Marvel made a familiar mistake with the ghostly ending.

This post contains spoilers for the finale of Agatha All Along, along with other Marvel titles. 

In one of the last scenes in Wednesday night’s Agatha All Along finale, Joe Locke’s Teen, also known as William Kaplan and/or Billy Maximoff, asks the now-ghostified Agatha if the others who died throughout the miniseries have also become ghosts. Floating in front of him in lilac robes, she shakes her head in response. Her spectral form solidifies bit by bit, and later in the episode, Agatha somehow manages to swipe her brooch out of Teen’s hand and fasten it to her semi-translucent self. Is she a partial ghost, then, still effectively 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 then, it doesn’t need to. This, after all, is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

This season of Agatha All Along was, up until the two-part finale, a near-perfect run of television. Kathryn Hahn offered a humanized, complicated, tragic, and funny interpretation of Marvel villain Agatha Harkness. Spun off from 2021’s 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 get skewed over time. The stakes in this miniseries seemed high: Villainous witch Agatha led a coven of fellow magic wielders 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 laying her life down and willingly receiving the kiss of Death to spare Teen a similar fate.

Before we could even recover from that emotional devastation, though, Episode 9 delivered another twist: Agatha returns in ghost form, thereby essentially promising another season, or yet another spinoff, and otherwise completely undercutting the thematic mission of the entire show.

Death has always been central to the series, and to the MCU itself. Episode 7, which mostly focused 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 leap 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 coven can go on. How disappointing, then, that the two chapters that followed seemed to undercut that very episode’s message. With Agatha’s ghost comeback, Agatha All Along does what so many Marvel projects have done: reboots itself in order to maintain a stronghold on beloved IP.

There’s a clear reason why Agatha might have been transformed 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+ is set to air another WandaVision spinoff, Vision Quest, featuring Paul Bettany, in 2026. This time, he’s starring as a different, ghostlier Vision who still has some of the memories of the original one. There’s a good chance that Agatha might show up, now that she’s guiding Billy, one of Vision’s sons, to find his brother.

Death means something, even in a TV show, but the way that Marvel deploys it and then reverses it feels cheap. There’s the age-old television franchise practice of introducing a new, somewhat minor character and killing them by the end of the series, instead of offing the major character who might actually need to die for a more impactful ending. It’s easier to kill off, Lilia, for example, partly because she’s played by Patti LuPone, who is absolutely not coming back for a spinoff because she’s Patti fucking LuPone and she doesn’t have to do this shit. But Agatha cannot stay truly dead and buried, even though that would make the most sense for her thematically and narratively, because Hahn has to 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 comic book–turned–movie world. Venom: The Last Dance was supposed to be the end of Sony’s cartoonishly bad trilogy, freeing Tom Hardy, who surely has better things to do than this. Instead, a post-credits scene hinted that Venom was actually not all that dead and might make his way 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: Endgame, is set to return in two more Avengers movies in 2026 and 2027 as Doctor Doom.

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

I know superhero shows and movies aren’t an ideal place to seek clarity and logic within the bounds of our mortal reality. Superman, after all, has been alive since the late 1930s. Thanos killed half of 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 flagging interest in the brand, then the risk of death and a forever loss has to be a 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 franchise’s heart if it can never be broken?