TV’s coolest witch since Samantha casts a bewitching spell
Agatha All Along
★★★★★
Disney +
The brilliant thing about WandaVision, the Marvel-meets-sitcom comedy/drama about former Avengers Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) is that it managed to remain faithful to the Marvel cinematic canon, while simultaneously not really requiring the audience to know too much about it.
Written by Jac Schaeffer and directed by Matt Shakman, it was set in the seemingly postcard-perfect town of Westview, New Jersey, a picturesque sanctuary constructed out of television tropes, with an emphasis on sitcom. In that sense, it owed much more to Bewitched and I Love Lucy than, say, Iron-Man or The Avengers.
Kathryn Hahn as Agatha Harkness in Agatha All Along.Credit: Chuck Zlotnick
If you saw WandaVision through to its thrilling finish – warning: spoilers – you’d know that it was Agatha all along. That is, all the string-pulling, plot-scheming mischief was the handiwork of the most famous witch in the Marvel canon, Agatha Harkness. The clues were always there: her house was, after all, an architectural copy of Samantha’s house from Bewitched.
That revelation – that it was Agatha “all along” – not only gave us the wonderfully campy, totally viral Munsters-riffing Agatha All Along (watch it on YouTube, please, and then watch it again) but it also gave us the spin-off series Agatha All Along (Disney+, on demand), which turns that revelation into a spellbinding new chapter.
With Shakman now directing the feature film The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Schaeffer writes this spin-off and also takes on part of the directing load, delivering a stunning follow-up series that is rich in the kind of character detail and narrative innovation that will quickly place it among the classics.
Hahn’s Agatha is a brilliant, capricious villainess.Credit: Chuck Zlotnick
The series opens, in a sense, where the original left off: with Harkness, now drained of power by Scarlet Witch and bound to the town of Westview, in the adopted persona of plain old Agnes O’Connor, in what looks like a Scandi-noir knock-off, Agnes of Westview, “based on the Danish series Wandavisdyen”. Come on, the discreet nods are glorious.
Once freed, Harkness sets out on a mission to travel the Witches’ Road, a legendary journey that will restore her stolen powers. On the road with her are a motley assortment, including a teenaged “familiar” Teen (Joe Locke), and the witches Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone), Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata), Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn) and Sharon Davis (Debra Jo Rupp). Of uncertain loyalty at this point is another witch, Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza).
Though it might seem cute (if not wholly original) to plant sorcerers and witches in comic book superhero stories, in truth they both share a strange and intertwined history. Agatha herself is a Marvel character, dating back to 1969. DC Comics had Enchantress, introduced in 1966. Sabrina Spellman – aka, Sabrina, The Teenage Witch – sprang from the Archie comics. Even Scrooge McDuck had the longstanding nemesis, the Italian sorceress Magica de Spell, first introduced in 1961.
Such characters either leaned into traditional mythology or were drawn from American colonial history. Circle, an example of the former, was plucked from Homer’s Odyssey, where she famously imprisoned Odysseus, to appear in DC Comics in 1949 as a nemesis for Wonder Woman. Harkness was drawn in particular from the 17th-century Salem witch trials.
When we met her in the finale of WandaVision, Agatha Harkness was a droll, sarcastic creature, who bounced between malevolence and vulnerability, often in the same scene. In Kathryn Hahn’s hands, it is a real fusion of writing and performance, the result being a brilliant, capricious villainess who is also, depending on your perspective, the show’s heroine.
But whether she turns out to be a bad baddie or a good baddie – like DC’s Catwoman, whose unpredictable nature has seen her lean across both sides of the line – is hard to say. What is certain is that Agatha All Along has shed WandaVision’s sitcom skin to become a much darker and intriguing series. With a perfectly timed,sly wink.
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