Agatha All Along...So Far
Marvel is leaning into a trial-of-the-week serial with a witchy Halloween feel
In case you haven’t noticed, I really don’t do episode-by-episode reviews well. So, I’m going to cover Agatha All Along’s first five episodes here, even though that’s a lot to condense into one post.
I’m usually skeptical of series based on villains, but I’m often proven wrong in my pessimism (Loki being a case in point) and find that there’s some genuinely great storytelling there. This makes sense, after all, because the only way to tell a truly compelling hero story is to have a villain with some depth. Also, despite the horror vibe that came from the trailer, I found myself looking forward to this series at least a bit because WandaVision was a masterpiece, and I was hoping for a return to that setting.
After all, Agatha has been trapped in Wanda’s Westview for years now, so it makes sense that we would at least be dipping a toe into that world again. And, indeed, I found it fantastic that we dive right back into the over-the-top genre storytelling that marked WandaVision with Agatha as a small-town detective solving a case with cryptic clues. Watching her shed her various Westview incarnations and have her memory restored was a ton of fun, and the first two episodes place us firmly into the continuity. With Wanda’s heroic death at the end of Multiverse of Madness, her hex that held the Westview universe in place is broken, and Agatha can return to the world…albeit powerless.
That doesn’t stop her from being the subject of vitriol and violence, because it turns out that Agatha is…well, not a good person, even by witch standards. The first episodes set us up for some deep character development for Agatha, which seems to indicate, at least to me, that she’s going to be a villain (or perhaps an antihero?) that will recur in many plots to come. If so, then Marvel is leaning into the series to do exactly what this type of series is good for: in-depth exposition that will establish a solid foundation for future appearances of the character.
And, if that’s the case, then the episodic, “trial of the week” format is a great vehicle to lay this foundation. Agatha’s new coven is fleeing from Salem’s Seven (which further establishes just how questionable Agatha’s character is, that she drug them into this), giving each character a chance to get the group through a trial, but really using each one to draw out an aspect of Agatha. She’s unmistakably the center of things, even when she clings to the background, which is both great writing and a masterful performance by Kathryn Hahn. She’s not alone…the performances by the entire cast so far have been excellent.
The mystery of the first five episodes, which is revealed just at the end of the fifth, is who is Teen? A spell prevents the others from learning who he is, although fan speculation has been fairly consistent that he is one of Wanda’s sons, Wiccan. When Wanda created Westview, as we remember, she created two sons for she and Vision. Even with Westview’s alternate reality hex dissolved, the souls of these two boys survive, which is consistent with the comics. Wiccan is a powerful character, and, when Teen is revealed to indeed be Wiccan at the end of episode 5, we seem to have collected nearly all of the Young Avengers at this point. With the quiet disintegration of the Kang Dynasty story arc, it would make sense that Marvel is going to move more intentionally in this direction, perhaps even as their new flagship “big team-up.”
As exciting as all of this is, the series hasn’t been without its problems for me so far. The “we’re just misunderstood” trope by the witches here, while amusing, is really just old and has been overdone elsewhere, so I wish the writers had avoided this. I also find the horror vibe a bit heavy-handed, but Marvel seems to want to do something for Halloween every year, as we’ve seen with two Werewolf by Night releases and a cancelled (?) Ghost Rider film. It’s just never been my genre, though, and I’m certain there are a lot of fans out there loving this series. That, after all, is the beauty of comics: they can incorporate every genre into their storytelling, and I’m glad that Marvel is embracing that flexibility on the screen.
All in all, I’ve found Agatha All Along a fun series so far. I’m looking forward to what we’ll see as episode 6 awaits, specifically now that we have two main characters. Agatha and Wiccan’s conflict could lead this to be less of a tale of a villain reclaiming her power, and more of a heroic good vs. evil battle, which I think would be a good direction for the series’ final episodes.
And now I’m off to watch episode 6…