We’re Not Getting 'Agatha All Along' Season 2 Because Jac Schaeffer Doesn’t Do Season 2s
Thank you Patti LuPone for your service, your optimism was much appreciated
It turns out Jac Schaeffer doesn’t go down the same road twice. Patti LuPone, who played divination-specializing witch Lilia Calderu in Marvel Studios’s Agatha All Along, really wanted a second season. She learned in a pretty hard way that not only would there not be while filming, learning such while finding out that even if there was to be one, her character would be dead, which happened in episode 7, when she turned the house over to impale the Salem Seven, and herself in the process. Agatha All Along was never going to go beyond a miniseries, no matter how their awards competition submissions looked.
“There won’t be one,” LuPone told Bravo personality Andy Cohen on his Sirius XM podcast Andy Cohen Live. “Jac Schaeffer, the creator, came into my trailer and she said, ‘Patti, I’m just here to tell you that Lilia’s going to die,’ and I went, ‘But I wanted a second season.’” To emphasize that it wasn’t just her, LuPone explained “[Schaffer] said, ‘I don’t do second seasons. She said, ‘They wanted me to do a second season of WandaVision and I didn’t.’ She said, ‘There’s too much to write,’ so she does one-offs and I’m really hoping and praying that someday I get to work with her again because she’s magic.” In a way, this explains not only the ending of the miniseries where Agatha Harkness debuted, with Wanda Maximoff and the newly-revived Vision in completely separate places, but why she’s not doing the Vision-centered series once known as Vision Quest, and Terry Matalas is.
Agatha All Along wrapped up in October with two episodes. Aubrey Plaza’s Rio Vidal had been revealed to be Death in Lilia’s death episode, and ultimately, all roads, even the Witch’s Road, lead to her. And while Billy embraced becoming Wiccan, Agatha embraced death with a long sensual and literal kiss. At the time, Schaeffer said she wanted the series to dive deep into Agatha’s psyche, exploring how she came to be the clever, self-serving witch we’ve learned to love, and the finale peels her 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.”
But even as Billy realizes he conjured the Witches Road, which was never real until he made it so, Agatha knows that even in death, she can’t move on. Face what she did with her son. The actual finale episode explored it all. Agatha’s son, Nicholas Scratch was nearly stillborn, with Death coming to take Nicky at birth, but Agatha pleads for more time; it is granted. Agatha and Nicholas spend his years scamming other witches to enhance Agatha’s power. The Ballad of the Witches Road was their song, but when Death does claim him, probably somewhere ten or younger, it completely untethers Agatha from the groundedness of their relationship, something she praises the episode’s director Gandja Monteiro and cinematographer Isiah Donté Lee for. “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.” She continued “We wanted the Nicky sequence to be very intimate, lyrical, warm, and authentic… 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.”
Schaeffer says that she always knew the series would end with Agatha’s death and return as a ghost. “It wasn’t about killing off the character,” Schaeffer says. “It was about the evolution of this character: What is her next phase?” In the present day of the finale, Billy gets over his guilt over what the road did to Lilia, Sharon, and Alice, largely because they would’ve fallen to her anyway. The now-silver-haired Agatha managed to convince him not to banish her, they seal the road entrance, memorialize the fallen, and set off to find Billy’s twin brother Tommy.
