Main cast: Kathryn Hahn (Agatha Harkness), Joe Locke (Teen), Sasheer Zamata (Jennifer Kale), Ali Ahn (Alice Wu-Gulliver), Okwui Okpokwasili (Vertigo), Debra Jo Rupp (Mrs Hart), and Patti LuPone (Lilia Calderu)
Director: Jac Schaeffer
Aww, at the time of writing, it looks like the opening episode of Agatha All Along has even worse viewership than the first episode of The Acolyte. Isn’t this a shame? Not it is a surprising thing, were this to be true, as everything touched by the House of the Mouse had been, with the very rare exception here and there, on a downward spiral of increasingly dismal return of investment.
However, Circle Sewn With Fate / Unlock Thy Hidden Gate—the titles are all coming together to form an incantation, it seems—isn’t too bad. It does drive home that the previous episode is completely unnecessary except for the last 15 minutes or so, a failed gimmick, and this episode makes for a much better introductory episode. At the same time, this particular Agatha seems like a different character from that in WandaVision, so who knows what is happening here.
Basically, Agatha learns of the Witches’ Road being possibly real and not an urban legend from the brat that was tied up and gagged in her house. Oh, this could be a means to regain her lost powers!
However, to reach the road and walk straight to the end to get her heart’s desire, she needs to form her own coven. This episode, therefore, sees her and her tagalongs saying hello to an assortment of witches.
Sure, the whole thing still feels gimmicky and superfluous, like an entire season based on a single line of an idea—let’s make a show based on very obvious “homage” to stories and films with witches in popular media. The Witches’ Road is blatantly the yellow brick road from Frank L Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz TikTok and YouTube clips of people covering songs from the musical Wicked and scenes from RuPaul’s Drag Race, and it’s easy to extrapolate from this to also draw parallels of this crop of characters to those traveling along the road in Oz.
Will this work? It’s too early to tell, but this episode remains watchable, albeit in a rather unexciting manner. The jokes are okay, the acting is okay, everything is okay, just not exactly on the grab-me-and-make-me-watch scale of things.
Even the obligatory musical number—Patti LuPone is hired to be on this show for a reason—ranks a mere meh on the excitement level. There is something calculated about the “quirkiness” of this show that doesn’t feel organic to me.
This episode also brings up an interesting question: why is this an MCU show? The tone and style are so different, and there is no linkage of this show so far with anything else in the MCU, aside from the lead character wearing the skinsuit of a character from WandaVision. How is Agatha, a character in her own show conceptualized for an MCU phase that no longer exists due to it being postponed and delayed for so long, going to fit into the MCU?
To be fair, the present day MCU is such a hot mess that I don’t even know why I bother raising these questions. Still, it does drive home that this show, like much of present-day MCU elsewhere, feels a lot like a vanity project of some no-experience diversity hire that thinks their job is to spend other people’s money to make things that serve only to validate their own insecurities and daddy issues.
So, here’s another tentative step down that yellow brick road. I’d like to say that I’m optimistic about the whole thing, but yeah, I’ve seen enough of what the MCU has become to not expect too much from this show.
