Agatha and her coven! Will she backstab? Probably! | Chuck Zlotnick/Courtesy of Marvel
Do you think Patti LuPone would be able to explain who Tony Stark is? Does she know anything about the multiverse? Could she cobble together three facts about Kang the Conqueror? Or the difference between Captain Marvel and Ms. Marvel? Is she familiar with Wanda Maximoff and how she became Scarlet Witch? Did she watch WandaVision?
Like the probability of Patti LuPone showing up to a Madonna concert, the answer to all the above is no, never, or absolutely not.
LuPone will tell you herself that she has no idea how anything in the Marvel universe works. That’s what makes her perfect for Agatha All Along, where she plays the kooky fortune teller Lilia Calderu. It might seem counterintuitive, but the fact that even one of the show’s stars lacks baseline Marvel knowledge goes to show how easy it is to get into the new WandaVision spinoff. It’s a perfectly silly spooky season teaser, even for non-Marvel fans.
Viewers require very little background knowledge to understand the show. That’s given the series a serendipitous story-telling cushion, allowing everyone involved a bit more creative slack to show us how the most maniacal 400-year-old witch to ever haunt the planet got her groove back. It’s a journey that takes us to a spoof of Mare of Easttown, an uncanny play on Bravo’s Real Housewives, a winking riff on The Wizard of Oz, and so many weird places in between.
Agatha is more interested in creating witchy nonsense than sticking with superhero seriousness. Each episode is crammed with spells and potions and magic, rather than reminding you what the Avengers are up to. There’s comedic, spooky world-building happening here in a way that Marvel’s regular fare rarely allows.
All you need to know for Agatha is that Agatha Harkness (Kathyrn Hahn) is a magic user who messed with the very powerful Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), a.k.a. the Scarlet Witch, and lost. Wanda took away all her power, zapped all her memories, and sentenced her to live in a New Jersey town called Westview. Stuck in the suburbs with no magic and no identity, Agatha’s career is in shambles.
Her rock bottom is where Agatha All Along picks up.
Thanks to the help of Teen (Joe Locke), a character that goes by the name “Teen” because of a spell that doesn’t allow him to say his actual name, and triggered by Wanda Maximoff’s death (see: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), Agatha breaks out of her trance. Like anyone living a life of quiet desperation in suburban New Jersey, she realizes she needs to regain her powers, and to do so, Agatha will need to assemble a gang of witches — a divination expert (LuPone), a potion brewer (Sasheer Zamata), a protection mage (Ali Ahn), and an earth magic enchantress (Debra Jo Rupp) — to find the “Witches Road” and pass its various trials.
A group of misfits walking down a road and having to help each other along the way? It’s an inverted riff on another very famous story about a road, a wicked witch, a group of new companions, and a troublesome redhead with all the pieces mixed and matched. Unfortunately for her coven, Agatha is very into double-crossing. Fortunately for her coven, everyone knows that Agatha is a double-crosser. Getting to the end of the road will require teamwork and keeping Agatha in check — things neither Agatha nor her coven seem capable of doing.
When Agatha All Along was greenlit, Marvel mania was still riding high on the back of 2021’s WandaVision, the potential for a multiverse of parallel timelines and worlds, and the promise of a new era of Avengers. Controversy surrounding Jonathan Majors’s domestic abuse allegations and a series of middling movies has fully derailed that momentum, but the checks were already signed and filming wrapped for Agatha in May 2023.
Agatha doesn’t have to set the table for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the series doesn’t feature a character that prominently figures into Marvel’s bigger plans. This could all change, but there’s currently no expectation for the Tony Award-winning LuPone to be busting out of an Iron Man suit to take on Doctor Doom (as fantastic as that sounds). Nor does there seem to be a big plan for Hahn’s Agatha to link up with any of the existing Avengers.
Without the pressure of being an integral piece of the Marvel design or needing the characters to save the world (as is the MO of so many Marvel projects), showrunner Jac Schaeffer and Agatha’s creative team have been allowed a bit more freedom to create a show on their terms. That materializes in the show’s penchant for silly musical moments and multiple costume changes. An episode later this season (critics were given four episodes to review) finds the women trapped in a Nancy Meyers-esque coastal mansion, complete with poison wine and a treacherous luxury bathroom.
The only predictable thing about the series is that not everyone in the coven is going to make it to the end, and no one, not even Agatha, is guaranteed a happy ending. Perhaps the witches will all turn on Agatha. Perhaps Agatha will, again, betray the witches who trust her. For once, anything and everything could happen in a Marvel show, and that’s an enchanting possibility.
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