The new Marvel miniseries follow-up to WandaVision is unlike the studio’s standard fare but it lacks the spirited edge of its anthological predecessor.
Akhil Arora, a Film Critics Guild member and a Rotten Tomatoes-certified TV critic, who has watched four episodes of Agatha All Along. He has been reviewing movies and TV series since 2015 and has written for NDTV and SlashFilm.
With WandaVision, creator Jac Schaeffer made it clear that she wasn’t interested in the standard approach to superhero fare. For most of its running, the Marvel TV show’s exploration of Wanda Maximoff’s grief over the loss of her partner Vision took the form of a sitcom spoof, one that barrelled through decades of the format—from black-and-white 4:3 aspect ratio to the meta recasting and costume choices—in an episodic fashion. Sure, Schaeffer struggled to usher her non-standard superhero show away from the climactic final-third tropes of the genre. But there was still a lot of fun to be had in WandaVision. It was the perfect possible start for Marvel’s new television-heavy era on Disney+ (though what has come after has been more miss than hit).
WandaVision was more fun than Agatha All Along
With Schaeffer returning to the Marvel fold for another nine-part miniseries, you would expect her to deliver something equally unique. Agatha All Along—which follows Kathryn Hahn’s witch character Agatha Harkness, who spent most of WandaVision disguised as nosy neighbour Agnes—does do that. As with its spiritual predecessor, it sets itself apart from the usual reluctant hero running from their past and saving the day heroics. Watching the first four episodes given to critics, there were moments where I had to remind myself that I was watching a product of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Agatha All Along is the furthest thing from Echo, The Marvels, Deadpool & Wolverine or even the second season of Loki.
Just as WandaVision captivated us with its setups and how it wove its story into revolving sitcom tropes through the ages, Agatha All Along draws on the history of witches in pop culture and blends that with homages to the golden age of fantasy and horror films. In one episode, you get Agatha and an assortment of witches in white collared shirts—Schaeffer termed it “coastal grandma chic”—in what feels like Big Little Lies set in the ‘90s. In another, the witches transform into a Fleetwood Mac-type band and must belt out a rock-and-roll ballad to ward off a curse.
But novelty itself can only take you so far. The new Marvel series struggles to have the same amount of fun as WandaVision. The character most living it up and injecting joy into the proceedings is killed off in the same episode, almost as if Agatha All Along wants to tell you that this is no jokey world. It’s more sincere and serious—and in turn, lesser for it. I kept waiting to be charmed over but it never truly lit up.
Say hello to a new coven of witches in Agatha All Along
At the start of the new Marvel miniseries, Agatha is still Agnes—trapped in the identity she had originally adopted after Wanda turned the tables and put a spell on her in the WandaVision finale. Curiously, though, she’s not just an aimless citizen in small-town Westview, New Jersey. Agnes is a police detective who returns for a case after a period of suspension. (The show goes hard on the Mare of Easttown parallels, dubbing itself “Agnes of Westview”, replete with title credits that give you a feeling of a generic crime drama police procedural in a mysterious small town.) What is going on? Is this a byproduct of Wanda’s spell or is this Agatha’s own doing? Like WandaVision, Agatha All Along wants to keep you on your toes.
Unlike WandaVision though, the illusion here fades in the first episode itself, as the events of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness set Agatha on a new path. With Wanda dead and all copies of the Darkhold destroyed—that’s the only material bit of connection to the Doctor Strange movie—“Agnes” is left powerless in her distorted spell. Physically vulnerable and with a bunch of sorcerers after her life, Agatha sets out to assemble a new coven and walk The Witches’ Road, hoping to pass the dreaded trials and regain what she’s lost. She’s joined in the pursuit by a teenage fan (Joe Locke) who can’t tell anyone his name because some witch has put a sigil on him. Together, the two recruit a divination, potions, protection and green witch. It’s a lot of random lore.
