Summary
Agatha All Along makes a misstep out the gate with a wasteful premiere that spends too much time in a parody instead of kick-starting the season’s plot.
It has only been three years since we were last there, but for some reason, Westview, New Jersey, holds a certain amount of nostalgia. I still remember those halcyon days of the MCU, when every new project was a huge deal, and generally ended up being pretty good. Agatha All Along, Episode 1 of which rather pointlessly lingers in a satire of a hardboiled detective show, is clearly intended to evoke those glory days of excitement around WandaVision, to which it’s a fairly direct sequel.
Does it manage it? Well, I don’t know about that. It’s perhaps too early to tell, but what “Seekest Thou the Road” does have is decent physical comedy, a pleasingly erratic Kathryn Hahn performance, and a very strong undercurrent of homoeroticism that, by Marvel standards, at least, feels quite edgy.
And for now, that’ll do.
Previously On…
Since it has been three years and many mediocre shows since we were last in Westview, allow me to catch you up.
Agatha Harkness was one of WandaVision’s villains, a 350-year-old witch living quietly in the sleepy town of Westview, immune to Wanda’s grief-induced hex that trapped all the other residents in a multi-cam sitcom.
As is the way of Marvel villains, Agatha was ultimately defeated, leaving her devoid of power and trapped in Wanda’s simulacrum, playing the role of an eccentric nosy neighbor and not an all-powerful witch.
Hard Boiled
Agatha All Along Episode 1 picks up three years later, with Agatha still trapped physically in the sitcom. But an ironic twist finds Agatha’s mind wandering into another show, a parody of Scandi noir called Agnes of Westview. It’s an excuse to poke fun at crime-thriller tropes in the same way WandaVision mocked the sitcom. Still, it’s a bit less sophisticated and lacks the underlying mystery the latter show had thanks to its connection to the MCU at its peak (it was, you’ll recall, the first of the post-Endgame TV projects that hoped to kick-start a brand new phase of multimedia storytelling. Nobody at the time suspected how badly that would go.)
It might just be me, but the fact this is so obviously happening in Agatha’s imagination made me lose interest pretty quickly. Sequences like this work best mid-season, with the characters and premise already established so that the new contortions feel novel. Starting here seems like a mistake. As soon as it became clear that the details of the investigation – reminders of the Darkhold, etc. – were little cues for Agnes to recall her real life, I was more keen to find out what was going on with that.
The reappearance of recognizable Westview citizens only compounds the frustration. Herb is Agnes’s partner, Phil is her boss, his wife Dottie is the librarian, and Norm is a pawnbroker. Her investigation feels like a roll call, reassuring audiences that, yes, this is a sequel to WandaVision, and just as soon as we’re finished making fun of The Bridge, we’ll get right to it.
Agatha All Along | Image via Disney
New Arrivals
The main point of interest in these early scenes is how the characters we don’t recognize fit in. There are, to be fair, only two of those, and one of them barely says anything until later on, but the other is played by Aubrey Plaza doing a send-up of her unconventional sexual charisma shtick that is just as broad as in The White Lotus, so that’s nice.
Plaza plays Rio Vidal, a federal agent who Agnes recognizes but can’t recall why. She spends most of Agatha All Along Episode 1 making very obviously leading comments about Agnes’s past, clearly trying to coax her into remembering it, but it’s the arrival of Joe Locke’s Teen that really sets Agatha free.
Teen first appears as a home intruder, but once Agnes chases and arrests him, his muttered incantations and mysterious comments lead to the illusion breaking down. The crime scene photos are just pretty flower beds. The two-way mirror is just a painting. After rushing back to the morgue, a frustrated Agnes is reminded by Rio of who she really is – her name appears above Wanda Maximoff’s on the library check-out card, and just like that, after a few outfit changes, she’s back.
Agatha All Undressed
When Agatha comes to, she’s completely naked, back in Westview’s pantomime sitcom. It’s here that “Seekest Thou the Road” really picks up some of that old WandaVision steam. Her interaction with Herb – while still naked – is very funny, and her subsequent fight with Rio, who turns up to dispense some clues about what’s to come, is good, homoerotic action.
Why can’t Rio kill Agatha? Who are the Salem Seven? Is a love story brewing here? Either way, Agatha is sans powers and unable to properly fight back, so the only thing protecting her, for now, is the fact that Rio’s black heart apparently beats just for her. I mean, it’ll do.
Maybe Teen, who’s locked up in the cupboard, holds the answers. We’ll have to wait and see. But you can see how this is a proper, compelling mystery, instead of a performative parody like the first three-quarters of the episode. Luckily, the chapters aren’t that long and Disney had the good sense to air the first two together, so worse things have happened, but those of us who have become understandably cynical about the MCU in the last few years can’t help but fret that the tendency towards self-indulgence is continuing to override the need for a good story.
The story continues in Episode 2 of Agatha All Along, which is thankfully a huge improvement.
