‘Agatha All Long’: Episode 1’s Murder Mystery Explained

The opening moments of the first episode of Agatha All Along resembles the early episodes of WandaVision by putting the series lead in the middle of a decade-appropriate genre piece which, in this case, is a camped-up version of an episode of HBO’s True Detective. Starring the residents of Westview, the episode within the series revolves around the mysterious murder of an unknown victim. Still trapped inside the spell cast by Wanda Maximoff in the season finale of WandaVision, Agatha Harkness stars as Detective Agnes O’Connor who feels an immediate an inexplicable connection to the murder victim. As the episode unfolds, it becomes clear that the current-ish events of the real world have leaked into the distorted reality in which Agatha is trapped.

Though Agnes is initially incapable of comprehending what’s occurred, the events of the third act of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness are neatly dove-tailed into the Agatha All Along opener by series’ creator Jac Schaeffer. And so, the victim is indeed Wanda Maximoff, who died by her own hand while she destroyed the castle of Chthon at Mount Wundagore.

The Evidence

While it’s probably pretty clear early on to most folks that Wanda is the dead woman in the creek, Schaeffer planted an incredibly clever clue at the murder scene. Throughout Episode 1, Detective O’Connor digs into a library slip with multiple dates and zero names. That card leads to the Westview library which allows Agnes to dig up the title of a book that she discovers was stolen from the Natural Science section. Following up on the book’s original location, Agnes learns that every copy of the book, Dialogue and Rhetoric: Known History of Learning & Debate, written by Andrew Ugo, has been burned. As Agatha works out for herself, the title of the book has a one-to-one relationship to the Darkhold, the book of the damned that Wanda stole from Agatha before choosing to destroy every copy of it throughout the Multiverse. As for Ugo, the author’s name is simply a rescramble of Wundagore, the Eastern European mountain that served as the setting for the final act of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Tying the victim’s death back to that location explains the cause of death, the presence of foreign soil and why all the copies of the D.A.R.K.H.O.L.D. appear burned up in the library.

Interestingly enough, the library card–which doubles as a toe tag for Wanda–may just serve as a list of the former owners of the Darkhold. As seen toward the end of the episode, Agatha Harkness’ name is on the card above Wanda’s which begs the question of who just might make up the rest of the list. While the pages of Marvel Comics provide a fairly straight lineage which includes Doctor Strange, Conan the Barbarian baddie Thulsa Doom, Morgan Le Fay, Werewolf By Night‘s Jack Russell’s ancestor Gregor Russoff and the book’s author, Chthon, the MCU’s own list of owners is yet to be defined and may well play a major part in the events of the remainder of the episodes of Agatha All Along.