As is standard with any review that concerns the MCU, I suppose I’d better start off with a reminder that despite the overwhelming success of Deadpool & Wolverine, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is still technically working through its more difficult phase as online pundits and backseat film critics keep insisting that it’s dead. However, resurrections and second chances are all what comic book are all about, but even I was a bit dubious about the news that Agatha Harkness was getting her own series.
It’s not that I was one of those guys who had a problem with yet “another” female lead Marvel product (a ridiculous claim at the best of times), but even a weathered comic hook reader such as myself thought that giving an entire show to a tertiary (if we’re being kind) character who once babysat for the Fantastic Four was a bit of a reach.
However, scratch the comic version from your mind and instead focus on the grand, scenery chewing performance of Kathryn Hahn that came out of WandaVision and things start to make a whole lot more sense.
Apparently it’s time to remember that witches be crazy…
As we belatedly return to the town of Westview three years after a grief stricken Wanda Maximoff inadvertently turned it into her own, rubber reality sitcom, we find former magic draining witch, Agatha Harkness, still trapped under her spell. However, as the episode starts, we find that she is no longer stuck in her outspoken, nosey neighbour identity of Agnes, but instead is somehow locked into a new reality that’s still riffing on episodic television. But while Wanda recreated her reality in a string of ever evolving sitcoms, “Agnes” is living in a bleak detective show that the opening credits introduces itself as “Agnes Of Westview”, claims it’s based of the Danish series named “Wandavisdysen” and takes the format of True Detective or The Killing.
In it we witness Agnes’ haggard and determined police detective be taken off suspension to take the case of a murdered Jane Doe found crushed to death in the local woods – however, a preliminary investigation of the body reveals that this mystery woman was killed elsewhere and then brought to her final resting place which is a sure fire hint that murder is afoot. Extra complications arise when Rio Vidal arrives on the scene – an FBI agent who Agnes has had previous run-ins with in the past – and more questions arise when the beleaguered detective catches a strange teenage boy trying to rob her house. The arrival of these two outside forces soom cause Agnes’ distorted reality to shift and before you know it, she’s facing the truth for the first time in three years as her memory comes flooding back; but questions still remain. Who the strange boy she’s arrested (read: actually kidnapped)? Who is Rio to her really? Why was she living a TV episode that cast Wanda Maximoff as a dead body? And what is she going to do about having no powers anymore?
Anyone initially questioning the existence of Agatha All Along would do well to remember two things: one is that Kathryn Hahn is an undeniable treasure and her performance of Agnes/Agatha was a genuine treat, so giving her a show all to her own isn’t something I’d exactly class as disastrous. Two: series showrunner and lead director Jac Schaeffer approaches this first episode as a literal sequel to WandaVision that not only employs a few similar tricks here and there, it also brings back a lot of the side characters from Westview to truly drive home the connection. Thus we get an opening credits sequence lifted straight from True Detective and we’re dropped straight into Agnes’ confounding illusion much in the same way we were dropped into Wanda’s and we spend the whole episode, like Agatha, unwrapping the layers until we find a way out into a reality we’re more familiar with.
It’s done really well too, with such characters as Dottie, Harold, Mrs Hart, Norman and Herb all once again popping up as the folk of Westview tolerate a slightly different delusion-suffering witch to give us that reassuring continuity that the MCU feeds on and the investigation of a Jane Doe who may be representative of Wanda Maximoff’s “death” in Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness (crushed, black fingers, dirt from a foreign country under her nails) gives us that WandaVision style mystery as we try to figure out what the hell is happening.
However, in an attempt to be more than just WandaVision 2, we fast track the mystery to have our confused lead regain her senses before the episode ends with a telling moment as Agatha literally strips off all of her past guises from the previous show (yes, even her 80s workout gear) to literally pit WandaVision behind her as she starts scheming once again. Hahn, unsurprisingly, is magnificent. Starting out first as a crumpled, bitter detective and then eventually seamlessly segueing into the bitchy, aloof witch we remember, she causally expresses a massive range without seemingly having to try and its legitimately fun to get her back.
Joining her and adding to the mystery is the MCU debut of Audrey Plaza who has previous Marvel form thanks to the brain bending, loose X-Men spinoff, Legion and as her character of Rio, she seems to be sticking to the same type of all-knowing, not-telling, chameleonic enigma she portrayed so well. We know that both her and Agatha have a past history and we definitely know they aren’t friends by the physical, MCU fight they have that obliterates a large portion of Agatha’s kitchen, but you can’t be a WandaVision spinoff without a hefty serving of tantalising mystery – as so, for now, Rio’s whole deal remains shrouded in the unknown.
However, making her seem like an open book (possibly the Darkhold) in comparison is the nameless teenager played by Joe Locke who breaks into her house looking for something called “the road”. Speculation is rife that Locke is playing the latest incarnation of Wiccan, aka. Billy Maximoff, one of the make-believe children that Wanda had created to perfect her family life with Vision – but while he certainly looks the part, there’s a chance that Marvel are just trying to swerve us once again with something that seems so obvious so I’m not taking anything for granted just yet.
In fact, like most of the MCU’s premier episodes, Agatha All Along seems utterly crammed with unresolved questions, uncertain identities, mentionings of nebulous menaces such as the “Salems Seven” and the fact that our protagonist is a puppy murdering witch who tried to steal power from a woman called the Scarlet Witch. Still, as deliberately puzzling first episodes go, Agatha All Along manages to live up to the kooky, TV fluent standard that WandaVision did, but where the show goes from here in its next eight episodes is anyone’s guess, but hopefully it can keep the momentum up as it forges it’s own Witches’ Road to form it’s own identity.
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