‘Agatha All Along’: A Perfect Halloween Brew From Marvel

Agatha All Along, now streaming to all your Marvel-connected devices, is the perfect fall streaming show from our Disney overlords. Marvel’s TV track record hasn’t really cooked lately. Secret Invasions was mostly a drab dud, She-Hulk fiercely split fans by being overly silly, and Echo gave us a fairly cool superhero origin story that most of us soon forgot. Now we get a spinoff series from the bizarre yet surprisingly poignant Wandavision, featuring antagonist Agatha Harkeness in a delightfully spooky-fun series just in time to get us into the Halloween mood.

Agatha, you’ll remember, was the “nosy neighbor” in Wanda Maximoff’s trippy hex, fueled by grief and loss over the death of her beloved Vision, that took over the entire township of Westview, New Jersey. As we came to learn, the fun side character, played with memorable theatricality by Kathryn Hahn, turned out to be a centuries-old witch intent on appropriating Wanda’s sinister magic from a powerful tome called the Darkhold. That didn’t work out so hot for Agatha, whom Wanda left trapped in the hex and powerless when that series concluded.

As this series begins, we see  another comical bit of genre appropriation similar to the various sitcoms emulated in Wandavision, only this time it’s a True Detective/Mare of Eastown gritty crime trope starring Agatha as the abrasive local cop investigating a murder.

As she digs into the particulars of the case, she encounters a teenaged suspect (Joe Locke) as well as the always-entertaining Aubrey Plaza as an FBI agent. Eventually, the unnamed teen manages to free Agatha from the spell, and the titular witch wanders naked and furious through Westview to learn that not only is she powerless, her neighbors have been kindly playing along with her true-crime delusions for several years now. In retrospect, it’s even more hilarious when you rewatch that opening scene knowing that the neighbors are just humoring her. It’s a clever and unexpected way to kick off a new show, and it bodes well for the series, assuming the writers can keep the tone as light and intelligent without succumbing to a melodramatic impulse, as happens often in these shows.

So, Agatha returns from her hex with a lot of questions, zero magical abilities, and a teenaged sidekick. We don’t know much about Plaza’s character, Rio, yet, other than the clear indication that she’s another witch that has some history, possibly romantic, with Agatha. She also warns our flustered protagonist that a terrifying coven called the Salem Seven is out to get her, so Agatha needs her powers back, stat. As she sees it, there’s only one way to do that, and it’s to travel down the “Witches Road,” a series of magical trials that, should one survive, grants the traveler their deepest desire. The only hitch is that it can’t be solo mission, meaning that Agatha will need to quickly assemble a coven with the appropriate magical skills.

Then we get your standard Blues Brothers meets Oceans 11 team-assembly bit. To help explain some of the minutia of witches and witchcraft in the MCU, Locke’s character serves as an effective target of exposition, although he has his own strange secrets, and we soon learn that he’s the subject of a sigil that prevents us from learning his name and backstory. When he attempts to explain, all we see is a glyph over his mouth accompanied by muted garbles. An intrigued Agatha decides to keep Teen along with her as she scouts the area for witches she can rope into her dangerous mission.

The squad Agatha gathers is a talented band of comedic actors whose characters have distinct magical skills, not to mention a few deep-seated desires that the end of the Witches Road could fulfill, should they live to see it. We have a potions expert, Jennifer, played by Sasheer Zamata, a sadly underused and underappreciated SNL cast member who shines in this role; Ali Ahn’s no-nonsense “security witch” Alice; and, in a moment of brilliant and lucky casting for all of us, Broadway legend Patti LuPone as a clairvoyant named Lilia.

Each of this rag-tag group seems to be down on her luck at the moment: Jennifer’s magic is “bound”; Lilia seeks to reverse her rotten fortune; and Alice desperately wants answers about the disappearance of her mother, also a powerful witch. Hence they all stand to benefit from a trip down the witches road, no matter how much they dislike or outright despise Agatha. Only one witch remains, an earth mother, and instead of seeking the clear choice, Rio, Agatha decides instead to invite her hilariously clueless neighbor Mrs. Hart to join the journey. Hart’s played by the wonderful Debra Jo Rupp, as jovially exasperated as ever. Team duly assembled, the witches, Teen in tow, musically summon the road with an absolute banger of an earworm ditty, and not a moment too soon, as the Salem Seven closes in on the newfound coven, giving their mission added urgency.

Which brings us to the road itself, something like a hallucinogenic vision quest mated with a magical escape room and a touch of L. Frank Baum. The only member of the group who’s been down this path before is Agatha, who isn’t always honest and forthcoming with her travel mates, to say the least. In the third episode of the series we get to see our first trial, in the form of a bougie beach house ripped directly from yet another series, Big Little Lies, featuring a deadly potions puzzle for Jennifer to solve, as well as a fun “wine-club socialite” wardrobe change for all involved that makes them appear more like monied HOA members than sorcerers.

It’s a fun gag, with some spooky hallucinations that tease us with a bit more backtory for each of our witches, and of course they survive the trial by the skin of their teeth. Well, mostly. At the conclusion of episode three, Mrs. Hart seems to have perished, but don’t count on that being permanent, as Rupp is entirely too entertaining to take out of the mix this early. I’m guessing she’s just mostly dead, and will turn out to be a bona fide earth witch somewhere down the line.

Agatha All Along is off to an enchanting start. Hahn inhabits her character with so much selfish, conniving scenery-chewing, it’s almost impossible to not find her amusing. It also doesn’t hurt that a veritable murderer’s row of supporting actresses backs her up. We haven’t seen too much of Plaza’s Rio yet, but that of course is going to change significantly down the line, judging by the available teasers, and I’m betting it’s going to be a hoot. In the meantime, Rupp, Ahn, and Zamata make this ensemble a formidable one, with the lynchpin of course being LuPone, who brings an incomparable balance of wit and gravitas only a lifetime of dedication to theater can grant. And surprisingly, Locke holds his own as the mysterious teen, and he even nails the few hilarious cracks the writers threw at him, most notably one about Hot Topic.

Seeing as we’re only a few episodes in, it’s hard to judge whether or not Agatha All Along might suffer the same fate as similar Marvel series and either bogging down in the middle and failing to make up for it in the finale, or just going completely off the rails. But with what we have thus far, I’m willing to wager that it’s going to be a fun season, at the very least. The deliberate release timing to coincide with Halloween was a smart call, and it’s doing a great job of establishing the vibe of the season with a classic coven story that incorporates scads of callbacks to centuries of witchy history, media and lore.

To that end, we get more than few references to The Wizard of Oz and fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel, and the end credits sequence is awash in nods to witchcraft stories throughout the years from Bewitched to Snow White, The Craft, and of course The Simpsons’ “Easy Bake Coven” Halloween episode, all set perfectly to Donovan’s “Season of the Witch.”

More than anything, Agatha All Along is Marvel’s homage to witches both in history and lore, and especially in TV and movies. Is it groundbreaking? No. Is it the most ingeniously creative, unique story ever told in the MCU? Also no. But is it…spooky, hilarious and fun? Absolutely. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go.

I left the coven on.