Agatha All Along S01E04 Review: Musical Time, Go

Agatha All Along, Season 1, Episode 4: If I Can't Reach You / Let My Song Teach You

So this episode is Alice's trial, and out of Agatha's coven, I felt like Alice Wu was always the one whose 'D&D backstory' was already told to us in the debut. Something about her dead mother, something about finding answers and stuff. It's simple, but it's also done relatively well here to give the whole thing a little 'witchy trope' bent. 

But before we get to the trial, we get a burial scene of Sharon. Not-Wiccan and Alice are a bit more somber about this, and even the two 'senior' witches Jen and Lilia are somber, but Agatha is as flippant as ever. But due to the fact that they needed a green witch later on for the trial, Jen and Lilia push Agatha and get her to summon a new green witch. Which... is kind of hilarious when it seemed like they accidentally zombified Sharon and everyone, even the more experienced witches, panic the shit out. It's a simple line, but Lilia complaining about the small font in Not-Wiccan's spellbook is probably one of the funnier lines in this show. 

Instead, the person that crawls out of Sharon's grave is Rio Vidal, who makes her reappearance after the first episode. She clearly has some history with Agatha, and the rest of the coven isn't quite sure what to make out of this more outright-psychotic witch (as compared to Agatha's thinly-veiled sociopathy) other than that she looks nice. The episode later basically confirms that Agatha and Rio used to be involved romantically, and that there was some betrayal that Agatha did. 

But we don't have time to process any of these yet, because we go straight into the next trial, with a different house, a different phase of the moon on the door, and a different set of clothes for our coven, where everyone is dressed up as rock groupies. Alice is clearly uncomfortable with the setting of the house, and it's quickly revealed that the interior of this house is filled with music recording stuff, and many of them correspond to her mom, Lorna's, band. 

We get a couple of moments of Rio trying to seduce Agatha and get her to betray the coven, but Agatha """accidentally""" activates a microphone that broadcasts Rio's proto-betrayal to the rest of the witches. There's also a brief moment where Lilia lapses and gives some ominous premonitions which she herself doesn't seem to understand why. All of this ends up getting put on the backburner as Not-Wiccan plays a record which spins backwards (of course) and starts burning random members of the coven with Exorcist-style pain. Jen is hilarious in this sequence, demanding Alice make a protective circle preemptively and refusing to move out of it. Eventually Alice reveals that her family has a generational curse that hits all of the women in their family, giving them terrible luck. 

Through some dialogue and handwaving, the coven discovers that the solution is to play Lorna's version of "The Ballad of the Witches' Road", which is an excuse to have our heroines just do a rock cover of that song. Okay! I can respect that. The witches discuss how this very popular song is actually a form of a protection curse, and since Lorna made it quite widespread, it's being played at any given moment in time somewhere in the world, which keeps the protection aura around Alice active. Does it make 100% sense? Not really, but it's quite heartwarming and it does kind of fit the common horror trope of someone embedding satanic messages in rock music. 

Halfway through the song, the Curse manifests itself as a demonic harpy-like creature, which is not CGI but traditional makeup and/or puppetry, which I can appreciate. Alice manages to banish the curse, but Not-Wiccan ends up getting impaled through the gut during the process and collapses at the end of the episode. It is very interesting to see just how uncharacteristically panicky Agatha was throughout this whole sequence. Jen manages to ultimately heal Not-Wiccan, but it's clear that Agatha's control over the coven -- not that it's ever that powerful in the first place -- is starting to slip. Rio hammers down another line to really shake Agatha's world... "that boy isn't yours", which, while it isn't a surprise for me as a watcher, is probably going to shake Agatha's motivations so far. 

Overall... yeah, I think that the witches' interactions with each other are quite fun, even if it's clear that the main characters in the showrunners' mind are Agatha, Not-Wiccan and now Rio. Jennifer didn't get quite as much focus last episode, though it is understandable considering that she's the first trial. Alice gets some rather basic storytelling motions, which I do appreciate, but it also feels like most of what the show is going to do with her has been ticked off. It's a nice story, I suppose, and as an episodic part of a season I suppose I don't have much to complain about.

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Agatha mentions having fought, and is implied to have killed, a superhero team called the Daughters of Liberty. They are a minor group of superheroes in the comics, which, ironically, comics Agatha was affiliated with.