It was right there in the title of the show. On Agatha All Along, pretty much any misdeed you can imagine was caused by Agatha, all along. But there’s one dangling thread worth discussing, something that wasn’t answered in the series: did Agatha kill Lorna Wu?
In case your memory too chock full of theories after that finale, here’s a brief recap of what we know. At some point in the past, the Wu family was saddled with a curse. We know thanks to Episode 4, “If I Can’t Reach You Let My Song Teach You” that the curse is a normally invisible fire demon that burns its victims to ash. But for most of the Wu family history, they just refer to it as a mysterious curse.
Jumping forward to some time likely in the late ’70s, Lorna Wu (Elizabeth Anweis) was touring with her band, Lorna Wu and the Coral Shore, on the back of their hit single, “Ballad of the Witches’ Road” when she felt her mother die by the curse, thousands of miles away. Though the rules of the curse aren’t explicitly stated in the show, it seems likely that it works its way down generations, meaning it was Lorna’s turn next.
Lorna, though, wasn’t worried about herself… She was mostly concerned about protecting her daughter, Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn). She encouraged Alice to get a protective tattoo (which she did). And as Agatha’s de facto coven in Agatha All Along figures out, Lorna turning “Ballad of the Witches’ Road” into a hit song wasn’t just an attempt to walk the Road and eliminate their family curse… It was also a protective spell she cast on her daughter. As long as the song was a hit and played all over the world, Alice was safe from the curse.
While she was able to save Alice, Lorna couldn’t save herself. The curse caught up to her while on tour. Lorna died in a hotel fire, caused by the curse. And then years later, Alice was able to eliminate the curse on Billy Maximoff’s (Joe Locke) version of the Witches’ Road. The Road may not be real — as we discover in the series finale — but the curse being eliminated did really happen.
So yeah, the curse killed Lorna Wu, not Agatha… Right?
Agatha Harkness May Have Indirectly Killed Lorna Wu
One little detail that isn’t explained in Agatha All Along is why the Wu family was cursed originally. Where does the curse come from? Why was it placed on them? There aren’t any direct answers in the series, and we may never get them… Particularly because there won’t be an Agatha All Along Season 2, most likely.
But it’s not too much of a leap to venture that Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) was the one who cursed the Wu family. As we discover in Episode 8, “Follow Me My Friend To Glory At The End,” Agatha gave the doctor who bound Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata) the spell to do so, something Agatha just remembered. And in Episode 6, “Familiar By Thy Side,” we got a montage of Billy researching Agatha and discovering she was likely behind some of history’s greatest disasters, from the Hindenburg to the Titanic, to, uh, being Jolene in Dolly Parton’s hit song.
So why wouldn’t Agatha be the one to cast the curse on the Wu family? In the finale, “Maiden Mother Crone,” we see her tangling repeatedly with ethnically diverse groups of witches throughout hundreds of years of history. So it’s likely that she’s been involved in a lot more than we see on screen. Her casting a generational curse on the Wu family and not even remembering she did it is entirely within character for Agatha.
Lorna Wu Used The “Ballad Of The Witches’ Road” The Way Agatha Couldn’t
I’ll also note that if Agatha did cast the curse, it makes this particular knot in history even more interesting. Agatha and her son Nicholas Scratch created “Ballad of the Witches’ Road” as part of a con game so Agatha could suck the power from her fellow witches. The Witches’ Road isn’t real, and the song technically has no power. It was something Agatha crafted with her son so that she could gain power while protecting him from Death (Aubrey Plaza). It didn’t work.
If Agatha did cast the curse on Lorna’s family, Lorna Wu then turned the “Ballad of the Witches’ Road” into something real… A protective spell. And she cast it on Alice, saving Alice’s life for decades to come. She took a song built on destruction, and turned it into a spell of protection, for her child. What Agatha was unable to do, Lorna did.
To put a capper on it, once clear of the curse Alice was able to access her power. She blasted a possessed Agatha, who proceeded to suck her dry, killing her. If Agatha did cast the curse, she murdered not just Alice, but the entire Wu family. And when one of them finally escaped the curse, she killed them, too. That’s… Pretty sad, to put it lightly.
Obviously, this is all supposition, and you can take whatever you want from it. Maybe Agatha didn’t cast the curse on the Wu family. Perhaps it was a totally unrelated event. But given the poignancy and cyclical nature of what we’ve laid out above, it makes the show — and Alice and Lorna’s plotline — richer if you do believe it was Agatha, all along.
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