That expands Agatha All Along’s ensemble to six. We get Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata), a bound witch who has been putting her potion experience into organic make-up products. There’s Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone), a divination witch whose fortune-telling business is running into the ground. Add to that Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn), a protection witch and a former cop who’s working as a store security guard. (I’ll let you discover the green witch as the Marvel TV series plays with that quite a bit.) While they are all hesitant to join someone of Agatha’s reputation, they reluctantly agree for their lives aren’t going as they dreamed. What I found a little funny is how Agatha finds four different witches in the span of an afternoon. Are the New Jersey suburbs just full of witches?
Agatha All Along switches it up each episode
Following the Mare of Easttown homage and the recruitment drive, Agatha All Along settles into a new groove of sorts. An additional bit of exposition tells us that The Witches’ Road will push each member of the coven to confront their greatest fears. That means a total of five trials—the unnamed teen fan is a familiar and not a witch himself. With Marvel keeping more than half the show under wraps, I’ve only seen two trials. One of them is akin to a house of horrors episode, where the gang is poisoned and suffers hallucinations as they attempt to figure out an antidote. In another, they must play a song to survive the ordeal. (With WandaVision’s songwriters back, Agatha All Along offers up a variety of takes on the new tune “The Ballad of the Witches Road”, from a cappella to rock-and-roll.)
Hahn, now in the lead, brings a devilish unreliability to the character. She doesn’t care about anyone in her fledgling coven—it always feels like she’s trying to play mental chess and figure out how she can outsmart, get what she wants, and then discard them. Locke and Debra Jo Rupp (who returns from WandaVision as a chatty Westview resident) have the most fun of any on Agatha All Along, though the arc of Locke’s character slowly gets more and more serious. Aubrey Plaza, who plays Agatha’s old friend and rival Rio Vidal, is a close second—or third, depending on how you see it—as she brings a bit of usurper energy and weaponises their shared past. Ahn, Zamata, and LuPone find themselves trapped in much more vanilla characters.
Jac Schaeffer can’t catch lightning in a bottle again
It takes Agatha All Along four episodes to bring its strangers together and begin to settle into more of a hangout vibe. At that point you start to feel like you’re going beyond exposition—not just learning about the characters—as the coven develops an interpersonal dynamic. That’s what you need for the show to be lively. Otherwise, it’s just a set of disparate characters forced together. (It also comes very close to giving us Marvel’s first onscreen lesbian relationship, stopping centimetres short of a kiss. For now, Brian Tyree Henry’s gay superhero in the forgettable Eternals remains the lone LGBTQ+ candidate.)
The changing costumes with each episode add to the Marvel TV series’ vibe and attempts at commentary. Agatha All Along also experiments in technical aspects. In one episode, the cinematography shifts gears to suit the style of the era it’s aping. Elsewhere, it pushes for in-camera effects like miniatures and creature effects over a heavier use of computer-generated imagery, which evokes memories of a time gone by.
Too bad Marvel has decided to give access to only four episodes because the fourth is in some ways the strongest. It’s the most out there and the most fleshed out for its characters. Overall—considering the first four episodes as a whole—Agatha All Along is intriguing but it doesn’t go as hard as it needs to. At times, I found myself drifting. It’s nowhere near as engaging or adept at delivering the thrills, spills, and scares on the equivalent level of WandaVision. Most of all, it doesn’t push itself in ways that truly excite you. Schaeffer did wonderfully with “sitcom as a coping mechanism for grief” but this is a whole new ballgame. And she can’t catch lightning in a bottle again.
The first two episodes of Agatha All Along are out on Wednesday, September 18 on Disney+ in the Americas and Thursday, September 19 in the rest of the world. A new episode drops weekly every Wednesday/Thursday until the two-part season finale on October 30/31.
- Agatha All Along review: novelty max, success not quite – September 19, 2024
- The Rings of Power season 2 episode 6: what time is it out? – September 18, 2024
- What time is Agatha All Along out on Disney+? – September 18, 2024
What do you think?