Marvel made a well-known mistake with the spooky ending.

This post contains spoilers for the finale of Agatha all the timealong with other Marvel titles.

In one of the last scenes on Wednesday evening Agatha all the time In the finale, Joe Locke's “Teen”, aka William Kaplan and/or Billy Maximoff, asks the now-ghostly Agatha if the others who died over the course of the miniseries have also become ghosts. She floats before him in purple robes and shakes her head in response. Her ghostly form gradually solidifies, and later in the episode Agatha somehow manages to take her brooch from Teen's hand and attach it to her semi-transparent self. So is she partly a ghost, effectively still someone who can physically and mentally live in this world even after she made a big deal about finally dying just an episode before? It doesn't make sense, but it doesn't have to. This is, after all, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where the rules are set and the points don't matter.

This season of Agatha all the time was a near-perfect television series until the two-part finale. Kathryn Hahn offered a humanized, complicated, tragic and funny interpretation of Marvel villain Agatha Harkness. Offshoot from 2021 WandaVision, Agatha all the time was an ambitious show in the same vein, dealing with a woman's grief, motherhood, and the way an origin story can become distorted over time. There seemed to be a lot at stake in this miniseries: the villainous witch Agatha led a coven of other wizards as they traversed the treacherous Witch Road to regain their ancient powers. At the end of the penultimate episode, three of the six witches (along with one civilian – the poor, beleaguered, confused Ms. Hart) were dead. Among the deceased was Agatha herself, who gave the series an emotional climax in episode 8 by giving her Gave up life and willingly accepted the kiss of death to spare Teen a similar fate.

However, before we could even recover from this emotional devastation, Episode 9 delivered another twist: Agatha returns in ghost form, essentially promising another season or spin-off and otherwise completely undermining the thematic mission of the entire series.

Death has always been at the heart of the series and the MCU itself. Episode 7, which focused primarily on Patti LuPone's Lilia Calderu, was one of the most well-constructed 30 minutes of television in recent memory – particularly daring since it deals with time travel and somehow managed to jump back and forth through time without confusing the plot or making holes. By the end of her journey, Lilia has internalized the truth that everyone must succumb to death at some point, and so she sacrifices her life so that her circle can continue to exist. How disappointing it was then that the following two chapters seemed to undermine the message of this episode. With Agatha's ghost comeback, Agatha all the time does what so many Marvel projects have done: reboots itself to maintain a stronghold of beloved intellectual property.

There is a clear reason why Agatha could have turned into a ghost instead of dying and remaining truly dead. One reason, of course, is fan service: in the comics, Agatha becomes a ghost and is resurrected more than once. In the meantime, Disney+ will air another show WandaVision spin-off, Vision Questwith Paul Bettany, in 2026. This time he plays a different, more ghostly Vision who still has some memories of the original. There's a good chance Agatha will show up, as she's helping Billy, one of Vision's sons, find his brother.

Death means something, even on a television show, but the way Marvel uses it and then reverses it feels cheap. There is the age-old practice of television series of introducing a new, somewhat minor character and killing them off at the end of the series, rather than killing off the main character, who might actually have to die for a more impactful ending. It's easier to kill Lilia, in part because she's played by Patti LuPone, who is absolutely not coming back for a spinoff because of her role Patti fucks LuPone and she doesn't have to do that shit. But Agatha can't really stay dead and buried, even if that would make the most sense for her thematically and narratively, because Hahn must now spend the next decade of her life contributing to the ongoing MCU IP project.

She is not the only one with this fate in the world of comics and films. Venom: The Last Dance was supposed to be the end of Sony's cartoonishly bad trilogy and free Tom Hardy, who certainly has better things to do than The. Instead, a post-credits scene suggested that Venom wasn't actually that dead and could soon be making his way to New York – and Spider-Man. Even Robert Downey Jr., who played the MCU's Iron Man from 2008 until the character's death in 2019 Avengers: Endgameis expected to return in two more avenger Films in 2026 and 2027 as Doctor Doom.

If no one dies, nothing is real, and everything can be reversed, then what's the point? What is at stake when a character can be brought back from the brink of death, when a plot can be restarted through the plot device of countless timelines and realities alone? WandaVision was a devastating and profound meditation on grief and anger; What was the point of her husband, the center of her torment, being rebooted as a separate being who also carries the baggage of the past?

I know that superhero shows and movies are not an ideal place to look for clarity and logic within the confines of our mortal reality. After all, Superman has been alive since the late 1930s. Thanos killed half the world and some of them still managed to come back. But as the MCU grows and attempts to convey more meaningful storytelling and real-world sentimentality to revive waning interest in the brand, the risk of death and permanent loss must be a part of it. Superhero films want to be taken seriously, and their audiences want to take them seriously too. But how can you grow the heart of the franchise if it can never happen? broken?