Agatha All Along's viral song “Witches' Road” is full of spoilers

Even before Disney Plus premiered its Marvel Cinematic Universe show Agatha all the timeIt was obvious that Disney had made the climax of the second episode, “The Ballad of the Witches' Road,” a huge viral hit. Showrunner Jac Schaeffer visited some of Disney's most successful songwriters, Frozen Composers Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez created the song – a sequel to their viral breakthrough hit “Agatha All Along.” WandaVisionwhich gave the new series its title. Disney previewed the show with a live performance of the song at D23. The company dropped the first two episodes simultaneously, allowing new viewers to see the song's introduction right at the end of the second episode. And right after that premiere, Disney was ready to share a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the song and several official excerpts of the song: the “True Crime Version” and the “Sacred Chant Version.”

But at this point it's also clear that the song isn't just a marketing tool – it's a key to unlocking the series for viewers. It was clear to anyone who looked closely at the texts that the big change at the end of Episode 3 would come sooner or later. Ballad of the Witches' Road didn't just warn us of what to expect either: it probably also told us what was coming next.

(Ed. Note: Spoilers ahead for episode 3 of Agatha all the time.)

“Ballad of the Witches' Road” describes the entire process that Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) and her cynically sloppy, ragtag coven use to open the door to Witches' Road: They gather witches who are based on fire, water, earth, and air, and use a “circle stitched with fate” – suggested by the witches Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone) from a yet-unrevealed power – to “open the hidden gate.” And then they go underground, according to the refrain “Down, Down, Down” – a polysemy that can be read simultaneously as “descent into the abyss” and “further on the path”.

The warning for episode 3 is: “When one is gone, we move on.” This line explicitly tells the searchers what to do if one of them dies on the road – and lets viewers know in advance that death is a real possibility on this journey. The rest of that line, “The Spirit is our guide,” suggests that poor Mrs. Hart (Debra Jo Rupp) will come back in a new form after her ignominious death at the end of the episode, and that she will play a crucial role in supporting it the rest of the witches on their journey.

Once you start to look at the lyrics as a guide for the series, they seem like foreshadowing. (Or spoilers, if you roll that way.) It's not like we needed the song to know that someone might die on the journey – Lilia and her fellow witches make that clear enough in their horror and disbelief when they find out that Agatha wants to try this path. Considering how central Disney made the song to the marketing and framing of the series, it feels more like hanging Chekhov's Guns on the wall because it contains explicit instructions about how characters should handle certain developments and what will follow.

According to the ballad, what else can we expect? Given what happened when Mrs. Hart did it, we've already seen that saying “I won't deviate from the path” pays off. However, “I hold the hand of death in mine” seems less direct and literal: it could mean anything from physical contact with Mrs. Hart's ghost to simply another reminder that the road is dangerous. It may have more to do with the hallucinations in Episode 3 that each member of the Circle has, which seem to be related to people from their past who may be dead.

Debra Jo Rupp's return as “Spirit Guide” seems like an obvious move, considering how little time Mrs. Hart had to reveal or explore anything about her character. In particular, she didn't even seem to know that she was a witch, or even know what a witch was, and yet she seemed to be considered a witch in the ballad ritual sense. It would seem strange to leave out such a stark difference between her and the other characters and then never fully address it.

“Many miles of tricks and trials” also seems obvious enough in the broadest sense – it suggests that the protagonists will spend most of the season dealing with the ins and outs of the road and solving their various problems with each other's stories and their own magic, leading to “The Glory Be Thine” and ending where the survivors get the power they want.

The first line that throws me off is “familiar at your side”, considering that none of the witch characters except Agatha seem to have a familiar, and she seems to have left Señor Scratchy behind when she and her group died Stairs went down to the street. To further illustrate the ballad's importance to the series, the titles of the first season's episodes are lyrics from the song, so we may see an episode titled “Familiar By Thy Side” at some point. Perhaps the witches there acquire their own pets, or we learn that they all already have familiars and can summon them at will. Given that the MCU has said essentially nothing about what familiars are or what they can do (partly due to a crucial scene where Señor Scratchy is cut from the film WandaVision Finale), anything could happen in this one.

But the payoff I'm most interested in is the one where we find out what “everything that's wrong is right and everything that's bad is good” means. The MCU has never before suggested that all witch magic is inherently malevolent and malevolent, so I expect this line to refer to an event that reveals a little more about what it means to be a witch in this setting. Perhaps there is a test the characters must pass by treating “fair” as “foul” and “foul” as “fair,” a line from The Witches in Shakespeare Macbeth this is explicitly referenced in the opening line of the song. It's hard to believe that these 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 enough that Schaeffer intends viewers to watch the song (and episode titles) for clues as to what's going on. Agatha and the Circle have already started quoting the lyrics as rules and guidelines, and I suspect that they will soon have the same thoughts and try to decipher and interpret the lyrics to figure out what comes next. They'll probably start speculating about the song as early as episode 4 as they decide what to do with Sharon. We might as well join them.