As we settle in yet another uncomfortably familiar scenario where the knives are out for yet another female-led, MCU series on Disney+, I have to say, I’ve never really got what all the vitriolic outbursts and review bombing is all about. If you don’t want to watch a supernatural thriller about witches that’s populated almost exclusively by women, that’s fine – just don’t watch it. Job done. Problem solved.
However, if you do that, you’ll be missing Kathryth Hahn tearing up the scenery with all the poisonous barbs and razor sharp one liners you could possibly hope for as Agatha All Along stirs up more mystery as it heads into its second episode.
The cast is expanding, the secrets are growing and as we get ever deeper into Agatha’s witchy world, there’s a sense that some big revelations are coven round the bend. But first, it’s time to meet the rest of the witches.
After regaining her identity with the help of the mysterious Teen, Agatha realises that if she’s ever going to get back to anything even closely resembling full strength, she’s going to assemble a coven and take the perilous walk along the Witches Road. This seems to please the Teen, who has been reading up on the legends and wants to walk it himself in order to increase his magical power, but Agatha’s suspicions are peaked when she finds that the youth is under a particular kind of spell which stops her understanding him whenever he mentions any personal details about himself.
Still, with no time to spare with the threat of the Salem Seven looming over her, both Agatha and Teen head out to recuit the types they need to form all the different aspects of the coven. First stop is a washed up fortune teller named Lillia Calderu who is hiding powers far beyond vague predictions of the future and after offering her an invitation, they move onto potion master, Jennifer Kale, who needs to also walk the road due to some legal issues that’s arisen. Last up is Alice Wu-Gulliver who is similarly wash up as she’s gone from a cop with a famous witch mother, to a lowly security guard who’s parent vanished after attempting the very walk Agatha is trying to get them to do.
However, it soon becomes apparent that Agatha’s cut some corners, recruiting long suffering Westview resident and blatent non-witch Sharon Davies (aka. the former Mrs Hart while under the Scarlet Witch’s spell) rather than seeking help from her enemy Rio Vidal and revealing that her whole plan to walk the witches road was a ruse in order to steal some power from her allies for herself.
However, given the choice of facing the cloaked, malicious force of the Salem Seven and risk her life on the road, Agatha has no choice but to lead her rag tag coven into the unknown.
If there’s one thing the televisual arm of the MCU has managed to cultivate with style is the act of maintaining mystery with endless questions and conundrums that arise with every single episode. This was kick-started, fittingly, with WandaVision, the show that Agatha first showed up in that was literally one, huge, nine episode puzzles that gradually revealed fractions of its secrets every episode, while taking care to add new questions and talking points all along, even if they were ultimately revealed as red (or should that be Scarlet) herrings. Well, Agatha All Along is coming to the party with a few questions of its own either the main one being the identity of Joseph Locke’s Teen who seems to be so obviously a grown version of the make believe Billy Maximoff, you can’t help but wonder if Marvel’s just fucking with us. Not only is the Teen acting exactly like the kind of excitable student of magic that fits the original character perfectly, the episode also draws more direct parallels by taking great pains to reveal that the Teen is gay – just like in the comics (he even married the half-Skrull Young Avenger, Hulkling). It seems almost silly to suggest that the Teen couldn’t be Wiccan considering that to simply make it so would nicely pull the trigger on a plot thread that’s been brewing in the MCU since the start of Phase 4 – but then, Marvel once turned around and made the Skrulls good guys and gave a Quicksilver replacement the name of Ralph Bohner, so who knows at this point.
While the enigma of Teen and his magically protected identity is obviously a sizable selling point, the other is that Agatha now gets to amass her coven of chaos (a previous title for the show) and she does so in a way that sees her rope together a bunch of misfit spellcasters that feels very much like witchy off-shoot of The Dirty Dozen. Thus we get to meet the likes of Patti LuPone’s underachieving Lilia, Sasheer Zamata’s disgraced Jennifer and Ali Ahn’s washed up Alice and soon the bitchy, witchy, catty remarks are flying thick and fast as the mismatched group begrudgingly have to admit that the duplicitous Agatha is their only shot atvany sort of redemption. The banter is strong and the chemistry even stronger as Kathyn Hahn seems to draw strength from the ensemble to lie, cheat, berate and suck up to these women with the full intention of stabbing them in the back (possibly literally) in order to goad them into using their magic on her – which coincidently is the exact method she uses to steal power. However, the show manages to throw in a nifty wild card in the form of Debra Jo Rupp who, after the indignities heaped upon her character in WandaVision, has been dragged back into witch-related shenanigans due to another one of Agatha’s ploys. While her Rose from The Golden Girls style lack of awareness doesn’t pay off hugely as of yet, I’m sure the show will take full advantage of her dawning realisation as the episodes progresses, but the show is still building itself as it goes. Also being built is the sense of threat, but while the much ballyhooed Salem Seven do make an appearance, their jerky movements and blacked out faces make them more of an Alioth than a He Who Remains (to use Loki as a reference point), but hopefully the conspicuous-by-her-absence Aubrey Plazza will return next episode to install some personality into the menace.
Of course, the main selling point is still Kathryn Hahn operating at full sass capacity as she switches her never ending stream of self serving bullshit on a dime and hurls withering put downs with the velocity of a decorated baseball pitcher. However, as we’re only two episodes in out of nine, an annoying question has popped into my head. If we’ve barely only started exploring Agatha’s solo series but we’ve managed to restore her memory, introduce her coven and get to the Witches Road in only two episodes, where the hell can the remaining seven episode possibly go to keep things fresh.
While I have faith in the showrunners to at least keep things perky and fun, I’m also worried that the mid-season slump that tends to effect the MCU shows could very well strike here.
Anyway, that’s a different worry for a different time and so far, Agatha’s casting her spells just fine.
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