Agatha All Along review: does the slow start sink the show?

Agatha All Along won me over in the end. After its first two episodes, I wasn't sure the series would work. By the finale it was probably my third favorite MCU show, and one of my favorite shows in general. Those opening episodes were still a miss for me, but everything after them was awesome, and I think the landing was pretty perfect.

Agatha All Along (2024) stars Kathryn Hahn, Joe Locke and Aubrey Plaza. My original review covered only the first two episodes, so it probably read as though I didn't like the show. I didn't like those two episodes. Here are my thoughts on the series as a whole, with full spoilers for the ending.

Why the first two episodes of Agatha All Along didn't work for me

Even now, I think the first episode was a waste of time, or at least could have been shortened by a lot so the show got into everything much quicker. It's nothing like what the rest of the show turns out to be. It isn't really a setup. We all knew Agatha was in the hex, still under Wanda's spell, and that none of it was real. So I sat there thinking this was a waste of time, because I knew it wasn't real. Yes, they were introducing Teen and a few other things, but mostly I wanted them to break the spell and get into it.

My sister proves the point. I told her to give the show a try, and after episode one she texted me that she really liked detective shows like this. I told her that's cool, but that's not what this is going to be at all. It isn't a detective show. Episode one is completely different from what comes at the end of it, and from episode two and the rest of the series.

The first episode bored me, and I thought it was pointless. The ending was good, though. I liked it when Rio showed up, and I liked Teen's character. I knew the whole time that he was Billy, based on the rumors and reports we had heard. Episode two was still slow as they went looking for the coven. I got more interested, and by the end, when they started singing the song about the Witches' Road, which lives rent free in my head, I thought the show had moments of greatness and could get better. Some people loved the first two episodes, and good for them. For me, it just wasn't it.

How Agatha All Along got intriguing from episode three onward

By the third episode we got into it, and I really liked it. I stayed open. I didn't write it off after the first two episodes. I hoped it would get better, and it did. By episodes four, five and beyond, the questions were piling up. Rio was probably Death. There was the Mephisto name drop, which made me wonder about Agatha's backstory. And where was the reveal that Teen was really Billy Maximoff? It all got very intriguing.

The Agatha All Along cast deserves the credit, and I think Joe Locke should get an Emmy

Bravo to the entire cast. They did an incredible job with the characters they were given. I think Joe Locke should get an Emmy for playing Teen and Billy. I think he did an amazing job.

The same goes for Kathryn Hahn. Agatha is such a great character. I was worried that a show about a side character who wasn't that popular or big might not work, especially since this version is very different from the comic version of the character. But it worked, and I'm so happy it did, because I think Kathryn Hahn is a great actress. Kudos also to the people who wrote this story and to Jac Schaeffer for directing it. It was incredibly well done and incredibly well written, and everybody crushed their roles.

Agatha and her son hit me harder than I expected

I didn't expect the story of Agatha and her son to hit me that hard. In episode eight, the second to last episode, she's helping Billy get his brother into a body, essentially helping him reincarnate his brother. Billy asks whether he's killing this boy to bring his brother to life, and then the boy disappears. Agatha's answer is no: "sometimes boys die." That hit me hard.

By that point you start to get the idea. Earlier, Rio asks Agatha why she lets people believe what they believe about her, and Agatha says it's better than the truth. So you get the sense that Agatha didn't trade her son to Mephisto for the Darkhold, and that perhaps he just died. I still want to know how she got the Darkhold.

Agatha gets very emotional about it, but through that moment comes life, showing us the cycle again. That's the big idea about death here: it's part of a balance and a cycle. She picks out the little stem, and from it comes life. Through the death of her son came life, and a little healing for her. Not full healing, because she became a ghost at the end and doesn't want to go face her son yet. But Death did her a favor.

I'm glad she continues on as a ghost, which is very comic accurate. In the comics, Agatha is a mentor to Wanda down the Witches' Road, and she's a ghost during that. I like how they're playing it here.

The love story between Agatha and Death, and Aubrey Plaza's performance

The romance between Agatha and Death was another really cool part of the story. I thought it was very good, and they navigated it in an intricate way that kept us wondering while giving us a little here and there. In one of the middle episodes, Death says she has a scar, and Agatha says she doesn't. Death insists she does: she had to do something she didn't want to do because it was her job, and she hurt somebody.

