After stealing the show in WandaVision, Kathryn Hahn returns as Agatha Harkness in her own witchy Disney+ series, Agatha All Along.
Set three years after the events of WandaVision, Agatha All Along opens with a spoof of popular crime series. For its first episode, Agatha is Detective Agnes O’Connor, a police detective working to solve the recent murder of a woman. And just like WandaVision, something isn’t right; it’s almost as if Agnes is a role that doesn’t quite fit.
There are people and interactions that prompt Agnes to reevaluate her existence. This includes the apprehension of a mysterious Teen (Joe Locke) who breaks into her house to steal a crime scene locket, as well as the unusual (sexual) tension she has with an out of town agent (Aubrey Plaza) who begrudgingly plays along each time Agnes wants to discuss the case.
It’s not until Teen mutters a Latin spell in the interrogation room that the shackles of Scarlet Witch’s curse shake loose and Agatha remembers who she is. The “reveal” is filmed in a similar fashion to early episodes of WandaVision, wherein the narrative and characters shift between genres and time periods, which naturally requires (often exquisite) changes in hair and costume.
What Agatha discovers is that she’s been living a drab normal life in Westview. More importantly, however, is that she’s lost “her purple” powers.
When adversary Rio Vidal (Plaza) confirms that she’s the first of many witches looking for payback, Agatha urgently realizes that she must regain her magic. In the lore of the show, this requires assembling a coven to walk The Witches Road, a perilous path that promises great rewards to the few who can survive it.
Nearly the entire second episode is spent identifying and blackmailing the rest of Agatha All Along‘s primarily female cast into accompanying Agatha on the journey. This includes failed wellness entrepreneur Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata), destitute psychic Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone), retailer Ali Ahn (Alice Wu-Gulliver), and Agatha’s nosey gardener neighbour, Mrs. Hart (Debra Jo Rupp). Each has a reason to seek out a power boost to change their fate, though all are equally wary of Agatha, whose duplicitous reputation precedes her.
The exception is Teen, the coven’s unofficial member and the one individual that Agatha seeks to both actively protect and understand. Teen is obsessed with her, and desires to walk The Road with her in order to become a proper witch, but there’s something odd about the boy. Undoubtedly Marvel fans will immediately deduce his identity (stay off the Internet, kids), but for the first four episodes screened for critics, he’s as much of a mystery to be solved as he is a character.
In one of the more inspired recurring visual & aural motifs of the show, Teen is unable to discuss his name or background. Presumably his true identity is the show’s season-long mystery, but credit to the Heartstopper fave for imbuing the character with depth and empathy. Locke does good work with a character that is deliberately presented as a puzzle to be solved (see also: Clara from Doctor Who).
Naturally the show has wit and spells aplenty, in addition to the occasional musical moment (Agatha All Along is clearly looking to build and expand on the popularity of its titular song, which went viral on WandaVision). What makes the show work, however, is how easy and breezy it is; sure there’s mystery and adventure and character back stories to unpack, but the cast is clearly having a ball.
This is particularly true of Hahn, who slips back into her anti-heroine role with gusto. Agatha is the reluctant leader of a group of people whose powers she would rather steal than work with and the role allows Hahn to crack wise, look exasperated, flourish a cape, and basically act like a complete diva. It’s exactly what you hope for from the character and Agatha All Along, by extension, is everything you would hope the series would be.
Showrunner Jac Schaeffer and his writers have adopted a fairly simplistic episodic structure wherein tasks along The Road directly correlate to the personalities and abilities of the characters. This not only guarantees to a) create conflict, but also b) expand characters’ relationships.
For example: episode four proves to be a particular challenge to Ali, but everyone is required to contribute in order to the solve the challenge before time runs out. In this capacity, Agatha All Along is a like a witchy version of the Escape Room movies, in which the group must work together to solve a puzzle or die in the process. And if friendship, trust, adventure, and/or a song should result, well…all the better.
There are stakes, certainly (a member of the coven disappointingly doesn’t make it very far), but overall the show is pretty family friendly. Episodes run an average of forty minutes and tend to pack in an equal amount of action, mystery, and <slight> character development.
Anyone hoping for speedy progress on The Road, however, will need to exercise patience. The group doesn’t get very far on an episode by episode basis (Lord of the Rings, this ain’t). With that said, each Inception-style stop does feature some pretty nifty production design, including a fun rift-on WASP chic suburbia in episode three.
The Bottom Line: There’s no world in which Agatha All Along isn’t a huge hit, particularly among the girls, goths, and gays. It may have taken several years and multiple fake titles to get here, but Disney+ is about to reap the benefits of programming the show just in time for Spooky Season. 4/5
Agatha All Along debuts with two episodes on Wednesday, Sept 18, followed by weekly episodes.
4 episodes watched for review.
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