Agatha All Along S01E01 Review: Witches, Oh My

Agatha All Along, Season 1, Episode 1: Seekest Thou The Road

Happy Halloween! I wanted to wait until Agatha All Along was over before watching any of its episodes, but it also kind of lines up rather nicely with Halloween and the end of my coverage of the first season of What If. So we're starting off with the first episode now on Halloween. 

(Yes, I know I haven't done Deadpool vs. Wolverine yet. Someday.)

And... it's nowhere as spooky as I thought it would be, nor is it an 'unsettling' kind of spooky like WandaVision's initial episodes were. Agatha All Along acts as a sequel to WandaVision, where we follow the antagonist of that show, Agatha Harkness, as she breaks out of the imprisonment that Scarlet Witch put her in, and fights against other witches that she implied to have betrayed before. 

And... this first episode of Agatha All Along tries, a bit, to capture what made WandaVision work. We get a parody of a particular type of TV show, and then our main character realizes that some of the things going on are a bit creepy and very, very wrong. It just... didn't really work. With WandaVision, starting things out of context and parodying a much older format ended up with something whimsical, and the acting of familiar characters Vision, Scarlet Witch and their supporting characters are so over-the-top cheesy that you're confused... and the horror that they did when Vision's boss choked and died was a huge sudden reminder that, hey, we're supposed to be in a superhero show, something is seriously wrong. 

Agatha All Along's first episode parodies a typical cop show, where Agatha is 'Agnes', a daredevil cop with an attitude and a swagger who chews her gum loudly and argues with her boss and all that... but we're still making shows like that. That's not particularly special, not the way that WandaVision's various TV parodies were. In addition, the horror is almost expected, so when things started to go weird, I go 'oh, finally, we're getting somewhere' instead of actually being shocked. The supporting characters are... well-acted for what they are, but I really didn't give two shits about them, and I'm really just waiting for things to go on. 

It's not as bad as Iron Fist's legendarily terrible first episode where they wanted to make the audience question if Danny Rand is actually hallucinating about the temples and magic chi fists or whatever, but it's also a version of being quite slow where the audience knows, exactly, what happened to Agatha. We saw Scarlet Witch put her in that weird trance. So prolonging it for 20 minutes just really feels pretty bland.

There is also the problem that Agatha Harkness... isn't a particularly interesting character. I'm genuinely a bit baffled why she got a spinoff out of all the side characters from the Disney+ MCU content. Maybe I still feel a bit burnt out on Echo, and I acknowledge that Kathryn Hahn is a fun presence, but I am still cautiously worried that they thought that the huge meme-moment of the Agatha song to actually equate to marketable popularity.

Eventually, in reaction to Scarlet Witch's death, the spell around Agatha seems to unravel. The 'Jane Doe' body turns out to be a (conveniently face-covered) representation of Scarlet Witch and the Darkhold, and some of the people in Westview is starting to ask questions. We get to see the emo blue-jacketed teen who's totally a teenage Wiccan/Billy Kaplan, and the snarky new FBI agent Rio Vidal (played by Aubrey Plaza, previously of Legion fame). Eventually Agnes realizes that she's actually Agatha, reality unravels, and she finds herself in the 'real' world, buck-ass nude and confronting the citizens of Westview who apparently have been okay with treating her as just a slightly loony neighbour for three years. 

And then we get the true identity of Rio Vidal, who's a witch with a knife, and we get an honestly rather tepid little magic fight... but that magic fight was tepid because Agatha doesn't have access to her magic anymore. Rio and Agatha talk a bit, with the implication being that Agatha betrayed their coven or organization or whatever the "Salem Seven" is. Agatha manages to pull off a "wouldn't you rather kill me at my strongest" bullshit to get Rio to walk of. She also has Not-Wiccan kidnapped and tied up in a closet. 

And... again, Kathryn Hahn is a great lead. She unfortunately doesn't get the chance to chew the scenery as much as I expected her to, since she spends so much of the first half in the dour True Detective knockoff, or is just confused in general. It's kind of a shame, but while this is still an enjoyable episode to watch (most certainly better than She-Hulk, Secret Invasion and Echo, three rather embarrassing recent projects from D+/MCU), I didn't find it to be MCU's best work... but with that pesky setup done, hopefully the next couple of episodes would be better!

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• The Salem Seven are a recurring group of seven animal-themed witches who menaced the Scarlet Witch and the Fantastic Four. In the main Marvel universe, they were actually grandchildren of Agatha Harkness.
• Various call-backs to WandaVision and Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness are made here. Agatha was trapped in that hallucination at the end of WandaVision, various supporting characters from WandaVision return (including the rabbit), the Darkhold is mentioned via the acronym of the book, and when Agatha regains her mind, she goes through a montage of all of her looks from the various television time periods in WandaVision.  
• A cute (if morbid) joke was that the mysterious corpse was 'blunt force trauma' from being 'crushed by a massive object'. Scarlet Witch's end involved her being squished between two halves of a mountain. 
• The book, in addition to being an acronym of DARKHOLD (Dialogue And Rhetoric: Known History of Learning & Debate), is also written by Andrew Ugo, which is an anagram of the mountain "Wundagore". 
• In her illusion, Agatha' room contains an empty child's room belonging to Nicholas Scratch, which is Agatha's son from the comics.