Agatha’s Viral Song All Along Was Warning Us All Along

Even before Disney Plus premiered its Marvel Cinematic Universe show Agatha Always Alreadyit was clear that Disney had adapted the climactic song from episode 2, “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road,” to become a massive viral hit. Showrunner Jac Schaeffer went to some of Disney’s current heavyweight songwriters, Frozen composers Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, to create the song — a sequel to their viral hit “Agatha All Along” from WandaVisionwhich gave the new series its title. Disney previewed the show with a live performance of the song at D23The company released the first two episodes simultaneously, so that new viewers could get right to the introduction of the song at the end of the second episode. And right after that premiere, Disney was ready to go with a behind the scenes look at its creationand several official versions of the song: the “True Crime Version” and the “Sacred hymn version.”

But it’s also clear at this point that the song isn’t just a marketing tool — it’s a runner to unlock the series for viewers. For anyone paying close attention to the lyrics, it was clear that the big change at the end of Episode 3 was coming sooner or later. “Ballad of the Witches’ Road” didn’t just warn us of what was coming: It likely told us what was coming next.

(Editorial note: Spoilers for episode 3 of Agatha Always Already.)

“Ballad of the Witches’ Road” chronicles the entire process by which Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) and her cynically scrappy, ragtag coven open the door to the Witches’ Road: They gather witches aligned with fire, water, earth, and air, and use a “circle sewn with fate”—the witches introduced to Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone) by some as-yet-unveiled force—to “unlock the hidden gate.” And then they go underground, following the “down, down, down” refrain—a polysemy that can be read simultaneously as “descending into the abyss” and “advancing along the path.”

The warning for episode 3 comes in the line, “If there’s one way, we’ll go on.” That line explicitly tells the searchers what to do if one of them dies along the way — and it lets viewers know in advance that death is a real possibility on this journey. The rest of that line, “spirit as our guide,” suggests that poor Mrs. Hart (Debra Jo Rupp) will return in a new form after her ignominious death at the end of the episode, and that she’ll be crucial in helping the rest of the witches on their journey.

Once you start to treat the lyrics as a road map for the show, they start to feel like foreshadowing. (Or spoilers, if you like.) It’s not that we needed the song to know that someone might die on the journey – Lilia and her fellow witches make that clear with their horror and disbelief when they learn that Agatha plans to take the road. It’s more that, given how central Disney has made the song to the show’s marketing and framing, having explicit instructions about how characters should handle specific developments and what comes next starts to feel a bit like hanging Chekhov’s guns on the walls.

So what else can we expect, according to the ballad? We’ve already seen a payoff for “I stary not from the path,” given what happened when Mrs. Hart did so. “I hold death’s hand in mine,” however, seems less straightforward and literal: It could mean anything from physical contact with Mrs. Hart’s ghost to just another reminder that the road is dangerous. Perhaps it has more to do with the hallucinations in Episode 3 that each member of the coven has, which are seemingly connected to people from their past who may be dead.

Debra Jo Rupp’s return as “spirit guide” seems like an obvious move, given how little time Mrs. Hart was given to reveal or explore anything about her character. In particular, she didn’t seem to even know she was a witch, or have any idea what a witch was, and yet she seemed to qualify as one for the purposes of the ballad ritual. It would seem odd to drop such a powerful distinction between her and the other characters and then never fully address it.

“Many miles of tricks and trials” also seems obvious, in a broad sense — it suggests that the protagonists will spend the majority of the season navigating the ins and outs of the Road, along with navigating their various issues with each other, their history, and their own magic, leading to the “glory shall be yours” ending in which the survivors are given the power they desire.

The first line that throws me off is “Familiar by thy side”, since none of the witch characters seem to have familiars except for Agatha, and she seems to have left Señor Scratchy behind when she and her group went down the stairs to the Road. To further emphasize the importance of the ballad to the show, the episode titles for Season 1 are lyrics to the song, so we can probably expect an episode titled “Familiar By Thy Side” at some point. Maybe the witches will get their own pets there, or we’ll find out that they all already have familiars and can summon them at will. Since the MCU has essentially said nothing about what familiars are or what they can do (partly because of a pivotal scene involving Señor Scratchy be cut off from the WandaVision end), all sorts of things can happen with this.

But the payoff I’m most interested in is the one where we find out what “all that is wrong is right and all that is bad is right” means. The MCU has never before suggested that all witches’ magic is inherently evil and malevolent, so I expect that line refers to an event that reveals something more about what it means to be a witch in this setting. Perhaps there’s a test the characters must pass by treating fair as foul and foul as fair, a line from the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth that’s explicitly stated in the song’s opening line. It’s hard to believe that those lines mean something as simple as “witchcraft is evil and all witches are monsters” — not in an environment as friendly to monsters as the MCU.

Whatever it means, it’s clear that Schaeffer wants viewers to look to the song (and the episode titles) for clues as to what’s going on. Agatha and the coven have already begun quoting the song’s lyrics as rules and guidelines, and I suspect they’ll soon be thinking the same thing, attempting to dissect and interpret the lyrics to figure out what comes next. They’ll likely start speculating about the song as early as Episode 4, as they decide what to do with Sharon. We might as well join them.