Looking back at my first take on Agatha All Along after four episodes

When I reviewed Agatha All Along, I'd seen only four of its nine episodes, and I thought those first four were really good. I liked the coven of witches at its center, the performances from Kathryn Hahn and Aubrey Plaza, and the way the show stood on the mythology WandaVision built rather than on wider Avengers lore. The series finale aired on October 30, 2024, so this is a look back at what I thought at the start, before the rest of the story played out.

I judged Agatha All Along on four of nine episodes, and I said so

I have to say that Disney didn't make it easy to cover their shows. They didn't give us all the episodes, so it was impossible for us to judge the show in its entirety. I'd been through that before with The Acolyte. I loved what I saw, and then I saw the rest of it. The Acolyte was good through episode five, then it was not good, and then it took a nose dive off a cliff. I think those of us who had defended that show felt burned.

So I wanted to be really clear: I'd seen four out of nine episodes, I could only speak on those four, and after that we would all see what happened together. The review embargo also lifted when the show arrived, and part of me wondered whether to do a review at all, since people would want to move straight on to a breakdown. But some readers had pointed out before that a review helps those who don't know whether they even want to start a show. That was a fair point, so I did the review anyway, as the first two episodes became available.

The Agatha All Along coven was complex women, and this was no Hocus Pocus

Popular entertainment has long depicted groups of women, but rarely in a positive manner. So it was quite refreshing to see a group of women and their male gay friend, played by Joe Locke, shown not just in a positive light but in a complex, interesting one. Earlier that year I'd praised the latest season of True Detective for portraying two female leads who were people first and women second, and I felt the women in Agatha All Along were just as complex and real.

In Agatha All Along, though, the female characters were also rich in feminine energy, echoing iconic witch movies like Practical Magic and The Witches of Eastwick. Some people asked whether it was like Hocus Pocus. Hocus Pocus is a full on family film, and this was, I think, a somewhat to pretty adult show. A lot of the adult subjects aren't overt, but they're very much there, and I think people will pick up on them even if they don't realize it. I would argue it was for high school and up.

The feminine energy was different from those movies, too, because at least in the four episodes I saw, none of these witches were interested in men. I wasn't sure about Patti LuPone's character, who didn't have any love interests, but otherwise it was made very clear that the rest of the coven was LGBTQ. So I had to wonder whether this would be True Detective meets The Acolyte: two female centric shows that were very friendly to the LGBTQ community and were torn apart by right wing commentators. I sure hoped that didn't happen again.

I thought True Detective fell apart a little bit in the middle and that its reveal was a little bit weak, but I still liked elements of it. I really liked the beginning of The Acolyte and then I thought it was horrible. Both of those shows have asterisks next to my praise. I wouldn't put an asterisk next to Agatha so far, but I was less than halfway through. I didn't feel True Detective deserved the hate, and while The Acolyte got pretty awful at the end, I still think what happened to it was unfair and too aggressive. That was one of the worst experiences I've ever had covering entertainment.

Agatha All Along didn't wear its causes on its sleeve

I'll say that Agatha All Along was not championing any causes. In fact, Agatha makes one funny joke during the first four episodes about not wanting anyone around who discusses politics. It's funny in context, and I thought that was great. The show has a lot to say, but it says it in a very subtle way. It's there if you're looking. A lot of things snuck up on me the second time through, when I went back for my breakdown, and I thought, oh, I get that, I didn't see that at first. I think it's really well done. WandaVision had a lot of messaging and nobody seemed to have a problem with that, so I hoped it would be okay.

These women lived through the Salem witch trials, and perhaps some of them even the Spanish Inquisition and more. They've been beaten down for centuries and persecuted, their wounds have never healed, and they've never seen the world get any better. That's not only compelling, but I think it's extremely relatable to the show's target audience.

Wanda fans were the audience, and WandaVision's mythology carried the show

Who was that target audience? Clearly it was Wanda fans, myself included. I'm a big Wanda fan, and while we'd all been very worried about when Wanda would return, at least in the first four episodes she cast a heavy shadow over this spinoff as the witches' corner of the MCU expanded. I found it interesting that a big issue with The Acolyte was that it didn't appeal to established Star Wars fans, and there weren't enough new Star Wars fans to support it on their own.

Wanda, on the other hand, had assembled what seemed to be a legion of fans. I think many of us feel she's what powered Multiverse of Madness to almost a billion dollars. This is where it gets interesting, because Wanda has never been a big character in the comics. She's made big moves, but she's always been an agent of chaos in other characters' stories and has never really had her own story, certainly not one that got a lot of traction. So almost all of Wanda's fans are not comic book fans, which at the end of the day might be what saves her corner of the MCU. The question then was whether Wanda fans could support it.

There was very little Avengers lore in those first four episodes: not a single Avenger mentioned, nor any MCU events outside of WandaVision. But we were very much in the world of WandaVision, which, many years later, had clearly created so much of its own mythology that it could support its own spinoff all by itself. That was incredible to me. If you liked WandaVision, I felt you would like this show. It was also a spotlight on the history of witches and witchcraft, both real and fictional, and the show and its end credit sequence did a fantastic job highlighting it. I haven't done deep research on witches, but I know some things, and I was really impressed.

Like WandaVision, there were Easter eggs everywhere and lots of mysteries, which made it fun to engage with and think up fan theories. Jac Schaeffer, it turned out, is very good at a tease, and I was beginning to feel the witches' corner of the MCU was in excellent hands with her. I was so happy to hear that, at least according to what Marvel was saying then, she would continue as the creative lead. I saw her as being to this corner of the MCU what Ryan Coogler is to the Wakanda corner, so I suggested calling it the Westview corner.

