Agatha All Along episode 1 review: good start, slow in Westview

Our verdict on the first episode of Agatha All Along, "Seekest Thou the Road," was positive with reservations. It was a fun, interesting start, but we both felt it spent a little too long in Westview before getting the story moving.

Agatha All Along (2024), the Disney+ series starring Kathryn Hahn, Aubrey Plaza and Joe Locke, premiered with episodes one and two together. Going in, Wendy was excited by the marketing, including the trailers and the D23 performance where the witches came out for the chanting song. It looked dark, interesting and a little mind bending. The question was how Marvel would pull off a dark show that still felt like Marvel.

Why Agatha Harkness earned a WandaVision spinoff

We loved WandaVision, and the feeling in our discussion was that Agatha became a very popular character through it. We wondered whether Marvel planned a spinoff from the start or only after seeing how fans reacted to her. In the comics she exists but is completely different, and she isn't a main character the way she is here. Still, the end of WandaVision made it look like Marvel had a plan to come back to her.

Agatha's Westview cop show leans on procedural tropes

Episode one opens with Agatha under a spell as Agnes, a detective in Westview. The lines play like a TV cop procedural, and it felt like the writers asked which tropes they could take from a procedural and put into the episode. The cheesiness parallels how WandaVision used sitcoms, just with a different TV genre. One theory in our discussion was that with Wanda's death, the spell might be weakening, which could explain why Agnes starts doubting her reality.

A kid's room marked Nicholas Scratch sounded familiar. In the comics, Nicholas Scratch is the son of Agatha Harkness, from the hidden magic community of New Salem, Colorado, and supposedly a formidable foe for the Fantastic Four.

Agatha All Along took a little too long in Westview

Watching her try to break out of the spell, and working out what was real, was a lot of fun. There was relief that the show didn't keep her trapped for two or three episodes. The counterpoint was that, unlike WandaVision, the audience already knows what is going on, so the show could have gotten going sooner, since "we're already in on the joke." The other response agreed it dragged a little, though the exchanges were interesting enough to make you want to theorize.

Aubrey Plaza brings attitude to Agatha All Along

We both liked the addition of Aubrey Plaza. In our discussion she was described as someone who "brings so much spice to the show," and she's a lot of fun and full of attitude, playing a dark character who is still fun to watch.

Our shared criticism was her choice not to finish Agatha off. If the two hate each other and Agatha is weak, why wait for her to be formidable, and why send the Salem Seven after her instead? It felt like an interesting character choice, even if, as we acknowledged, it is the reason there is a show at all.

Teen and the Wiccan speculation

We wanted to know more about the character credited as Teen. The speculation we had heard was that he could potentially be Wiccan. The little we saw of him, reciting an incantation in Latin, looked great, and we wanted to see his character evolve.

Overall, it was a slow but good start, and the hope was that episode two would be more amped.