That goes all the way to the ninth episode, where Death was in a relationship with Agatha at the time. Agatha calls her my love and begs her not to take him. That part was emotional, because Aubrey Plaza's acting was so on point. Her lips are quivering, and you can tell from her eyes that she's holding it all back. It's her job. She is the cosmic entity Death, and as she explains in episode eight, she's necessary. She's balance, not evil. Life ends with death, and then there's a cycle.

You could tell she didn't want to do it, which adds a whole other layer when they love each other and she still has to take Agatha's son. In episode eight she even says she gave Agatha special treatment no one else had gotten before. She delayed the death of the son, who was supposed to be stillborn, and gave him six years. They hit you hard with the emotion.

Billy Maximoff created the Witches' Road, and Agatha knew all along

Then came the reveal that Billy Maximoff made everything, using the same reality warping powers the Scarlet Witch has, and that he brought the entire Witches' Road into reality. Bravo, because that is "an incredibly well-written story." In the comics, the Witches' Road is real, which is why I wasn't expecting it.

I've gone back and looked for certain things, and you can tell that Agatha knows. They show you that at the end, too. They didn't have to change much across the series, because everything was written in from the start. When they wrote episode one, they knew how it would end, so they wrote Agatha doing tiny things to show us she knew it wasn't real.

The whole time, I felt Agatha had never been down the road and that she was lying. But I never thought for a second that the Witches' Road wasn't real. They did a very good job showing us that Agatha knew it was Billy the entire time. She tells him he's so much like his mother, and she remarks that something is so dramatic he must be a Maximoff. I think that was incredibly well done.

Losing Alice, revealing Death and the Wiccan finale

I think the homage the show pays to the other characters and their stories was awesome. I'm still mad about Alice. I didn't want her to die, and I didn't want Debra Jo Rupp's character to die either, because I love her. But people complain that we need stakes, and here they died. They really died.

They handled the reveal of Death well. During the Ouija board scene, the board spells out D E A T H and she laughs, which solidified in my mind that she was Death. They didn't reveal it right away, and when they finally did, with the half skeleton on her face, it was very cool.

The final fight was awesome. When Billy comes in as Wiccan, now technically his superhero name, I thought "this has to be one of the coolest MCU scenes that I've seen." I was alone at my computer and I audibly said oh my gosh, that is awesome. It's an epic scene. Agatha dying by a literal kiss of death is epic too, and bringing her back as a ghost is a clever play on her being a ghost in the comics. She can come back to life, since Marvel Comics does that a lot, but who knows what they'll do in the MCU. I'm looking forward to her and Billy going to find his brother, Speed, which I'm pretty sure is leading to a reunion for the Maximoff family.

The Scarlet Witch question Agatha All Along left open

The one thing the show intentionally didn't reveal, and messed with us about, is whether the Scarlet Witch is alive. In one episode Billy asks whether Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, is really dead. Agatha says yes, dead serious for a second, and I wondered whether they had really just told us she's dead. Then she says no, and then maybe, she doesn't know. She tells him: "if you want a straight answer ask a straight lady." They know we want this answer, and they were toying with us.

I think it all leads to a Scarlet Witch reunion with her sons, and probably Vision, since Vision Quest was also on the way at the time.

Where Agatha All Along ranks among MCU shows

If I'm ranking it, it's probably my third favorite MCU show. Loki, WandaVision and Agatha are very close: if I rated Loki a 10, I'd rate WandaVision a 9.9 and Agatha about a 9.8. The first two episodes were a miss for me, but everything else was awesome. I think the show is very entertaining. It was emotional, which I didn't expect much of, and it was mysterious. It kept you guessing, revealed things along the way that kept you in it and made you want more, and when it revealed everything at the end, it was fantastic.

Based on the first two episodes alone, I said in my early review that the show might be a miss, depending on the rest. We knew it was nine episodes, so seven were left. I stayed open, and I'm so glad I did. It ended up being one of my favorite shows ever, probably top three in the MCU, and one of my favorites in general. I was bummed whenever I had to wait a week to see what happened next. I haven't felt that way in a long time, and this show and The Penguin have done that for me.

I loved it. I think it's one of the best things the MCU has done in a very long time, and I hope we see more of this story, whether during the Multiverse Saga or after it.