Agatha All Along

★★★★★

The best piece of live-action Marvel I’ve seen in years, and the best Marvel TV since the first seasons of Daredevil and Jessica Jones.

The twists and turns, betrayals and tragedies grow organically through a (rightfully) mistrustful group that’s been forced to work together, first by Agatha’s bullying, then by necessity. The multiple variations on “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” tie it all together, and it’s a gut punch when you finally learn where the song came from. And where the road came from, for that matter.

Agatha All Along is as effective as Poker Face and The Sixth Sense at showing you an accurate but incomplete view of what’s going on, letting you fill in or gloss over the gaps, and then flashing back later with more context that completely changes your understanding of what it meant. Especially in the episodes that focus on Patti LuPone’s character, who experiences her life out of sequence Billy Pilgrim-style, and on the teen who (for magical reasons) cannot be named, when you find out who he is and what was going on outside the illusions in the first episode. Lorna Wu’s 1970s rock version of the song is another great example: what she was trying to do with it, what happens with that goal, and the final twist of why it hadn’t worked.

The whole cast is solid, and Kathryn Hahn especially is fascinating to watch, giving Agatha a huge range. There are times when you feel sorry for her, there are times when you like her, and there are times when you want her to just die and go to hell already and give everyone else a break. I’d been apprehensive before picking up the first episode, since while I really liked her as “Agnes” in WandaVision, once she revealed herself she kind of turned into a one-note cackling Wicked Witch of the West(view). That’s shattered right from the start.

The series stands mostly on its own. You don’t need to have watched any other Marvel shows or films, and while it helps to have seen WandaVision, they recap the important parts. The season is a complete story, too, though there’s an epilogue that sets up a possible direction for a second season (which probably isn’t happening) with the surviving characters.