looming ahead. Billy is still having a hard time trusting Agatha, and he says he’s begun to question whether she’s ever walked the Road at all.
As they walk through the doors of the mansion, their clothes transform once again. Agatha is dressed as the Wicked Witch of the West (green skin and all), and Billy dons horns much like those of Maleficent. After they remark on their new looks, they find a stone table in the center of the room that reads, “your path winds out of time.” That’s when Billy notices the tarot deck. When he picks it up, the timer begins.
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He gives Agatha a tarot reading, which turns out to be deadly, as they soon realize there are swords in the ceiling that will fall if they get the reading wrong. Agatha rips the deck from his hand, saying there’s no skill to tarot, and begins slamming random cards down. More swords fall from the ceiling, with one nearly piercing Billy, who jumps out of the way just in time.
Meanwhile, we’re back with Lilia, and Jen is with her now. This appears to be moments after they disappear into the mud. As they’re trying to find a way out, Lilia is confused, and Jen is pretty angry.
Lilia is acting more confused than usual, and soon audiences are pulled into her mind, as she asks Jen, “Which is it, am I wispy, or am I kooky?” You may remember, this is what Lilia randomly asked Alice in the music studio in Episode 4. As she says it, the scene flashes back to that moment. Then, Lilia continues with that outburst, as she says, “Alice, don’t!” and the scene flashes to the previous trial in Episode 3, where Lilia randomly screamed “try to save Agatha!” as they were brainstorming the challenge.
Then someone asks, “Lilia, what do you see?” and an old woman from the Renaissance era is speaking to a young girl. She answers in Sicilian, and the old woman replies: “You are traveling. How long has it been?”
The next time the camera pans, Lilia is sitting across from the old woman, replying, “centuries.”
This woman says she’s giving Lilia her first lesson on tea leaves. When Lilia peers in the cup, she’s transported back to Jen, under the Road. She gasps, and Jen assumes she’s confused again, but Lilia lashes out, insisting she isn’t confused. She accuses Jen of thinking she’s old and senile, and Jen rebuttals by asking what she should see instead.
“The flow of time is an illusion, Jen. Most people don’t realize that,” she says, explaining that, as a child, she experienced her life out of sequence. She would see flashes in her mind, and now it’s happening again…and it’s getting worse. She doesn’t know why, but can only assume that means she’s “close to the end.”
Just then, she’s pulled into the trial, dressed in that Glinda outfit, with Agatha sitting on top of her. Turns out, Agatha was pushing her down to save her from being impaled by a sword. Oh, and Jen is also there, dressed as the hag form of the Evil Queen from Snow White.
When Lilia lays eyes on Billy, she storms for him, pinning him against a wall. He profusely apologizes, explaining that he wasn’t hiding his powers, as they were a surprise to him to. Lilia realizes that he’s reading her mind and, now that the sigil has been destroyed, she says she remembers Billy from the bar mitzvah. She puts aside her anger, because she realizes they need her help with the trial. Billy asks if she’s the one who put the sigil on him, and she admits it was her, because she saw what would happen to him that night and knew he needed time.
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Just then, she has a flashback again, going back to the last trial, when things were going crazy in that cabin, and Lilia yelled, “I hated this the first time.” Then, it flashes back to the first time they met her, when she turned away from them to scream with her hands over her ears. Suddenly, she’s back with the old woman, and she’s still yelling.
“Tell me about your life now,” the woman demands, asking if she has a coven. Lilia questions what for, since it has never worked out for her in the past. She asks the woman how to control what’s happening, but the woman says her only task is “to see.”
Then, she’s back in the tunnel with Jen, trying to figure out a way to escape after being thrown off the Road. (Talk about a confusing timeline.)
Jen asks why Lilia’s ability eventually stopped manifesting, and Lilia says it’s because she wanted it to. She started ignoring it, and it went away. That’s when they stumble upon Agatha and Billy, who are bickering as she and Jen fall through the door. No sword falls on her this time as she approaches the table to observe the tarot.
She sits across from Billy, ready to give him a reading. He needs to ask a question imperative to his existence on Earth. “Am I William, or am I Billy?” he blurts out, and the table stops spinning. A very good question, she says.
Billy pulls a card and it’s the Magician. She lays it on the table, and still a sword falls, but Lilia is convinced she’s got it right. She continues, as Billy pulls The Sun, then…that’s when the sword falls on Lilia and she screams, “get off me!” just as she did in Agatha’s basement in the second episode.
She’s back with the old woman, asking: “What am I missing?” The old woman pushes her, asking Lilia why she is on this journey, to which Lilia answers, “To get my powers back.”
“Is it gone? Where did it go? This is not the true reason,” the old woman goads. Lilia responds, “I’m a forgotten woman,” so the woman says she needs to remember. Lilia then reveals that the old woman was once part of their coven and, due to her ability, she saw that her entire coven would die from a plague before it happened. Still, she couldn’t change it. The old woman has made peace with death, but Lilia clearly has not.
“When will it come for me?” she asks. “I was falling. I will fall.”
The woman answers: “Yes. What will you do with your remaining time?”
All of a sudden, Lilia is hovering over Jen, covered in mud after being kicked off the Road. She explains the son of the Scarlet Witch kicked them off telepathically, and they need to find their way back. She tells everything to Jen, knowing that in a few minutes she’ll forget all of this. Just then, they hear the Salem Seven on their tail and hide. As they watch them glide past, Jen wants to see what they’re up to. But instead of go after them, Lilia explains they need to find Agatha and Billy in the next trial.
Back in the trial, all the pieces click into place. Lilia realizes she is the Traveler, aka the Queen of Cups. She is empathetic, intuitive, inner voice to be trusted. She places it in the middle of the table, and all the swords stay in the ceiling. She throws down the Three of Pentacles for What’s Missing. The Path Behind is the Knight of Wands, and the Path Ahead is the High Priestess. Obstacles? Three of Swords. With barely any time left, she finally reaches the Destination…and the scene cuts back to Lilia and Jen falling into the Road once more.
This time, Lilia encounters Rio. Except, it isn’t Rio. It’s death. Or, Rio is death. Remember how the ouija board spelled out that Death was in the room with them in Episode 4? Looks like it wasn’t wrong after all.
It cuts back to the trial room, where the ceiling of swords is about to collapse on everyone, and Agatha takes the Death card in the center of the table, saving them from being impaled. The ceiling retreats, and the door to the Road opens. Lilia tells them she’s realized that Rio is Death.
Agatha admits she’s known all along, shrugging as she says, “What can I say? I like the bad boys.”
Lilia ushers them out and back onto the Road before locking herself in the room, sacrificing herself for her coven. It seems the Salem Seven were lurking, and Lilia managed to lure them into the trial room, where she flips the Tower Reversed card (which she mentioned out of context in Episode 6) so it is upright, upheaving the entire room. It stuns the witches, sending them all flying as the room spins upside down, each falling onto a sword. Lilia holds onto the table to save herself, but eventually she lets go, allowing herself to fall.
That’s the scene we saw at the very beginning of the episode. The screen cuts to black, and then we see a young, Renaissance-era girl running to begin her first lesson on tea leaves with that old woman in Sicily.
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