I was surprised how appealing Agatha All Along made witchcraft look

Considering that witchcraft is a form of paganism, which did occur to me while I was viewing it, I was surprised how appealing the show made it seem. It practically asks if you want to join a coven, and I found myself thinking that maybe I did, just for fun. I thought that was pretty wild, and I hoped it wouldn't be a problem for the show.

If you celebrate Halloween, I don't see how you can have a problem with this show, and America loves Halloween. But as we discussed with Beetlejuice, maybe some other corners of the world not so much, and there's that toxic struggle everywhere. I admit I got a little nervous about that, too.

Kathryn Hahn's Agatha and Aubrey Plaza's Rio made me nervous for Wanda

The coven wasn't only about the positive portrayal of women fighting for themselves and each other. It was also about the wonderful personalities at play. I'd been pretty vocal about not wanting more witches in the MCU because I thought it would dilute the Scarlet Witch. But now that I'd met these witches, my answer was bring them on. In fact, these ladies were so compelling that I was getting a little nervous about Elizabeth Olsen's ability to compete with them. In WandaVision, and especially in Multiverse of Madness, Wanda was portrayed as a victim, reacting to things done to her, often out of control and not even realizing what she was doing. Here there was so much agency. It was like the opposite of that.

If you thought Kathryn Hahn was good in WandaVision, I said to get ready to be blown away, because I called this the performance of her career. She's funny, sexy and has tons of attitude. She's a proper Disney villain. Her character had already appeared in the parks, but now they could do a whole show. Even sexier was Aubrey Plaza as Rio Vidal. I have never seen Plaza look as good as she does here, and the chemistry between her and Hahn could be cut with a knife.

Olsen's Wanda has a softness to her, while these two women have edge, though that's not to say they don't have vulnerable moments. I thought Wanda would have to evolve if she wanted to compete with Hahn's Agatha and Plaza's Rio, and that she would have a very hard time competing for screen time and attention with them, because they're just so extra.

Joe Locke's Teen was everything I wanted, and I was 99% sure he was Billy

The other main character was Joe Locke's Teen, and that moniker is actually quite funny when you see how it comes about and how it's used. I think it turned out to be a great idea. Locke was even better than I'd hoped. I was smiling when he first appeared. He was everything I wanted and more. His American accent is excellent, too; he's actually from the UK, and his breakout role was in Heartstopper on Netflix.

I was 99% sure he was playing Wanda's son Billy. The clues were all there, both on screen and off. Still, the show was having such a good time, and it was such a good tease and such a good mystery, that in a fun way I found myself wondering whether he really was. I didn't think they were going to do another Ralph Bohner on him. I thought Jac Schaeffer had learned her lesson.

As for the other witches, I was impressed with how seriously Patti LuPone was taking her role, and Sasheer Zamata had some excellent scenes in the first four episodes. Thanks to the readers who recommended it, I'd read James Robinson's run of Scarlet Witch comics. It's not amazing, but it's pretty good and clearly an influence here. Best of all, one of the coven's witches comes from that run. She was one of my favorite parts of it. This version is a little different, but I was interested to see where things went because I liked the character so much in the comic.

I found the LGBTQ representation in Agatha All Along the most organic Marvel had done

As I said above, there's a definite chemistry between Hahn and Plaza. They are definitely former lovers, with a lot of heat and passion left between them. It's also made extremely clear that Locke's Teen is gay. However, it's never discussed or debated. These characters simply are. The LGBTQ community will be the ultimate judge of whether they're happy with this representation, but to me, as a straight ally, it seemed to be the most organic and therefore most successful representation Marvel had had to date, and Disney as well. I was very impressed with how it was handled.

The show actually reminded me of Good Omens, both in its LGBTQ representation and in having characters who are hundreds of years old giving historical and otherworldly context to modern life. Good Omens works off the Bible, and Agatha All Along off the history of witches and, I think to some degree, women. It's worth noting that Wanda, by contrast, is not LGBTQ, though she is a woman in love with Vision, who is not a real boy. I joked that you could argue even Wanda has her kinks.

The episodes felt like 45 minutes, and the Witches' Road song won me over

I thought the show was very compelling, very well done and very witchy. If you like witch movies and the history of witches, I said you would enjoy it very much, and it ran right up to All Hallows' Eve. The episodes felt really long in a good way. They're about 35 minutes of actual story once you take out the recap and the end credits, which on these shows run a good five to six minutes. There were no end credit scenes, at least in the first four episodes, but I sat through the end credit sequence every single time because I thought it was incredible. Each episode felt like 45 minutes to me, because I got so much story, action and character development.

Then there's the Witches' Road song. When I saw them singing it at D23, I didn't even look at it properly; I thought it looked so stupid. But in the context of the show, I kind of like it, especially once you learn how important the song is to the story. I think it could become a big Halloween song, especially on Disney mixes, the way The Nightmare Before Christmas is there. It was written by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez of Frozen fame, who also wrote Agatha All Along, but I think this one is even better. I think it has more to say, more depth, and it's more atmospheric. It's also a harmony, because it needs to be sung by the entire coven together, which I thought was a nice touch.

Agatha All Along wasn't very MCU on paper, but it was MCU in spirit

That's another great thing about this show: it has not only bold strokes but nice, delicate details. As I said earlier in this piece, it's not very MCU, literally speaking. But it is very MCU in spirit, in terms of having a rich history and drawing on other things. I think that's a part of the MCU we all miss very much, and in some ways WandaVision was where it peaked. It was nice to see that Jac Schaeffer and her team were able to bring it back.

I hoped everyone would at least try it, and if it wasn't for them, that they would let the rest of us enjoy it as we walked the Witches' Road and uncovered its many mysteries.

Which member of the Agatha All Along coven stood out most to you?