Streaming Marvel: It Really Was Agatha All Along

The Marvel Cinematic Universe rolls ever onward, whether the average viewer can possibly watch all of it or not. And now, the small screen has become the place to watch the bulk of MCU storytelling. Can’t keep it all straight? Ken Lowe is revisiting every MCU TV show—the good, the bad, and the non-canon—in our ongoing feature, Streaming Marvel. You can follow along with the whole series here. This month, a much-anticipated follow-up to an unexpected breakout character: Agatha All Along.

Like the comics that inspired this particular genre, television shows have a special advantage: They can retool based on the success of a character or concept, reacting to audience tastes, or even just to how something might unexpectedly strike the creators. Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman character in Breaking Bad was supposed to die in the first handful of episodes, according to showrunner Vince Gilligan’s original plan. Fortunately for him and for fans of the show, Paul’s performance caused the creators to totally change it up and make him one of the most important characters on its canvas.

Agatha All Along was first announced a few months after WandaVision. It was doubtless in some form of development before that, but it’s also clear that it’s the result of the character’s positive reception during WandaVision, where Kathryn Hahn hammed it up as a ridiculous caricature (and a showcase of the evolution) of the nosy sitcom neighbor. The series went through about half a dozen subtitles during its development— House of Harkness and Coven of Chaos were just two. None of them seems as if they are describing the kind of joint that we eventually got in 2024. 

Like every Disney-Marvel production, this justifiably leads one to wonder if perhaps studio meddling or writers’ room uncertainty was a factor. If it was, however, Agatha manages to pull off a feat that you would think to be a low bar to clear, yet which eludes so many huge studio endeavors lately: If you watch it from the beginning again after having seen the ending, it is clear that the writers were aware of the late-season twist as they were writing. That seems like the bare minimum one should expect from writing that is being exhibited to the public in exchange for money, but I still find it remarkable!

Following WandaVision, Agatha is a refreshingly fun entry in the steadily growing Marvel canon, but it was also not without some of the same small frustrations that plague these things, and don’t appear to come from any clear source or motivation.

The Show

Agatha All Along begins as what seems to be a police procedural, although we already know that it isn’t, because at the end of WandaVision, we saw baddie Agatha Harkness defeated by the Scarlet Witch, who then de-powered her and cursed her to live as a character in a TV show. (Amazingly, nobody, from the other residents of the beleaguered town of Westview to the entire government agency that just tangled with Wanda, bothers freeing and interrogating Agatha!)

The show, and Hahn in particular, plays this off perfectly. The title sequence is reminiscent of stuff like True Detective and cheekily references the fact that this is clearly a dream of Wanda’s. (Sadly, Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch is nowhere to be found in the show.) “Agnes” believes she is solving a small-town murder mystery, and that she is visited by an old girlfriend concerned with her well-being (Aubrey Plaza). All is obviously not right, and soon Agnes realizes this just as clearly as we do. A broccoli-haired teenager (Joe Locke) tries to snatch something out of her house, but during the interrogation, Agnes’ hallucinatory reality starts to break down.

When she does finally discover that she is Agatha Harkness and she’s been brainwashed by Wanda to remain in a recursive simulacrum for the past three years, she flips her lid and immediately starts plotting revenge. This is interrupted by the fact that the teen who invaded her house is actually real, and so is Agatha’s ex-girlfriend—“Rio” is another powerful witch who keeps saying she wants to kill Agatha but obviously wants to do something other than that to her (my money isn’t on “marry” either).

Agatha manages to talk her way out of Rio killing her, and then discovers that the teen who tried to steal from her wants her help to find something called The Witches’ Road—some fabled place that will grant witches power. “Teen” is so called because any time he attempts to say his name or anything about himself, some magical hex garbles his speech—nobody is sure who imposed this on him or why.

According to the arcane rules of the Road, a coven of witches is needed before they can be granted entry. Agatha and Teen scrounge up several witches, each with her own reasons for wanting to journey down the infamous Road: Sasheer Zamata’s Jennifer Kale, Ali Ahn’s Alice Wu, Debra Jo Rupp reprising her role as “Mrs. Hart” (that was her WandaVision sitcom name, and is how Agatha insists on referring to her over her protests), and Patti LuPone as Lilia. While they are initially distrustful of Agatha and at each other’s throats, they are driven into the suddenly appearing portal to the Witches’ Road due to the other folks who want Agatha dead: The “Salem Seven,” some witches she killed years prior, but who won’t stay dead.

