Miniseries
Original Air Date: September 18–October 30, 2024
Note: I’m writing this before Agatha All Along‘s two-part finale, which comes out later this week. Marvel shows are notorious for dropping the ball right at the end, so keep that in mind. Maybe everyone will be really mad at this show tomorrow!
Three years after WandaVision, Agnes of Westview is a crime noir series about Agnes O’Connor (Kathryn Hahn), a surly detective working a Jane Doe case in Westview, New Jersey. At least, that’s what The Scarlet Witch wanted Agnes to believe when she escaped the hex at the end of WandaVision. Actually, Agnes is a performance that the witch Agatha Harkness is being forced to perform and the rest of the town humors because what else are they going to do. Her running around town with a hose nozzle in a holster isn’t hurting anyone. But all good things must come to an end, and a mysterious goth teen (Joe Locke) appears and helps wake Agatha up from the spell. The teen wants Agatha’s help finding the Witches’ Road, a trial that rewards witches what they desire most, which Agatha has survived once before. She’s not interested, but that’s when the green witch Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) shows up and tries to kill her.
Agatha convinces Rio to spare her until she gets her powers back, but Rio warns her that her old enemies, a group of ghoulish witches called the Salem Seven, are now also hunting Agatha. With no options left, Agatha decides to walk the Witches’ Road with the teen. But first she needs a coven to get there, so they quickly find whatever nearby witches they can. Fate or magic leads them to Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone), a spacey fortuneteller, Jen Kale (Sasheer Zamata), a potions specialist acting as a beauty influencer, and Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn), a security guard whose mother was a famous singer and secretly also a witch. The coven almost complete, Agatha decides not to ask Rio to be their green witch and instead grabs Sharon Davis (Debra Jo Rupp), another victim of Wanda’s hex who has no magical powers at all. I’m sure that won’t be a problem.
The rest of the miniseries (so far) focuses on the coven’s adventures on the Witches’ Road. Each episode focuses on an individual trial that is uniquely suited to test one member of the team. In this way we get a weekly one-two punch of character backstory and fun life-or-death traps. So I’m happy to report that this actually is a fun seasonal show, fully living up to its potential as a somewhat spooky witchy adventure. It’s not like you’re actually going to be scared, but they use the atmosphere and genre tropes really well. And the show is actually fun every week, unlike other Marvel shows like Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Moon Knight that felt like they were dragging out movie stories into eight-part miniseries. I think Agatha All Along hits more often than it misses, and I appreciate the series’ willingness to focus on these supporting characters who are even less famous than the incredibly niche titular character.
That was my initial resistance to Agatha All Along: Agatha Harkness is a relatively obscure supporting character in Fantastic Four and Scarlet Witch stories, it seemed odd to give her a whole miniseries and a sign of Marvel’s over-saturation of the market. I’ve turned around on it for two reasons: one, it’s now pretty clear that this is the middle chapter of a Scarlet Witch miniseries trilogy that will conclude with Vision Quest. And two, the show is good. It’s funny, it’s colorful, it’s queer, it’s worth tuning in every week. Like Andor, I gotta remember to trust when a creator, in this case Jac Schaeffer, has a vision and just let them cook. Marvel could maybe learn that lesson too, especially after the Guardians of the Galaxy 3 debacle.
Marvel doesn’t want to take a break but sometimes it’s forced to. It happened in 2020, when the global pandemic forced Feige and co. to take a year off that they should have planned on anyway after Endgame gave us a satisfying conclusion to the whole MCU and Spider-Man: Far From Home a sweet epilogue (that, if you go back to, also correctly makes fun of the idea of multiverses but no one was listening). And it’s happened again in 2024 thanks to the dual industry strikes last year. 2023 was perhaps the worst year in Marvel’s cinematic history, with more misfires than they’ve ever had before: nobody liked Quantumania, The Marvels bombed, Secret Invasion should have stayed a secret, and What If…? came out at Christmastime without anyone noticing. This was a great time to step back and reevaluate, and it seems like they kind of did but mostly took all the wrong lessons, especially after Deadpool & Wolverine made 1337 billion dollars.
That said, while I’m pessimistic about the MCU’s cinematic output, their TV arm has been quietly crushing it with this and the X-Men ’97 revival. And what’s the difference between those shows and Deadpool 3? Say it with me: they left the writers alone long enough for them to write the whole thing. So is Agatha All Along a harbinger of Marvel’s rebound? Well, the fact that they’ve reshot Captain America: Brave New World like 50 times leads me to believe no, that’s not what is actually happening here. I guess I should really focus on enjoying those last couple episodes of Agatha because I’m betting despite everything, Kevin Feige thinks his saviors were Hugh Jackman, Robert Downey Jr. and Andrew Garfield all along.