Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column, published every Friday, spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: Kathryn Hahn returns in Agatha All Along, following on from the events of WandaVision.
Agatha All Along: Season 1
The scene that bothered me the most in Deadpool & Wolverine is the one where Logan (Hugh Jackman) and Mr Merc with a Mouth (Ryan Reynolds), having been pulled out of their Twentieth Century Fox timelines, arrive at the Time Variance Authority, the bureaucratic peacekeepers of Marvel’s multiverse. Here it is, they’re finally about to be a part of the MCU. Then Deadpool cracks the joke: “You’ve joined at a bit of a low point.” Fair enough, the studio’s been trapped in a well-publicised creative and financial crisis, with some of their lowest box office returns and a seeming inability to make a Blade movie.
Deadpool is irreverent. He breaks the fourth wall. I get it, I’m a fan of his work. The frustrating part is that he delivers this line in the middle of the TVA, the only set in Deadpool & Wolverine with any visual identity, and one that was actually designed by the makers of the 2021 Loki series. You know, part of that so-called “low point”. It’s the crux of my issue with Marvel’s current state of play. On the one hand, you have the desperate nostalgia bait of Robert Downey Jr.’s return as Victor von Doom, reflected in Deadpool & Wolverine’s teary-eyed romanticism over the old Avengers line-up, treated with far more sanctity than the X-Men movies this was supposedly a tribute to. They can’t goddamn move on.
On the other hand, you have something like Disney+’s Agatha All Along. In its first four episodes (provided to critics), it’s having fun, embracing a different kind of audience, and sincerely trying to conceive of what this franchise could be beyond a long line of cameos. If you’d told me back in 2012, after the release of The Avengers, that one day this same universe would contain Kathryn Hahn and Aubrey Plaza as a pair of witches with a messy past and potent sexual chemistry, or that Patti Lupone would be there and she’d sing an entire song, I’d call you a visionary but insane.
Yet, Agatha All Along works. And, while it’s not as immediately striking as WandaVision or Loki, I’m already invested in where its conceit might take us: Hahn’s Agatha Harkness, an ancient spellcaster trapped by magic in Westview by the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) at the very end of WandaVision, takes to the fabled Witches’ Road to undergo its trials and restore her powers. But she can only do so if she, the infamously murderous traitor who killed her own coven to absorb their powers, can form a new coven and learn to play nice. Or, at least, play nice until she gets what she wants.
Lupone plays one of those witches, Sasheer Zamata and Ali Ahn the other two; Debra Jo Rupp returns as Agatha’s neighbour, who gets swept along for the ride; and Joe Locke stars as an Agatha stan who we can only refer to as “Teen” for plot reasons. Plaza stalks the sidelines. The trials in question are what I’d describe as trauma-themed escape rooms. Each, as a form of deference to WandaVision’s sitcom pastiche, bears a unique aesthetic theme. These are all things I like. I’m keen to see where we head next.
But I’m here as someone who (at the risk of being publicly jeered at) doesn’t consider the Avengers movies the height of culture. And so, my problem with Marvel now isn’t that it’s made nothing good, but that it keeps forgetting the good it’s made. Most of these have been television shows. Both Moon Knight and Werewolf by Night hinted at something brewing up on the supernatural side, a chance to provide the fun, weird sideshow alternative to the super soldier, spy, and billionaire headliners—a position that used to be filled by the (now seemingly concluded?) Guardians of the Galaxy movies.
WandaVision set up a compelling villain arc for the Scarlet Witch that was utterly squandered by Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Supposedly, she’s dead now, crushed under a mountain, and even if Agatha All Along brings her back like the internet says it will, what will they do with a character whose narrative has already reached its end? She had the will and the justification to wreak havoc on the MCU for a good two or three Avengers movies, considering nobody bothered to check in on her after she was forced to kill the love of her life and then wiped from existence for five years. I wouldn’t have been so forgiving.
And so, in a way, I agree and disagree with the criticisms that Agatha All Along seems as if it has no consequences. It probably won’t, and that’s the issue, because hiring somebody like Hahn to bring to life such a fascinatingly selfish, wounded, yet not entirely malevolent woman is exactly the kind of character study the MCU is missing right now. No one else seems to have all that much going on, really (minus Florence Pugh, maybe, scowling in the corner). What Agatha All Along proves is that Marvel’s “low point” is both unnecessary and self-inflicted. Give this witch her time in the spotlight.
