“Agatha All Along” Review: Marvel and Their Mommy Issues

Warning! Contains major spoilers for the show Agatha All Along

Agatha Harkness is undoubtedly a “bad guy.” She is innately evil, cruel, and narcissistic, and she has the evil witch laugh down perfectly. However, she also represents the struggles of humanity and the fierce love of a mother who will do anything for her child. These aspects add a layer of depth and vitality to her titular show Agatha All Along which has been dearly lacking in Marvel Studio’s recent projects, although they are held back significantly. 

What to Know After WandaVision

The show picks up two years after the events of WandaVision, where we were first introduced to nosy neighbor Agnes who is actually the infamous witch Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn). Agnes was part of Wanda’s (played by Elizabeth Olson) magical anomaly, where Wanda attempted to create a “perfect life” straight from the sitcoms after experiencing several deaths from loved ones. Harkness is revealed throughout the show to be centuries old and extremely powerful, having survived by absorbing the power of other witches which has rightfully placed her on many witches’ bad side. WandaVision’s finale is the most important for her character, where she battled it out with Wanda as the Scarlet Witch and ended up losing all her power. Wanda then traps her as her Agnes persona to prevent her from harming others, which is where Agatha All Along picks up from. 

Marvel’s World of Capitalism

As someone who’s been a diehard Marvel fan for many years, I sincerely wanted to love Agatha All Along. I loved the beginning of Agatha’s character in WandaVision and was fully prepared to love the rest of her in this show. Unfortunately, Agatha is a piece of modern Marvel media whose producers refuse to treat it as art and instead only care about the marketability of the project. This is regrettably a common occurrence in our modern world of capitalism, though Marvel Studios is especially guilty of this. If you search the comments of any Marvel trailers, you are undoubtedly going to find keyboard warriors declaring this exact thing, “Marvel just hasn’t been the same recently,” “All these new movies suck,” etc. They are correct on this, although for different reasons than they probably think. Marvel is, first and foremost, a corporation, and they act like it. The first generation of Marvel media was only good because there wasn’t a real established universe yet, not including comics, and people didn’t have to watch half a million movies to understand one. Marvel, and Disney by extension, really only liked the pretty checks they got from those movies and don’t truly care if more recent projects just aren’t as good. As long as they aren’t losing money, they’ll continue to crank out cookie cutter movies and refuse to give passionate writers the funding to make them unique. If the masses will pay for Disney Plus and movie tickets, who cares if the content is mediocre? I’m sad to say that Agatha All Along is a victim of this, though it does its best to break through the noise. 

Down the Road

From the very beginning of the show, Agatha failed to deliver the punches it could have. The very first episode opens on a police procedural show, which left many viewers in confusion. It turns out that it was just the writers’ way of incorporating the end of WandaVision into the show, which makes sense in theory but was mediocre in execution. It broke one of the biggest rules of storytelling: “Don’t lie to your readers.” The only good thing about this episode was the tension between Agatha and her love interest played by Aubrey Plaza. In fact, one of the only reasons I continued watching (besides my unfortunate devotion to Marvel) was that the chemistry between Kathryn Hahn and Aubrey Plaza was so compelling. 

After its confusing first episode, the show does start to get it together. A newly freed Agatha reluctantly teams up with the mysterious “Teen” (Joe Locke) who freed her from the Scarlet Witch’s spell, which is almost as intriguing as the fact that Teen can’t speak his own name. In between fanboying over Agatha, he demands for Agatha to take him to the Witches Road, a series of deadly magical trials a coven of witches can partake in to achieve their deepest desire if they reach the end. The rest of the episode is spent assembling the hodgepodge team, consisting of psychic Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone), bound potion witch Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata), protection witch Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn), and Sharon Davis aka Mrs. Hart (Debra Jo Rupp) who is recruited at the last minute.

