Agatha All Along’s final episode took us to the end of the Witches Road but also back in time. We went to Salem in 1750 to discover more about Agatha’s life and her relationship with her son Nicholas Scratch. Predictably, it was a sad story that explains why she’s such an agent of chaos in the present day. Here’s what really happened to Nicholas Scratch in Agatha All Along and how it affected this entire journey down the Road.
Agatha is alone in the woods and gives birth to a baby boy. Shortly afterward, Death arrives to claim her son Nicholas. She begs her lover not to take her son and Death agrees to offer more time. Agatha wants to know how much more time but Death leaves before answering. She lives with this looming fear that Death will take her son. As he is born, she recites the line, “I spoke no spell. I said no incantation. You… You I made from scratch.”
This explains the Nicholas Scratch moniker, but also presents two possibilities about how Nicholas came to be. This could be taken as Agatha had a natural born child with a man, which isn’t out of the realm of possibilities. He doesn’t exhibit any clear powers and ends up being rather sickly. Even comic Nicholas Scratch doesn’t have an identified father. But there’s also the chance that Agatha, a powerful witch, crafted her son from nothing, much like Wanda did in WandaVision. That would be another source of connection between the two.
Either way, Agatha and Nicholas begin this long process of killing witches. He provides the setup, which we see when he steals and sings songs, particularly a little tune that eventually turns into the Witches’ Road theme song. And Agatha absorbs their essence. When he asks why they do it, she says it is to survive and says that they cannot live among the witches because they will try to kill them. It’s an odd explanation that doesn’t fully answer why she does it.
Perhaps it is because she hopes to be powerful and protective enough to keep her son from a sad fate, even though she knows it probably won’t work. But, there’s also a chance that she thinks those deaths will somehow keep Death fed enough to leave her son alone. It seems to work for a while, until Nicholas decides one day to not go along with killing witches. Death comes for him that very night and Agatha is devastated. That Three of Swords tarot card really defines her guilt of being powerful enough to do magic and kill others but not enough to save Nicholas.
But a young woman who heard the song comes to her for help to see the fictional Road. So Agatha comes up with a whole new ruse to take witches spirits/essence by gathering covens to go on the Road only for it to not exist. She’s able to get away with this for centuries as the legend persists, and even told Billy that was her intention when they gathered in her basement. But that time, Billy was powerful enough to actually craft a Road, just like the magician he is.
Agatha eventually gives herself to Death but her ghost lingers, afraid to go to the other side and face her son. So she becomes the ghostly guide for Billy to help him find his brother, whose soul is in a boy somewhere in the world. Maybe one day Agatha will be able to reunite with her son on the other side.