The show seems to know what it has in the witch’s song, which it’s not shy about reprising in later episodes.

The show’s middle episodes focus on creepy and deadly trials imposed on them by the odd liminal space that is the Witches’ Road itself—and as the story progresses, not all members of the coven make it. Eventually, though, they reach the end, and it’s revealed that this entire time, Rio has actually been a witch of unfathomable age and power known simply as Death. And she is not happy about Agatha having spurned her earlier.

But one of the other big reveals is that “Teen” is actually Billy Maximoff—that’s right, Wanda’s made-up son from her WandaVision hallucination. In a desperate bid not to die, his spirit possessed the body of a teenager in the moment after he died from a car crash. Billy’s trip down the road is in search of his twin brother’s soul, and the ability, perhaps, to bring it into this world in the same way.

But that’s not the only twist the show has in store in its final episode. It all feels satisfying when you go back and rewatch the show, because it does, as I said, all make sense. But there are still some things that keep the show from being a complete home run.

The Shenanigans

I have to ask it here: What is with Marvel/Disney shows killing off secondary characters after seeming to set them up for something promising?

Watching this or other Disney productions like, say, the disappeared-from-existence Willow, you will encounter this phenomenon. You’ve been introduced to a vibrant cast of characters with some promise of them slowly fulfilling some deep and interesting role in the story, and then BAM! They’re Really Most Sincerely Dead. I’ve taken to awarding such characters with the Tallie Lintra Posthumous Medal of Honor (never forget!).

Agatha has not one but three recipients of this storied accolade, “Mrs. Hart,” Alice, and Lilia all bite it before the end of the show, and I would only regard the exit made by LuPone’s Lilia as being really sold well to us (her time-hopping episode was, in my opinion, the best episode of the series). This is especially egregious in the case of Debra Jo Rupp’s character. Rupp is an absolute ringer who was being set up as, perhaps, some witch with incredible latent power but no real understanding or awareness of it—there’s so much potential for that to be a quirky and fun turn for a great actor! But nah, she gets chumped at random a few episodes in, never to return. I was so astounded at this that I skimmed synopses of the episodes ahead, hoping for some indicator that she would come back. No dice! She’s gone!

As we’ve seen by this season’s ending, death isn’t necessarily the end if you’re a savvy enough witch (or Death herself is your actual girlfriend), but there’s no guarantee of that, and there’s also no dangling story thread for any of these characters. Were they to come back, what would be the point?

Worse for their characterization, really, is the reveal at the end of the show: We discover that the Witches’ Road is just completely made up. Agatha and her doomed son invented it back in the 17th century so that Agatha could more effectively lure in and drain the power of witches, as she does to Alice in one episode. The Witches’ Road was only made real by Billy Maximoff’s reality-rewriting powers—hence the reason why Agatha is so astounded when an entrance to it actually opens.

So, to sum up: The last page on these characters’ lives is that they got duped by the show’s protagonist and then died unceremoniously (except in Lilia’s case, where she chose to do it and it’s actually a good story beat). Knowing that this is how characters are so often treated in these shows—whether they be the random lumberjack lesbians who died in the very same scene they were introduced in Willow, or Erin Kelleyman’s ridiculously mis-treated Karli Morgenthau in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier—why would a devotee of Disney+ grow too attached to anybody?

It just really bugs me.

What’s Next

For a look at exactly what Wanda is getting up to during the events of this, check out Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. For now, though, there aren’t any officially announced plans to continue this particular thread of the MCU. If it’s picked up again, it’ll be interesting to see how the Maximoff family drama ends.

Tier Ranking

Despite the bad taste in my mouth I get from the fate of a big chunk of the show’s core cast, Hahn’s performance, as well as some of the foundational conceits of the show were really compelling. Agatha All Along appears instantaneously from out of a cloud of purple smoke in the B-Tier.

Join us next month as Streaming Marvel smashes fourth walls (and sometimes Matt Murdock) with She Hulk.

Kenneth Lowe is a regular contributor to Paste TV. You can follow him on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social. To support his fiction, join his Patreon.

Keep scrolling for more great stories.