MIDNIGHT REVIEWS Agatha All Along Episode 1&2 Review
Where everything is not what it seems.
Agatha All Along
Episode 1: ‘Seekest Thou the Road’
Episode 2: ‘Circle Sewn with Fate/Unlock Thy Hidden Gate’
Series created by: Jac Schaeffer
Featuring: Kathryn Hahn, Joe Locke, Aubrey Plaza
Synopsis: Agatha (Hahn), having been trapped by Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) in a world that isn’t real, comes across a bizarre but intriguing Teen (Locke) and mysterious, antagonistic figure Rio Vidal (Plaza).
Review: Marvel have done it again. Another hit TV show, going against the grain and releasing episodes every week instead of dropping them all at once, this time featuring beloved stand out character Agatha from WandaVision. Kathryn Hahn, of course, leads the show fantastically. Her charisma and charm levels are off the charts here.
This time, the tables have been turned on her as we find her stuck in a fake world, trapped by the Scarlet Witch inside a world made to look like detective shows of recent times. Oh sweet irony, you slay me.
But by episode’s end, Agatha is free and planning to put together a coven of witches in order to get her power back. Where will this lead? Will Agatha really do anything to get her power back, no matter what the cost? How will this fit in to the wider Marvel Universe? How… can I bring myself to care?
Marvel have done it again.
First off, all the talk of this show being ‘Marvel’s gayest project yet’ and that it will feature a ‘gay explosion’ (a phrase I’m sure will terrify certain parts of the population, hilariously) oversells the opening two episodes. The characters are having as gay a time as The Flintstones had. It all translates into one character having a boyfriend who tries to call him, and two women having a conversation featuring the line ‘prefer me horizontal… in a grave.’ Suffice to say, so far there are queerer shows on daytime TV, or even elsewhere on Disney+.
Instead, more time is taken to explore the brand new idea of a group of women who don’t get along. Agatha All Along gives us not one, but three scenes where the main character tricks or coerces another into joining her group. The morals of the protagonist aren’t the complaint here; it fits because Agatha is mean and fights dirty. I simply thought I’d accidentally sat on the remote and skipped the show backwards because I was watching a scene playing out identically to the last. It all leads to a room full of women yelling at each other. Truly, Marvel is the House of Representation™.
Marvel have done it again.
But how does it relate to its predecessor? Whilst WandaVision revelled in the different eras of TV it deliberately aped, attempting to give us some neat, funny twists on a world we knew was fake, Agatha All Along copies and pastes recent detective shows, explaining some of the genre’s tropes out loud, without adding anything revelatory or witty. Fortunately, the show doesn’t copy WandaVision. Agatha finds her way out of the spell partway through the first episode, and off to find her lost power. So what is the problem, really?
Fittingly, it’s a witch from the MCU who said it best. ‘Nothing lasts forever,’ so said Wanda in Age of Ultron. Unfortunately, those in power in the real world didn’t take the hint and Marvel films and television shows have lumbered on ever since the movie that actually had the word ‘END’ in the title.
How does Agatha, and her show, fit into the Marvel Universe™? Well, it certainly looks the same, with absolutely no significant aesthetic deviations to speak of. That this has been the case since 2008 shows a culture in dire need of change, of restoration, of resolution from this controlling hold Kevin Feige and his baseball cap have had for so long. And this is not just limited to style choices.
Marvel have done it again.
Fortunately, they at least realised releasing a new Marvel Product every other week was leading to the much-talked about superhero fatigue. Unfortunately, they didn’t go the whole way. They could’ve pumped the money they made into movies and TV shows that casts and crews are actually worthy of making, but instead began a run of TV shows just as the phrase ‘prestige TV’ started to mean ‘make a movie, but ten hours long and split into chunks with rusty scissors carried by someone with their eyes shut.’
‘Prestige TV’ also apparently now means spending over an hour on set up, in the same year that, as an example, Rebel Ridge sets up its entire premise, themes and all, in the first five minutes.
Ah, you might say. But Rebel Ridge didn’t have all the baggage that any Marvel film or show has. Agatha comes along after having her duel with Wanda, who herself came along after her and her brother Quicksilver helped the Avengers and so on. Terry Richmond didn’t fight off aliens in Rebel Ridge: The Space One, or have an origin story in Rebel Ridge: This One Doesn’t Really Matter.
No, Rebel Ridge just had to carry the baggage of, oh, race relations, police power, personal freedoms and what it truly means to live in modern America, just to name a few.
Ah, you might say again. But efficiency doesn’t equal great television, or indeed great art. Why not just find a summary of Moby-Dick instead of reading it?
Which is correct. Efficiency, as the people behind Quibi discovered, is not equal to great art. But when I sit through hours of television to find out it’s been eight to twelve episodes used to set up something else, I start to reevaluate how I spend my free time. And it feels the same again here.
Marvel have done it again.
In this way, the entire Marvel Universe©™ registers, no matter how hard the publicity tries to convince us otherwise, as a giant homogenous Thing. It can try to convince us that Spider-Man: Homecoming is a coming of age movie because Tom Holland webs his way through some back gardens (before the film then displays the scene they’re homaging on a giant television screen), and it can try to persuade us that Agatha All Along is a show about witches with window dressing, high production values and a former Buffy cast member, but it is, above all else, a Marvel Product.
I was there to watch Tony Stark find his heart. And for the Hulk to ingest so much extra gamma radiation his face changed shape and he grew phenomenal chest hair. I pumped my fist when Steve Rogers picked up Mjolnir, but ultimately felt tired when they announced Marvel Product #352b afterwards. The mincemeat factory continues, because they thought that was all we wanted to eat. Is it? Is it all we want to eat?
Do we want to try something at all challenging, or rewarding, or in any way enthralling? Or do we simply want to continue digesting, taking in ripped off chunks we don’t really need to chew, featuring that same Marvel Universe Smoke Flavouring™ they’ve used for years? Which is it? Because I fear the last sixteen years has made our collective brains mushy.
Maybe it’s the comfort of the known as we reach a point of no return technologically; maybe it’s the knowledge that we’ll know what we’ll get when the rest of the world has been turned so topsy-turvy, when access to unlimited knowledge has made lies and truth indistinguishable. Maybe the release of a show involving a character being able to break out of a fake world so easily has irked me somewhat. Maybe it really was (drum roll) Agatha All Along.
Matthew D. Smith likes to overshare his views on movies and TV shows whenever and wherever he can. Indulge him, and follow him on Twitter or listen to the podcast he co-hosts with Leslie Wai.
