One of the big moments of Marvel Studios first Disney+ streaming series WandaVision was the reveal of Katherine Hahn’s character Agnes is revealed to be a witch named Agatha Harkness who was behind the mysterious happenings of that series. Propelled by a lively performance from Hahn, and a zippy little theme song from Avenue Q co-creator Robert Lopez and and his wife Kristen Anderson-Lopez, the character quickly became a fan favorite, and Disney knew enough to spin her off for her own adventures. What could have been a cynical corporate decision turned out to be a good call as Agatha All Along is, at least in the first four episodes of the series that were made available for review, a show that easily slots into the top tier of Marvel’s Disney+ output.
Agatha All Along debuts on streamer Disney+ with two episode premiering on September 18 at 9pm eastern. It will release its remaining episodes weekly with its final two episodes dropping appropriately enough on October 30.
So it is now three years after the finale of WandaVision and Agatha is finally able to break from the mystical spell that Wanda used to imprison her in the town of Westview. Now powerless, she finds the only way to regain her magical abilities is to walk the Witches’ Road, a series of mystical, and potentially fatal, tests. As the task needs to be done by a coven of witches, Agatha reluctantly recruits several other witches into her group, all of which have seen better days. Also joining them on the journey is a mysterious teenage boy (Joe Locke). A bit of a fanboy for magic, he has been placed under a spell that prohibits other people from hearing him when he tries to say his own name or talk about his past.
WandaVision creator by Jac Schaeffer is back for similar duties with Agatha All Along and that helps the new series feel like a continuation of the original without ever coming off as a slavish clone. Where WandaVision played with sitcom tropes, Agatha All Along is a spooky thriller and the mood she has created very much permeates this new show. Interestingly, although I don’t think that the series delves into this too deeply, Agatha All Along is similar to WandaVision thematically as it is also a show about loss. Here, the loss is Agatha’s witchcraft power, which she sees as integral to her identity. And as the members of the coven she gathered around herself were at the least partly coerced into their journey, there is a parallel that can be drawn to the citizens of Westview who were captive to Wanda’s magical attempt to work through her grief over the death of her beloved Vision. But Agatha All Along does stand on its own as a series, cleverly using its opening episode to separate itself from its progenitor’s sitcoms-through-the-ages conceit. Its second episode sets up what’s to come and then things really get cooking in episodes three and four.
And it is perhaps not just lost power that Agatha is seeking to regain. Early on mention is made of an infant son that rumor among the witches says Agatha traded to a dark power for her magic. The show does hint that the mysterious Teen could possibly be Agatha’s son, but that seems like too easy an answer for this particular mystery. Hopefully as the show takes us all down the Witches’ Road for the remaining episodes, there will be no easy answers and that the journey continues to be spookily entertaining for us viewers.