The first solid scene is the very last one in episode two, where the newly assembled coven has to summon the Witches Road by–wait for it– singing the “Ballad of the Witches Road”. This song gave me actual chills, as well as hope for the rest of the series. Patti LuPone is, obviously, absolutely amazing in this, though it also represents a rare moment of unity for this group that is achieved only a few times throughout the series. However, this moment is quickly ruined by the writing flaws of Agatha. She has recurring problems throughout the series, but her biggest one is the fact that she apparently can’t let a moment just rest, she has to get in and aggravate everyone. If she wasn’t supposed to be the main character, this would be less of a problem, but it ends up making her character infuriating and near impossible to actually like which seems like quite the flaw on the writer’s part. 

Once the show gets into the Witches Road Trials, the flow of the story seems to even out a lot more. Knowing what to expect from each episode creates a familiar atmosphere for each of them, which is what made me start to actually enjoy the series. The trial in episode 4 is probably my personal favorite, transporting the coven into 70’s rock-themed outfits and making them perform a version of the “Ballad” to break an intergenerational curse on Alice Wu-Gulliver. It is simultaneously a heartbreaking story that has been built up through the first few episodes as well as an absolute banger, and I loved every second. This episode is also the first one to feature the true tension between Agatha and Rio, becoming a historic piece of Marvel queer media in the process. The ending few scenes capture rare moments of Agatha truly caring for another person, which is a first so far in this series. 

The main problem at this point is the fact that the writers somehow can’t go more than two episodes without killing a character, especially at such early points in a series. Two characters die within the first five episodes of a nine-episode series, which creates the feeling that we as viewers couldn’t form attachments to characters. While both fatalities were lovable characters in themselves, the early endings felt unsatisfying and insufficient to the plot when they could easily have kept on living and propelling the coven forward. I couldn’t help but think that the writers were forced to kill off these incredible characters just because they wouldn’t make money in another franchise film. 

After episode five’s climax which left the coven without yet another witch, we finally get to really dive into the plot tension of Teen. His identity and lineage reveal was, admittedly, quite expected, but the manner in which it was executed was fantastic. Episode six follows his journey of self-discovery, and how he got to the point where the show began. While he is a very fun character to explore, it felt like they were only setting him up for the Young Avengers, which is presumed to be Marvel’s next “big project.” This was a disappointing realization by the end of the series, as it made it feel like they did this whole project just to soft launch another. 

Episode seven, “Death’s Hand in Mine,” is an absolute masterpiece focused on the master, Patti LuPone. Lilia, LuPone’s character, has been written for most of the series as a “kook,” with random, strange outbursts and a general air of unreliability. This episode gives a reason for it, explaining that her psychic abilities are so powerful and unpredictable that she lives in the past, present, and future interchangeably and often can’t control when her consciousness moves. In this way, the episode follows her throughout her childhood, the present trial, and briefly into the future in a true masterwork of cinematography and acting. While I have several issues with the ending, this was the point in the show that began to really make me care and I will admit to shedding a few tears over Lilia. 

The end of episode seven also reveals that Rio Vidal is the “original green witch,” aka Death. As Teen points out, Agatha’s ex is literally Death, which feels quite in character. Many jaw-dropping dramatics ensue, and the episode concludes with Agatha sealing her fate with a passionate kiss with Death that we’ve been waiting for for eight episodes. 

Episode nine, the final episode, is an explanation of Agatha and her son, Nicholas Scratch. The episode once again has beautiful cinematography, which it artfully uses to express the deep devotion a mother has to her child, even one doomed to die. We follow a much younger Agatha and her son as they survive through killing witches, although no explanation is actually given as to why that is. This episode acts as the final piece in the puzzle, though with a few notable gaps in the picture, many things do fall into place throughout it. Even with my complaints, the ending of this show was deeply touching and I found myself going back to it for weeks after its release.  

While I have many complaints about this show, I should also include that I deeply enjoyed watching it on a basic level. Many Marvel viewers have learned that you must either deal with the subpar content or simply stop watching, and I am too invested in these characters to give up on them. The cast of this show was delightful to watch, and I am excited to see (some of) them return in the future. It’s hard to live up to a legacy like Marvel’s, but Agatha sure did try her best, and made Herstory along the way! 

Watch all nine episodes of Agatha All Along on Disney Plus