Despite this fascinating relationship, the MCU has strayed away from including Death. Real heads thought there might be a chance the character would appear, especially after the first Avengers post-credits sequence. In that scene, The Other tells Thanos that humanity isn’t as weak as they once thought and that “to challenge them is court death” before the purple fella turns around and smiles. While that scene meant that he was up to the challenge and signaled him as the Infinity Saga’s big bad, it was also a nod to comic book fans who knew the relationship between him and Death. While the Russos thought about including Death, they ultimately decided against it, as it would have meant another character for them to flesh out amidst the juggling act that was Infinity War and Endgame; instead, they gave Thanos a very different motivation for snapping half the MCU out of existence, something to do with resource allocation and the population of the universe and you know what let’s not go down this road right now. Anyway, that didn’t stop various MCU projects from dropping other hints about the character, including a statue dedicated to her in the temple of Eternity, as seen in Thor: Love & Thunder.
Agatha All Along has been dropping hints about Rio’s true nature for a while, all the way back to the episode where Rio mentions to Agatha that she’d “get [her] bodies” and the Ouija board sequence that quite literally spelled it out for us as it moved around to spell “DEATH.” There have also been hints all along that Agatha and Death have a shared history, having likely met after the death of Agatha’s son, Nicholas Scratch—and that Death may emerge soon enough as Agatha’s once and future love interest. With two episodes left and the cards around Death revealed, we’ll likely get more insight into the true nature of their backstory.
The casting of Plaza as Death marks another heat-check performance from the actor after her show-stealing turn in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis as the femme fatale financial-market reporter “Wow Platinum,” another character you could imagine falling for if you were horny for death. It’s hard to imagine someone more rightly suited to play Death than Plaza, who seems fully capable of infusing it with the right amount of absurdity and seriousness. But now that she’s been properly introduced, can the Russos find a way to make room for her in Avengers: Secret Wars?
