The Sequel to Marvel’s Best Show Re-Creates Its Magic—and Its Biggest Mistake
The history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is full of surprising plot twists and sudden reversals, unexpected deaths and unpredictable resurrections. But few have generated the shock of the moment in the Disney+ series Agatha All Along when Broadway legend Patti LuPone is accused of singing off-key.
A WandaVision spinoff that follows the attempts of the villainous witch Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) to regain her powers and escape the false reality she was trapped in by the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Agatha isn’t a musical, exactly—Frozen songwriters Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez are credited with “original song,” singular. But that song recurs in nearly all of the episodes, or at least the four (of nine) released to critics in advance of its premiere on Wednesday night. Whether idly hummed by the series’ protagonist on her way to work or belted out as a ’70s-style rock anthem, “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” sets the series’ witchy heroines on a figurative and literal course to confront their deepest fears, including the terror of drifting a semitone sharp.
Created by WandaVision’s Jac Schaeffer, Agatha All Along opens with a reprise of that series, Marvel’s first and still best foray into episodic television. Instead of a 1950s sitcom, Agatha—or Agnes, as she’s briefly called—is trapped in a prestige TV drama, where she’s a loose-cannon detective with oily hair who finds a dead woman’s body lying face down in the woods. The Mare of Easttown knockoff is fine as far as it goes (and I will admit to chuckling at “Based on the Danish series Wandavisdysen” in its fake opening credits), but it goes on long enough to make you wonder if it took three and a half years to come up with the idea of replicating WandaVision’s serial pastiches in a different genre. But the cosplay peters out after Agatha makes her way to the morgue and discovers the identity of her mysterious corpse—per the toe tag, one “W. Maximoff,” aka the Scarlet Witch.
Wanda’s death isn’t enough to break her spell, but it weakens it enough for Agatha to see how she’s been imprisoned, and for her to remember the only way out: to convene a coven and walk the Witches’ Road, a mystical path that will lead each of its five members to a personalized confrontation. Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata) has to reckon with the fact that she’s been turning her talent for potion-making toward selling bogus wellness remedies, while Alice Wu-Gulliver (The Diplomat’s Ali Ahn) confronts the generational curse that took her rock star mother, in a recording-studio sequence straight out of Stereophonic. There’s also a septet of creepy, Conjuring-style witches pursuing her, plus an angry ex-lover named Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) who can’t seem to decide whether she wants to kill Agatha or get her back—a matrix of emotions Plaza has become an old hand at playing.
There’s also the matter of the teenage boy, played by Heartstopper’s Joe Locke, who turns up on Agatha’s doorstep begging to be schooled in the magical arts and winds up accompanying the witches on their quest, although no one quite offers an explanation for why he’s there. He tries to tell them his name, but every time he does, a spell sews up his mouth, so Agatha settles on simply calling him Teen. Like the identity of WandaVision’s antagonist or The Acolyte’s secret Sith, the mystery of who the Teen really is comes up frequently in Agatha All Along, mostly by way of reminding us that we’re supposed to care. There are also the moments when the other members of Agatha’s coven briefly take on personalities that are not their own, and references to an unidentified “he” who is responsible for stripping the witches of their powers. (Comics readers, or anyone with a smartphone and curious fingers, will note the presence of an empty nursery in Agatha’s house, along with the name “Nicholas Scratch.”)
These scattered informational morsels are meant to entice us to keep moving on down the road, tuning in or logging on each week to take one more incremental step toward the big reveal. But where witches are concerned, following the breadcrumbs doesn’t always work out as planned, and the history of mystery-box shows is one of almost inevitable disappointment. Anticipation is wonderfully elastic, capable of stretching out over weeks or months without losing its pull. But satisfaction is much less forgiving, and a smarter show, or even just one more concerned with not setting its audience up for a fall, wouldn’t let quite so much hinge on the result of filling in a few blanks. Even WandaVision lost its magic after it unveiled who was behind the curtain, although the new show owes its existence, or at least its title, to the musical manner of that revelation.
That’s not to say Agatha All Along isn’t enjoyable, even if most of the joy is to be found around the edges. Hahn plays her centuries-old sorceress with an acidic crankiness, as if she ran out of Fs somewhere in the 17th century, and the actors make the most of every tossed-off gag, as when LuPone’s witch balks at exiting one magical space through a door in the back of an oven, reasoning that it didn’t work out so well for an old friend of hers. But I could feel myself bracing for the part when it gets less fun, when the self-contained storytelling gives way to larger imperatives and the fun turns into homework. Like the images of fictional witches strewn throughout Agatha’s closing credits, from The Wizard of Oz up though The Craft, the many rearrangements of “The Ballad” suggest we’re watching the latest iteration of an ages-old story, one about powerful women pitted against each other to distract them from the focus on a common foe. But when the distractions are so engaging, the real enemy is whatever is pulling them toward the end of their journey, forcing a destination when we’d rather just be along for the ride.
