Witches, Man

I feel like I’m starting to sound like a broken record but what the hell is going on with Marvel? They had the greatest film franchise ever, with movie after movie setting Box Office records and making billions for the company. They were the jewel of Disney’s empire, the can’t stop money making machine that fans adored. Yes, COVID came along and forced the company to rethink their film release schedules and caused them to move things around, but you’d think the group that was able to create 22 successful films (give or take an Incredible Hulk here or there) would be able to figure out how to keep that effort going.

And yet, as I’ve observed before, Phase IV of the Marvel Cinematic UniverseWhen it first began in 2008 with a little film called Iron Man no one suspected the empire that would follow. Superhero movies in the past, especially those not featuring either Batman or Superman, were usually terrible. And yet, Iron Man would lead to a long series of successful films, launching the most successful cinema brand in history: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. was an unmitigated disaster with films no one cared about, heroes that failed to launch, and expectations lowered so far that fans don’t even consider the MCU “event watching” anymore. Certainly the dilution of the brand across TV and specials didn’t help, in large part because most of those shows weren’t that great and certainly were appointment television. But even now, most of the way into Phase V, with Marvel supposedly recalibrating and working to bring audiences back, they’re still cranking out mediocre products that aren’t worth tuning in for. And yes, that includes Agatha All Along.

Marvel was already fighting an uphill battle trying to get people to tune in for a new MCU show. Audiences have been turned off by one middling show after another, and no one wants to watch yet another mediocre show about a D-list character on Disney+Disney's answer in the streaming service game, Disney+ features the studio's (nearly) full back catalog, plus new movies and shows from the likes of the MCU and Star Wars. at this point. No offense to the fabulous Kathryn Hahn, who is absolutely fantastic as Agatha Harkness here, but Agatha All Along is just another mediocre show about a D-list character. Agatha was the villain over on WandaVision, and while that was one of the few good shows Marvel cranked out early in Phase IV, no one was asking for more adventures with Agatha. She’s not a draw on her own.

Going in and watching the show, that is made abundantly clear. I’ve already recapped the basic premise of the show in my premiere review, so we don’t need to do that here. While the show has an interesting starting concept, with Agatha bringing in witches and taking to the magical Witches Road, it can’t really figure out a good reason for Agatha to be there. It spends nine episodes trying to balance whether Agatha is the heroine or the villain of the piece and by the end of the series it still doesn’t have an answer. She’s bad but she’s good. She hates witches but she cares all the same. Her wants, her needs, and her motivations are mixed and incomplete, and the series never manages to resolve any of that. It’s almost like making a show with Agatha Harkness as the protagonist might not have been a good idea.

A big reason for that is that Agatha is already a complete character by the time we meet her on WandaVision. She’s not someone that has wants or needs of her own, already becoming one of the most powerful witches in the world. Her whole desire was to grow Wanda’s power so she, Agatha, could steal it (as that’s her thing). The only thing Agatha All Along has is Agatha without her power, desperate to get it back. But she doesn’t actually learn anything along the way, or figure out some new lesson about herself. Her whole desire is just to find a way to restore her power, and then she can go back to being Agatha all along.

To try and make up for this the show brings in the Teen (Joe Locke), a mysterious kid with a big secret. Who he is becomes a major plot point of the series, so much so that I don’t want to spoil it, but suffice it to say that while his character is absolutely essential to getting the plot going, once it’s revealed it actually sucks a lot of the interest out of the show. If Agatha was here to illustrate what happens to her after WandaVision, tying up that loose end, Teen’s inclusion actually performs a similar act. He’s here to tie up another loose end, a dangling plot point that no one actually cared about, assuming it didn’t matter. Marvel expected it to matter to fans… but it didn’t.

It certainly doesn’t help that the cast of characters drawn around Agatha and the Teen are all incredibly disposable. Agatha, as we know, kills other witches. It’s only to be expected, then, that as these characters are forced to walk the Witches Road, some (most) are going to die. We know this, we get it, and that’s made all the more obvious by the fact that each other character she brings in for her new coven – Patti LuPone as divination witch Lilia Calderu, Sasheer Zamata as potion master Jennifer "Jen" Kale, Ali Ahn as protection witch Alice Wu-Gulliver, and Debra Jo Rupp as friendly neighbor Sharon Davis – are paper thin sketches that only get fleshing out right before their time on the show is over.

In fairness to the series, some of these send-offs are great. Lilia gets a fantastic episode focused all around her, and it’s a real highlight for the series. It’s time twisted and very engaging and if the series could have devoted more time to her and the way her powers worked I think that would have been fantastic. I don’t think she could have supported a series all on her own as she’s not that much more interesting than Agatha, but certainly she has an interesting powerset that is only revealed in her episode, right when it suddenly feels like it’s too little, too late.

The show also just doesn’t know when to stop. One big twist is followed by another, and another, and another, right up to the point where we have a twist so big and so silly that I turned to my wife and said, “did they just Kaiser Soze the ending?” When you watch it, you’ll know, and suddenly everything in the series takes this one big step so much farther out that it becomes laughable. Yes, the groundwork for this sudden twist is laid throughout the series, but that doesn’t make it any more believable. It’s just one more big twist on a show that goes for the twists harder than M. Night Shyamalan at a writer’s workshop.

But the biggest problem with this show is simply that it feels so disposable. So far Marvel has seemed reluctant to have their TV shows properly feed into their movies, and vice versa. In part that’s because the one time so far that they’ve really tried it, with The Marvels, the film crashed and burned because many viewers didn’t want to have to put in the “homework” to watch all the other shows that tied in to explain who all the characters were and why they should care. Because of that, nothing that happens on Agatha All Along feels like it’s really going to matter. Are these characters ever going to show up again? Do we need to care about any of them? By and large the answer is no, especially when you look ahead to the projects in development by Marvel and you see that for the next five years or so these characters aren’t anywhere to be found. So why care?

There are a lot of interesting ideas in Agatha All Along, only some of which the show walks back as it puts one more twist on top of all the rest. It’s a show packed with ideas, and sometimes those ideas even help the show and make Agatha a slightly more interesting character. But, at the end of the day, all of that only matters if anything comes after this. We have to care about where Agatha is going to and what it means for her and the franchise as a whole. Agatha All Along doesn’t have an answer for that, and can’t even make a compelling argument that Aghgatha is someone we should bother following for nine episodes, let alone beyond this point.

Watching this show I kept asking myself why this existed. That is beyond giving Kathryn Hahn something to do, which is always worthy on its own. If Marvel wanted to bring Agatha back, they should have made her a villain somewhere else. Give her a couple of sentences to say, “that curse Wanda put on me? You really think I couldn’t break that in five seconds? Please.” And then you move on with her terrorizing some other magical person. Agatha versus Doctor Strange, or Agatha battling Shang-Chi makes a whole lot more sense than sending Agatha on a journey of discovery where she learns nothing and discovers even less. She’s too complete of a person to carry a show on her own, but she’s not well known enough to put anywhere else.

Much as I like Agatha as a character, and much as I love Hahn’s performance, this show doesn’t work. Long term, I just don’t think there’s a solid place for Agatha in the MCU. Most especially if Marvel keeps fumbling every project they make, putting out mediocre projects like this.