Maybe she thinks hanging around as a ghost is better than her alternate destination.
This is a poor characterization of Agatha. She’s extremely charismatic - how exactly do you think she’s spending centuries convincing entire covens to follow her lead?
Who said the other witches are always the first to shoot? Agatha is Han - she’s shooting first, and once the other witches respond their power is hers.
I loved the last episode, myself (even the absolute absurdity of all those open witches in colonial New England). No notes.
Nope. Initially the performance of the song was just a way of luring some witches to a place where Agatha could zap them. There was never a plan to have it go viral. Agatha just took advantage of it when it did.
As pointed out already, Agatha is extremely charismatic. And she’s not convincing anyone - they’re coming to her to travel the Road.
Agatha shot first.
I had assumed she was disposing of the bodies afterwards for that very reason, although my impression is that the plan to go down the Road was always very hush-hush so it may not have been widely known they were talking to her.
Agatha is a great one for seizing opportunities and making them work for her, usually to the detriment of others. I think she only stumbled when it came to betraying Wiccan because he reminded her of her son. And even then, she seized the opportunity to carry on as a ghost.
Did she? I completely missed that. To me, it always seemed like she threw taunts, then leaned back expecting that sweet magic juice being pumped into her…
Didn’t she say that it was because she couldn’t face seeing her son again?
That’s exactly my point, though. Her screen time is filled with sneering at and insulting everyone around her, and them showing their open dislike for her. The idea that she’s convincing all these covens to follow her is one part of what made her plan implausible. There’s nothing to show us her charisma.
The director? The scriptwriter? The actors? The CGI crew? I’m not sure who, but in our montage, we see her insult them, them blast her, over and over and over.
Except they repeatedly show Agatha just walking away from the bodies, instead of showing her doing the slightest bit of work to clean up the crime scene.
She did. Nicholas died shortly after he asked her to please stop murdering everyone. He even talked some from “helping him out” (luring them to their purplely deaths). Even if you’re evil, something like that has to weigh heavily on the conscience.
This may be picking nits, but didn’t she say she couldn’t face him again, without specifying who “he” was? It could have been Nicholas, but it could have been Mephisto.
Or perhaps I’m misremembering.
She did say “him.” I inferred it to mean Nicholas.
This reveal does explain why all the trials on this supposedly extreme test were so easy. One thing that was annoying me was that the only reason they kept cutting it fine was due to squabbling and in-fighting. These trials were too easy for a focused coven.

These trials were too easy for a focused coven.
How focused would you be in a coven with a known coven killer among you?
But the Road ,as we understood it for 8 episodes, is a real thing, and the trials therin were supposed to be really hard. Without the context of episode 9’s reveal the tasks were very easy. The hodgepodge nature of the fractious coven that entered in this case should have been blown away in the first task, still squabbling.
What gives you the idea that Agatha was following a long-term plan? The 9th episode shows her using all sorts of short term strategies to make money or get power - but nothing long-term at all. She gets witches distracted by a thief so she can attack them unaware, or she has her son sing a song, and tries to persuade onlookers to donate money, etc., etc. Once Nicholas dies, a naive witch shows up and interrupts Agatha’s grief to beg info about the fictional Road, but there’s no indication that Agatha ever intended that to happen. She just sees it as another opportunity to run a scam. Given that witches are apparently common but insular, Agatha can run the Witches’ Road scam every few decades when she runs into some suckers without being exposed - but the only time she’s really desperate to have it work is in Episode 2, when she’s in immediate danger, and has a sucker right in front of her - and sure enough this time, when she actually has to persuade people to join her, as opposed to having the suckers come to her, things don’t work out so well.
P.S. I think you’re misinterpreting her approach in general - some con artists try to be very friendly and convince you that their basic good nature is making them offer you a (too-)good deal - but it’s a valid strategy to pretend to be aloof, so the sucker ends up begging the con artist to be let in on the deal that the con artist is withholding - and that’s what Agatha is doing in some cases.

