Marvel made a famous 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 of Wednesday evening Agatha all the time In the finale, Joe Locke’s Teen, also known as William Kaplan and/or Billy Maximoff, asks the now ghostly Agatha if the others who died during the miniseries have also become ghosts. She floats before him in lilac robes and shakes her head in response. Her spectral form solidifies little by little, and later in the episode Agatha somehow manages to swipe her brooch from Teen’s hand and attach it to her semi-transparent self. Is she then a partial ghost, still effectively someone who can physically and spiritually live in this world even after making a big deal out of finally dying just one episode earlier? It doesn’t really make any sense, but it doesn’t have to. This is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, after all, where the rules are made and the points don’t matter.

This season of Agatha all the time was, until the two-part finale, a near-perfect television series. Kathryn Hahn offered a humanized, complicated, tragic and funny interpretation of Marvel villain Agatha Harkness. Split from 2021 WandaVision, Agatha all the time was an ambitious show in a similar vein, also about a woman’s grief, motherhood and the way an origin story can become skewed over time. The stakes in this miniseries seemed high: the evil witch Agatha led a group of fellow magic wielders as they traversed the treacherous Witches’ Way in an attempt to regain their old powers. By the end of the penultimate episode, three of the six witches (along with one civilian – poor, beleaguered, confused Mrs. Hart) were dead. Among the deceased was Agatha herself, who brought the series to an emotional climax in episode 8 by laying down her life and willingly receiving Death’s kiss to spare Teen a similar fate.

But before we could even recover from that emotional devastation, Episode 9 delivered one more twist: Agatha returns in ghost form, essentially promising another season or another spinoff, and otherwise completely fulfilling the thematic mission of the entire show. undermines.

Death has always been central to the series and to the MCU itself. Episode 7, which focused primarily on Patti LuPone’s Lilia Calderu, was one of the most well-constructed 30-minute television series in recent memory – especially daring because it dealt with time travel and somehow managed to go back and forth jumping through time without a confusing or disorienting plot. holes. By the end of her journey, Lilia has internalized the truth that everyone must eventually succumb to death, and so she sacrifices her life so that her covenant can survive. How disappointing, then, that the next two chapters seemed to undermine the message of that same episode. With Agatha’s ghostly comeback, Agatha all the time does what so many Marvel projects have done: reboot itself to maintain a stronghold on beloved IP.

There’s a clear reason why Agatha might have turned into a ghost instead of dying and truly staying dead. One reason, of course, is fan service: in the comics, Agatha becomes a ghost and is resurrected more than once. Meanwhile, Disney+ will air another one WandaVision spinoff, Vision questwith Paul Bettany, in 2026. This time he stars as a different, spookier Vision who still has some memories of the original. There’s a good chance Agatha will show up as she accompanies Billy, one of Vision’s sons, to find his brother.

Death means something, even in a TV show, but the way Marvel deploys it and then reverses it feels cheap. There’s the age-old television franchise practice of introducing a new, slightly minor character and killing them off at the end of the series, rather than rejecting the main character who might actually have to die for a more impactful ending. For example, it’s easier to kill Lilia, in part because she’s played by Patti LuPone, who’s definitely not coming back for a spinoff because she Patti fucks LuPone and she doesn’t have to do stuff like this. 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 devote the next decade of her life to contributing to the ongoing IP project that is the MCU.

She’s not the only one with this fate in the world of comic books-turned-movies. Venom: The Last Dance should be the end of Sony’s cartoonishly bad trilogy, freeing Tom Hardy, who certainly has better things to do than this. Instead, a post-credits scene hinted that Venom wasn’t actually that dead and might be coming to New York – and to Spider-Man – soon. Even Robert Downey Jr., who played the MCU’s Iron Man from 2008 until the character’s death in 2019 Avengers: Endgamewill return in two more games Avengers films in 2026 and 2027 as Doctor Doom.

If no one dies, nothing is real and everything can be undone, what’s the point? Where are the stakes when a character can be brought back from the brink of death, when a storyline can be rebooted merely through the plot device of countless timelines and realities? WandaVision was a devastating and profound meditation on grief and anger; what was the point if her husband, the center of her suffering, was rebooted as a separate entity who also carries the baggage of the past?

I know that superhero shows and movies are not an ideal place to seek clarity and logic within the confines of our mortal reality. After all, Superman has been around since the late 1930s. Thanos killed half the world and some of them still managed to come back. But as the MCU grows and tries to tell more meaningful real-world stories and sentimentality to revive waning interest in the brand, the risk of death and forever loss has to be part of that. Superhero movies 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 that’s never possible? broken?