In early 2021, the Marvel Cinematic Universe kicked off its post-Endgame era with WandaVision, a series that started out amusing and became less so as it descended into incoherence the way almost every MCU show has since. And now the main baddie from WandaVision, the witch Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn), is back with her own little quest–and so far, through the four episodes that were screened for critics, it’s one of the more entertaining and well-told stories in recent MCU memory.
Agatha All Along begins with Agatha still trapped in some sort of residual illusion in Westview–she’s a police detective who’s been suspended without pay and has been wallowing until she’s brought back in to investigate a murder. The case is full of sign posts intended to lead Agatha back to reality, like her centuries-old witch locket. After intervention by another witch named Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) and a mysterious unnamed teen boy (Joe Locke), Agatha escapes the illusion.
But she’s got no power, and Rio wants to kill her thanks to some old personal grudge. To avoid the wrath of both Rio and a group of witches called the Salem 7, Agatha will need to gather a new coven of witches and walk the fabled Witches’ Road, which she believes will help “get my purple back,” as she says in the premiere episode.
The first two episodes are all about this setup, and Agath’s recruitment of her new coven, which consists of more cast-off witches like Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone), who’s working as a strip mall fortune teller because she can’t deal with the witch establishment; Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata), a potion master who makes cosmetics now because her magic has been sealed for a hundred years; Alice Wu Gulliver (Ali Ahn), a mall shop guard who inherited her witchness from her mother and hasn’t ever really operated as a witch; and Mrs. Hart (Debra Jo Rupp), who may not actually be a witch, but she’s awesome enough that we aren’t too concerned either way.
The core cast is a blast and has great chemistry. Hahn and LuPone are the heavyweights, but Zamata, an SNL alum, might be the secret weapon since she’s nearly as good at hopping between jokes and drama as Hahn is. Ahn has a more thankless role because Alice, who’s been meaningfully unlucky her entire adult life, is more reserved than the other witches, but that helps her sell her weariness extra well. And while Plaza doesn’t emerge as a main character until Episode 4, her superior ability to deadpan is a perfect complement to the rest of this ensemble And her sexual tension with Hahn is incredible, partially just because they’re good at their jobs, and partially because the MCU is so comically light on any kind of sexual content that it feels amazing to have that sort of real human feeling as part of the story.
Once the new coven has been assembled, we finally head to the Witches’ Road, with each episode forcing the group to pass some sort of life-threatening trial that will kill them all if they can’t work together to deal with it. From this point, Agatha All Along essentially adopts the structure of the Escape Room movies, with each trial being a new room they have to figure out. If this comparison sounds specious to you, consider this: The first trial ends with our witches crawling through an oven while the room they’re in fills with water. This isn’t a negative comparison, though–the Escape Room flicks are fun and worth taking inspiration from, and Agatha All Along does it well.
Unlike Escape Room, though, these trials are tailored for the people experiencing them, bringing up deep traumas that each of the witches, and the mysterious boy who’s tagging along, will have to directly face if they want to push forward. These trials aim to defeat them emotionally and mentally first, and then physically by killing them. And given the sort of people we’re talking about here–cast-offs, folks who were raised weirdly and can’t deal with normal people, folks who have been betrayed, and folks who are ready for it to all be over and are simply wasting time until it happens–it’s a very easy group for me to empathize with.
While the assembled cast is outstanding, it’s really the writing and structure that’s making it work. One of the big problems with the MCU’s TV efforts has been general storytelling incompetence–they can construct some great scenes but usually fail at making those great scenes work well as a unit.
Through these first four episodes, Agatha All Along feels different. It’s got lots of setups and payoffs and foreshadowing for further developments down the line. For example, Episodes 2 and 3 are full of little tidbits about Alice and her mom, and then in Episode 4 those details become the focus of their trial. A typical MCU TV show would save those details for the episode they’re most relevant in, but Agatha All Along creator Jac Schaeffer and her writing staff were able to do it right through the first half of this season.
I am, of course, quite concerned about whether this series is going to end well–I can’t help but be wary of that common descent into incoherence that I mentioned before. Through these four episodes, Agatha All Along has been very well contained–there have been only oblique references to what happened on WandaVision, and nothing else in the MCU has been alluded to at all. But that won’t last forever. Agatha All Along will almost certainly eventually tie back to the rest of the MCU by some means, and it should–the connections between various parts of the franchise is supposedly a key appeal for this whole endeavor.
But after the chaos of the past few years of the MCU, and with the main franchise story still in the process of being completely reworked as we go, it’s not easy to have faith that Agatha All Along will stick its landing. So many of these MCU TV shows are fun for a while and then utterly fall apart at the end. But the foundation that these first four episodes have laid down is impressive, and though I don’t have faith that it’s going to end well, I do at least have reason to hope that it might.
Source: GameSpot
