Marvel’s Shameful Waste of Female Talent

With films such as Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals and The Marvels, and TV series like Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and Echo, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has spent much of its post-Avengers: Endgame phases trying to respond to criticism that it’s not inclusive.

Agatha All Along furthers that mission via a Hocus Pocus-y story featuring two lesbians and one gay male character on a predominantly all-female adventure. Alas, any points won for representation don’t overshadow the ho-humness of this small-screen affair—a pleasant trifle that’s nothing more than a franchise footnote.

Agatha All Along, which premieres Sept. 18 on Disney+, is a follow-up to 2021’s WandaVision, and though it eventually proves somewhat disconnected from the MCU’s serialized narrative, it begins where its predecessor left off.

In a dour riff on Mare of Easttown called Agatha of Westview, Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) is a sullen detective investigating the death of a Jane Doe, chewing gum and grousing at everyone (including her colleagues and boss) in caricatured fashion.

This is a continuation of WandaVision’s TV-parody alterna-realities, and it comes to an end (after three years for Agatha and too long for us) with the appearance of an FBI agent (Aubrey Plaza) who’s actually Rio, a witch determined to shake Agnes from her boob-tube delusion so she can kill her. Before that can take place, however, Agnes convinces Rio to let her regain the powers she lost courtesy of Wanda so they can have a legitimate showdown—a plot point that suggests Rio is a dolt.

In her Westview house, Agatha discovers a bound and gagged boy who’s prevented by a spell from revealing his name, and whose eyeliner and ear piercings are such obvious signifiers of his sexual preference that the sight of him subsequently avoiding a call from his boyfriend seems unnecessary.

This Teen (Joe Locke) convinces Agatha that she can restore herself to her former glory by traveling the Witches’ Road—a journey he also wants to take. The issue is, Agatha needs a coven to accomplish this task. Thus, the two set out to recruit fellow witches. First is Lilia (Patti LuPone), a divinations expert who’s been alive for over 400 years and reads folks’ fortunes for money. Next is Jen (Sasheer Zamata), a master of potions working in a candle store. Additionally, there’s Alice (Ali Ahn), a protection witch who’s toiling away as a security guard. And lastly, Agatha snatches Sharon Davis (Debra Jo Rupp), her Westview neighbor, since as a gardener, she can suffice as their “green” witch.

To access the Witches’ Road, the women sing a famous ballad that was penned—and made insanely popular by—Alice’s rock goddess mother, thereby allowing them to escape impending death at the hands of specters known as the Salem Seven. The path they find resembles the goth flip side to Dorothy and Toto’s Yellow Brick Road, full of shadows, mist, and scary trees and muck which indicate that they must stick to the straight and narrow. Quite a bit of Agatha All Along’s maiden four episodes (which were all that were provided to press) take place on this spooky boulevard, and that’s too bad, because in dreary MCU tradition, it’s drenched in murk that renders the proceedings unsightly.

Chuck Zlotnick/Disney

Marvel’s CGI-ified gloom remains one of the studio’s least attractive hallmarks, so it’s a relief to find Agatha All Along intermittently entering lighter lit spaces during various stops along the witches’ expedition. The first of those is a luxurious home where they face a trial that involves deciphering a riddle and concocting a potion from random household ingredients.

Their subsequent destination is a ’70s-style recording studio where they must sing a Fleetwood Mac-ish version of the aforementioned ballad in order to destroy a curse. In both cases, as soon as the witches pass through the front door, they’re bestowed with location- and era-specific outfits, allowing them to cosplay as, respectively, the 1 percent and as rock stars. Such gimmickry is cute, but it’s barely enough to make up for the general thinness of the show’s characters, most of whom are defined by a single hang-up and a shared distrust of Agatha, who cares more about herself than her cohorts.

Following a tragedy, Rio joins the group, allowing Agatha All Along to reveal that her beef with Agatha may have to do with their prior romance. Unfortunately, there are precious few sparks of any kind in Schaeffer’s series, whose writing is drably sassy and whose plotting is sluggish and silly.

When given an opportunity, Hahn tries to remind viewers why Agatha was an engaging character in WandaVision, badmouthing others and scheming to get her own way, but the material—trapped between hewing to her villainous roots and making her a likable protagonist—doesn’t do anything interesting with her. The same is true of her compatriots, who come across as daffy (Sharon), angry (Jen), mopey (Alice), and blandly enigmatic (Teen).

Chuck Zlotnick/Disney

The early revelation that Agatha gave up her son in order to acquire the Darkhold (an evil book) suggests that Teen is really her grown offspring. Yet the show underlines this idea so insistently that it seems dubious at best. Other than that thread, though, there’s not much to pique one’s curiosity in Agatha All Along, which despite its bevy of fine actresses can’t muster up any comedic energy—a veritable crime considering that it often has Hahn, LuPone, and Plaza sharing the screen.

It’s all frivolous to the point of being irrelevant, and while Marvel succeeds at casting it as a stand-alone saga that requires little prior knowledge of franchise lore (save for WandaVision), it never devises a reason for us to care much about Agatha reacquiring her nefarious abilities. In the end, she’s just a random witch paired with even more random witches on a quest of minor consequence.

Catering directly to a younger (female) audience, Agatha All Along successfully expands the diversity of the MCU. It’s less adept, however, at giving that target demographic (or anyone else) something to get excited about on a weekly basis.