There are many movies and episodes of TV that embrace the challenge of a non-linear narrative, but perhaps none more famously or successfully than Christopher Nolan’s Memento or the Desmond-centric Season 4 episode of Lost. However, with Marvel Studios’ Agatha All Along, and more specifically, its seventh episode, “Death’s Hands in Mine,” a new entry has joined the ranks of top-tier non-linear storytelling.
Agatha All Along, a nine-episode spinoff of WandaVision, aired on Disney+ from September to October 2024. The titular witch, Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn), first made her Marvel Cinematic Universe debut in WandaVision, ending the show trapped and powerless.
Now, three years later, in an effort to regain her magical abilities, Agatha is forced to assemble a coven of witches to access the legendary Witches’ Road. This “road” is a realm full of magical trials that, if completed, will grant a witch whatever she most desires. One such member of Agatha’s unlikely coven is Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone), a Sicilian divination witch and the oldest of the group at more than 450 years old.
On the road, each witch faces a trial meant to test her specific skill set, and in Lilia’s case, hers involves a Tarot reading in the tower of a medieval castle. Written by Gia King and Cameron Squires, with directing from creator/showrunner/executive producer Jac Schaeffer, Lilia’s trial takes place in Season 1, Episode 7, “Death’s Hand in Mine.”
A Tarot reading for a divination witch may seem simple enough if not for the dozens of swords dangling from the ceiling that threaten to plummet to the floor one by one whenever a wrong card is pulled. If that wasn’t enough, the ceiling is also rigged to slowly descend, creating an added time pressure for the trial. Finally, to complicate matters even further, Lilia, the lynchpin of this trial, keeps “bopping” (in the words of Schaeffer) back and forth between three different locations and moments in time, only one of which is the trial itself.
It’s important to note that, throughout the season leading up to Episode 7, Lilia is portrayed as being a little “off” at times. Occasionally, she blurts out seemingly nonsensical words or phrases and then can’t seem to remember that the outbursts ever took place. One interpretation of this characterization is that it’s a commentary on the aging population’s greater risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, but within the text of Agatha All Along, Lilia’s affliction is simply described as her being plagued by a non-linear existence.
As with the examples cited at the top of this article, Episode 7 is structurally unique in that we, as the audience, experience it the way Lilia herself has spent the better part of five centuries — completely out of sequence. “The flow of time is an illusion,” she tells fellow witch Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata) as they make their way through underground tunnels. In addition to her and Jen’s disjointed quest to find their way back to the rest of the coven, Lilia also jumps in and out of a conversation with her maestra (Laura Boccaletti) that’s taking place in 16th-century Sicily. It’s this interaction that sets the stage for the pivotal Tarot reading to come.
Lilia is asked by her maestra, who’s aware her student is visiting from the future, whether she has found herself a new coven (Lilia’s original coven, of which her maestra was a part, all died from a fever Lilia foresaw as a child but was helpless to prevent). Lilia quickly rebuffs the suggestion: “It didn’t work out for me the first time. It’s sure not going well for me now. It’s better to be a hermit. To be a fraud.”
She then begs her maestra for help to figure out her worsening affliction but is merely chided instead. Her maestra’s reply — “Your task is not to control, but to see.” — so perfectly encapsulates Lilia’s journey throughout this season, but especially this episode. She’s meant to understand her fate and find peace with it, not to reverse or otherwise attempt to influence it.
At one point, when Lilia is actually present in her trial, she begins to do a reading for a member of their coven, Billy Maximoff (Joe Locke), believing him to be the “querent.” However, much to the coven’s chagrin, this fails to prevent swords from continuing to drop from the ceiling. It’s only after another enlightening moment in the past with her maestra that Lilia properly realizes her mistake. “I know what I did wrong,” she declares before “bopping” back to the divination trial with renewed vigor.
Just like her maestra has been encouraging all along, Lilia finally understands that the “Safe Passage” Tarot spread, which must be completed to pass the trial, is actually for her. She is the first card in the spread, the “traveler” meant for this journey, not Billy. The card she pulls from the deck to represent this is the Queen of Cups, which, as Lilia explains, means “empathetic, intuitive, inner voice to be trusted.”
