Marvel made a familiar mistake with the ghostly ending.

This post contains spoilers for the finale of Agatha All Alongalong with other Marvel titles.

In one of the last scenes of Wednesday night Agatha All Along finale, Joe Locke’s Teen, aka William Kaplan and/or Billy Maximoff, asks the now ghostly Agatha if the others who died throughout the miniseries have also become ghosts. Floating before him in purple robes, she shakes her head in response. Her spectral form solidifies little by little, and later in the episode Agatha somehow manages to swipe her brooch out of Teen’s hand and attach it to her semi-transparent self. Is she part ghost, so still really someone who can physically and spiritually live in this world, even after she made a big deal out of finally dying just one episode before? It doesn’t really make sense, but it doesn’t have to. After all, this is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

This season of Agatha All Along was, until the two-part finale, a nearly perfect series of television. Kathryn Hahn offered a humanized, complicated, tragic and funny interpretation of Marvel villain Agatha Harkness. Separated from the 2021s WandaVision, Agatha All Along was an ambitious show in the same vein, similarly 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 villainous witch Agatha led a coven of fellow magical practitioners in traversing the treacherous Witches’ Road 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 giving up her life and willingly receiving the Kiss of Death to spare Tea a similar fate.

Before we could even recover from the emotional devastation, however, episode 9 delivered another twist: Agatha returns in ghost form, essentially promising another season or another spin-off, and otherwise completely undercutting the show’s entire thematic mission.

Death has always been central to the series and to the MCU itself. Episode 7, which focused mainly on Patti LuPone’s Lilia Calderu, was one of the best-constructed 30 minutes of television in recent memory — especially daring since it dealt with time travel and somehow managed to jump back and forth through time without 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 pact can continue. How disappointing, then, that the two subsequent chapters seemed to undermine that very episode’s message. With Agatha’s ghostly comeback, Agatha All Along is doing what so many Marvel projects have done: rebooting itself to maintain a stronghold on the beloved IP.

There is a clear reason why Agatha might have been 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 resurrects more than once. Meanwhile, Disney+ is ready to air another one WandaVision spinoff, Vision Questwith Paul Bettany, in 2026. This time he stars as a different, ghostly Vision who still has some of the memories of the original. There’s a good chance Agatha will show up now that she’s guiding Billy, one of Vision’s sons, to find her brother.

Death matters, even in a TV show, but the way Marvel implements it and then turns it around feels cheap. There’s the age-old TV franchise practice of introducing a new, slightly minor character and killing them off at the end of the series, instead of insulting the main character who might actually have to die for a more impactful ending. It’s easier to kill, Lilia, for example, partly because she’s played by Patti LuPone, who is definitely not coming back for a spinoff because she’s Patti sucks LuPone and she doesn’t have to do this shit. But Agatha can’t stay truly dead and buried, even though 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 comics-turned-movies. Venom: The Last Dance was supposed to be the end of Sony’s comically bad trilogy, freeing Tom Hardy, who surely has better things to do than this. Instead, a post-credits scene hinted that Venom wasn’t actually that dead, and could be coming to New York — and to Spider-Man — soon enough. Even Robert Downey Jr., who played the MCU’s Iron Man from 2008 until the character’s death in 2019’s Avengers: Endgameis set to return in two more Avengers films in 2026 and 2027 as Doctor Doom.

If no one dies, nothing is real, and everything can be reversed, what’s the point? Where is the stake if a character can be brought back from the brink of death, if any story can be restarted simply through the plot device of countless timelines and realities? WandaVision was a devastating and profound meditation on grief and rage; what was the point if her husband, the center of her pain, is rebooted as a separate entity, also carrying 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 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 more meaningful storytelling and real-world sentimentality to revive waning interest in the brand, the risk of death and eternal loss must be part of it. 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 it can never be broken?