Once Nicholas dies, a naive witch shows up and interrupts Agatha’s grief to beg info about the fictional Road, but there’s no indication that Agatha ever intended that to happen. She just sees it as another opportunity to run a scam. Given that witches are apparently common but insular, Agatha can run the Witches’ Road scam every few decades when she runs into some suckers without being exposed - but the only time she’s really desperate to have it work is in Episode 2, when she’s in immediate danger, and has a sucker right in front of her - and sure enough this time, when she actually has to persuade people to join her, as opposed to having the suckers come to her, things don’t work out so well.
All the steps I described seem to be what happened. The song her son wrote became well-enough known that she could run this scam hundreds of years later (admittedly, maybe it went Ye Olde Viral, so the first step I described might not have been on her).
Speculation that she only ran this scam as one among many sounds like strong headcanon to me: the montage didn’t show her running a bunch of scams, it showed only this one. Sure, pre-kid-death, she did many scams; but post-kid-death, there were no other scams shown, only this one over and over and over.

P.S. I think you’re misinterpreting her approach in general - some con artists try to be very friendly and convince you that their basic good nature is making them offer you a (too-)good deal - but it’s a valid strategy to pretend to be aloof, so the sucker ends up begging the con artist to be let in on the deal that the con artist is withholding - and that’s what Agatha is doing in some cases.
Absolutely. That’s fine.
What’s not fine is the idea that over and over, the witches respond to her bitchiness by turning their proton packs on her simultaneously. That’s ridiculous. All it would take is for one of the witches over the centuries to not Ghostbuster it up, see what’s happening, and whack her on the head with a rock instead.
First of all, my apologies for my cranky tone - I must have been in a bad mood last night. My primary objection is to the idea that there was a plan involved with the Road myth.
I agree that it’s a silly idea that Agatha can automatically count on her opponents always to attack blindly and thus get their powers drained (in fact, we see that approach fail in Ep 2) - but I was willing to buy that the montage was focusing on visually dramatic scenes and not on any prep work, since we also see that Agatha can and will kill witches who aren’t attacking her (the witches chasing Nicky were drained and so were the witches who offered shelter and care to Nicky and Agatha).
I wouldn’t underestimate Agatha’s ability to get under people’s skins and make them blindly furious, given time to prepare, either (in Ep 2, she’s got her back against the wall and can be assumed to be taking risks she wouldn’t otherwise take – which may be why her usual approach fails there (Lillia attacks but isn’t killed).
And Agatha is probably invulnerable to many physical attacks (when she has her normal powers).
All of that may be true–but none of it was portrayed on screen. An additional thirty seconds of screen time showing that her plan sometimes failed, or that she was immune to physical attacks, or otherwise that her plan wasn’t simply “piss people off using the exact same story each time, get them to blast her simultaneously, drain them”, would have made it a lot less annoying to me.
As I watched it, I was like, WTF, seriously? The silliness of it as portrayed just took me out of the story.
Edit: and no worries about any crankiness. I realize that I’m shitting in the punch bowl here, and I’m genuinely glad that other people enjoyed it, and my goal isn’t to ruin it for anyone; rather, I’m just expressing my own frustration with it, and am curious if anyone else had the same issues with it that I had.

I’m just expressing my own frustration with it, and am curious if anyone else had the same issues with it that I had.
Any silliness gets a pass from me in a comic book universe.
I get that. For me, motivations and behavior have to be plausible, even if nothing else is. It was the motivations and behavior of her victims that fell so flat for me.
I’m curious why you think the trials were easy? A few resulted in casualties, and the solutions weren’t always obvious. And there was a time limit.
I do agree though that once the solution was discovered, they had more trouble completing it than they should have. But they weren’t a real coven, it was just a group brought together out of convenience.
But certainly they were reasonably difficult challenges even for witches who get along. And more clever than Wiccan probably could have designed consciously.