Over the course of the season on Agatha All Along, the show has been teasing that Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) had to do the unthinkable in order to possess the Darkhold, the mystical, all-powerful tome she owned when we first met her in WandaVision. So, with the finale on Disney+, how did Agatha get the Darkhold?
Uh… No idea, friendo. Spoilers for the Agatha All Along finale past this point, but despite all the hints and clues that Agatha traded her child, Nicholas Scratch, for the Darkhold, that is definitively not what happened.
To take a step back, as mentioned, by the time we meet Agatha in the “present” she possesses the Darkhold. Then Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) takes it, after beating Agatha in battle in the WandaVision finale. In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, after being driven mad by the book and almost bringing about the end of the multiverse, Wanda destroyed every copy of it in existence. That’s what Agatha discovers early on in Agatha All Along… Though she doesn’t quite know it while still under Wanda’s spell in the series premiere. If you’ll recall, she found a burnt shelf in the Westview library… That was all the Darkholds in the multiverse, destroyed.
As the show continued, the book was referenced several times. Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata) told Billy Maximoff (Joe Locke) that the rumor is Agatha traded her son for the Darkhold. Later in the episode, under the influence of poisoned wine, Agatha had a vision of a baby’s cradle. Inside that cradle? The Darkhold.
To add fuel to the fire, it’s been strongly hinted throughout that Agatha traded her son for the book. Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) even explained that she had to do something terrible that hurt someone back in the day, someone she loved. It seemed pretty clear these two things were related, right?
Nope.
Nicholas Scratch Has Nothing To Do With The Darkhold
Without getting too in the weeds here, Nicholas Scratch’s death and what Rio was referring to have nothing to do with the Darkhold. He was supposed to die in childbirth but is given more time. At around six years old, Rio takes him in the middle of the night when he dies of a light cough. Agatha is even asleep at the time, so there’s no bargaining going on, or trading for mystical instruments. It’s just a sad death, probably caused by sleeping outside too much and not feeding her child real food. Hot tip: feed your kids real food, not witch blasts.
In fact, when we catch up with Agatha in 1750, she doesn’t seem to have the book at all. Not only that, a montage sequence following that shows her sucking witches dry of their power by conning them into believing the Witches’ Road is real (it’s complicated), and there’s no shot of the Darkhold or reference in any way. We get to see time go forward all the way to the 1980s, too, so it’s possible she obtained the Darkhold sometime after that. Not that she needed to be holding the Darkhold in every shot, mind you. But why would she need to con these covens is she possessed one of the most powerful artifacts in existence? I guess “she loves killing witches” might be part of the reason. Possibly.
Is it important exactly when and how Agatha got the Darkhold? Not exactly. It is, if it relates to Nicholas Scratch’s death because that impacts the characters emotionally. But it doesn’t relate. Instead, all those hints of a connection amount to nothing, and we still don’t know how or when she got the book (and no, it was not from Ghost Rider after he got it over in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.).
I guess chalk this one up as yet another MCU dangling plot line that may or may not be resolved at some point in the future.
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