It Was Wiccan All Along?
Apparently so.
I can’t really do a proper review of Agatha All Along because I didn’t watch the whole thing. Having learned more than I ever wanted to about Marvel TV’s storytelling I figured, (rightfully so as it turned out) that I could just skip everything between the premiere episode and the series finale because any and all in the middle would be utterly pointless filler. I was right by the way but it does mean I can not in all integrity give the show a proper review.
This show started life in 2020 when a gag on WandaVision went viral.
It was okay I guess. It was certainly in keeping the show’s Golden Age of Television vibe. But a novelty gag song with a sort of Munster’s riff going on really should not have been enough to build a TV show around and it wasn’t.
However, it was enough if you’re an over-promoted accountant who is scared to death of Victoria Alanso. Which Bob Chapek obviously was. Green light!
Disney knew they had a turkey on their hands with Agatha. This thing was repeatedly pushed back. It was a nine-episode mini-series with the first two and last two episodes streamed on the same night. The only reason to do that is if you want to dump the series as fast as possible and move to anything else.
There were rumors that the scripts were repeatedly scrapped as Disney tried to figure out what to do with this vehicle. It was always a terrible idea. Agnes Harkness is a recurring but rather minor character in the Marvelverse. She’s never had her own comic book, what with it being a terrible idea and all.
The sad part was that one of the ideas that clearly got chucked was the only one that was interesting. Agatha as a true crime procedural. I said before I liked the first twenty minutes, although everything after that was a wade through quicksand.
It turned out this wasn’t really her series at all. It was created to introduce Billy Maximov, one of Wanda’s sons. They tried to make his identity a secret but everyone guessed it the first night the show premiered He somehow went from being a figment of Wanda’s imagination to being a real boy. Wiccan’s very gay by the way. Which is the same as being a woman apparently, so he can be a witch? Sure why not? You knew Marvel was feeling seriously behind the power curve when it came to gay representation. This show was meant to balance those scales. As far as I could tell most of the characters in this show were homosexual. Including Death herself.
That was Aubrey Plaza’s mystery character by the way. Death had a fling with Agatha sometime during her Salem days and then they had a breakup because Agatha’s son was fated to die at birth. Death gave her kid a temporary stay of execution but collected before he hit puberty. And you know what? Plaza only plays one character but in this case, she was totally right for the part.
But you’re still a little intrigued.
In the series finale, it’s revealed that this whole “Witch’s Road” motif was just a means Agatha used to kill other witches and steal their power. All witches in the show were dead at the end except for the black lesbian because that gave her the power of unbreakable plot armor. Finally Wiccan kills Agatha. Yaaaaay!
Then she back in one more episode for an extended denouement. Aww!
We get to see the Salem stuff. And get to hear that Renaissance faire banger Down the Witches Road one more time.
Billy tries to banish the ghost of Agatha, but she can’t face her son so that makes everything all right and they go off together to find Billy’s brother Tommy AKA Speed. I am quite confident that they were doing so because Marvel is dead set on its Young Avengers thing. So far they’ve got Ms. Marvel, Wiccan, Cassie Lang, Iron Heart, Kate Bishop, and now Speed. That’s six and if Marvel reaches its stretch goal on their Kickstarter they will unlock two more.
Bottom line. The only purpose of this show was to give MCU Wiccan an origin story. Mission Accomplished I guess. There is now a male superhero with Marvel’s famously ill-defined woman-power of glowy hands that does whatever it has to wrap up any given plot. The series has been dumped and Marvel will never speak of it again.