In a meta sense, this moment marks the acknowledgment of one of the customized Tarot cards originally revealed as part of the show’s marketing. (Beautifully-designed Tarot cards were created by showrunner’s assistant Brittany Horn as promotional material for Agatha All Along, and eagle-eyed fans began to notice that each card seemed to be associated with a specific character in the show.) In a similar fashion to Lilia’s collection of odd moments sprinkled throughout earlier episodes, there were also several instances where she would proclaim the name of one of these specific Tarot cards entirely unprompted — or so we thought at the time.
When we reach Agatha All Along Episode 7, all of the following cards have already been spoken by Lilia at some point in the season: Three of Pentacles, High Priestess, Three of Swords, Knight of Wands, and Tower Reversed. The only cards remaining are the aforementioned Queen of Cups, and the Death card.
Once Lilia correctly divines herself to be the Queen of Cups, she can proceed with the rest of her reading. The next card is what’s missing, or the reason for her quest, and Lilia pulls Three of Pentacles. This card represents her coven itself: “collaboration, community, singular voices waiting to harmonize.” As Lilia emotionally admits to both herself and us, “I needed you. My coven.” It’s just like her maestra was trying to remind her.
Next is the path behind, referring to wounds suffered and lessons learned. The card Lilia pulls here is Knight of Wands, which came up in Episode 5 when coven member Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn) died sacrificing herself to save Agatha from her mother’s ghost. “Full of fire. Fights bravely,” Lilia says as she pays tribute to her fallen friend.
Following this is the path ahead, a space for growth and discovery. This card is High Priestess, attributed to Jen when Lilia first laid eyes on her in Episode 2. As Lilia explains, this card reflects someone with “immense spiritual power, unable or unwilling to use it,” which perfectly fits Jen’s situation (her motivation to embark on the road was to break the binding spell that’s prevented her from accessing her magic for the last 100 years).
The Safe Passage spread also includes obstacles, in this case, represented by the Three of Swords card. Lilia called out this card in Episode 4 when Agatha feared for Billy’s life, who’d just suffered a penetrating wound to his abdomen. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this card means heartbreak, sorrow, and grief, all of which Agatha experienced in that traumatic moment.
The penultimate card in the spread is the windfall or unexpected good fortune. Lilia pulls The Tower card here, but it’s reversed. Normally, this card signals disaster, destruction, or sudden upheaval, but reversed, it means miraculous transformation. Lilia identified this card in Episode 6, when she was working as a fortune teller and met William Kaplan shortly before he would die in an accident and have his body taken over by the soul of Billy.
The final card Lilia pulls represents the traveler’s and, therefore, her destination. With only one Tarot card from the show’s marketing yet to be seen, it’s pretty clear what this final one will be and what it’ll mean for Lilia’s fate. Sure enough, the destination is Death, and this card being drawn is coupled with the much-anticipated reveal that Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza), Agatha’s ex-girlfriend/unpredictable interloper on the coven’s trip down the Witches’ Road, is actually Death herself.
With this, Lilia successfully completes the Safe Passage spread and, subsequently, the trial. Agatha, Billy, and Jen, ecstatic to have survived, prepare to return to the road for the next trial, but Lilia doesn’t join them. Instead, she sends them all out the door ahead of her, revealing to Jen at the last minute that she has no intention of leaving. She emotionally confesses that she “loved being a witch” before shutting the door and deliberately trapping herself in the tower, thus ensuring her imminent death.
Because this episode is presented from Lilia’s disrupted point-of-view, while the rest of the show proceeds more or less linearly, it allows for the unveiling of her Tarot spread to be this beautiful and poignant culmination of the entirety of Agatha All Along thus far. The scene emphasizes the necessity of each member of the coven to Lilia’s journey, recontextualizes the meaning of every card she pulls, and legitimizes Tarot card reading in general as a form of witchcraft (earlier in the episode, Agatha dismissed it as a “con like any other,” requiring no skill or magic). Beyond merely passing the trial, Lilia’s reading grants her the clarity and peaceful acceptance of her own fate that she’s been seeking all along.
In finding her coven, she finds herself.
Agatha All Along is now streaming on Disney+.
First Featured Image Credit: ©Disney+