The Most Vital Marvel Series Yet
5 min read
Forgive me, but has it felt lately as though some of the oldest misogynist winds are blowing? Suspicion directed at child-free women, women who work, postmenopausal women? Feverish diatribes about missing pets and made-up rituals? Way too much talk of cats? It can’t be coincidental that every time fear of female power and autonomy manifests in public discourse, it takes a familiar, paranoid form. And so: The season of the witch is upon us once again. This time, though, there’s no sense in resisting it. As the Marvel sorceress Agatha Harkness (played by Kathryn Hahn) says in the first episode of the new Disney+ series Agatha All Along, “The things that you’re roasting me for are the things that make me dangerous. So you wanna keep poking the bear?”
I was expecting Agatha All Along to be fun—Hahn alone is a windfall on that count—but I wasn’t anticipating how opportune it would feel, at least judging from the first two episodes. The show, a spin-off of the acclaimed 2021 series WandaVision,was announced that same year, so it’s hard to imagine Jac Schaeffer, the creator of both projects, anticipating that Agatha would premiere in a moment so saturated with 17th-century misogyny. (Sometimes we just get lucky.) Still, the show’s portrayal of a woman chasing power and declining to conform fits almost too neatly with 2024’s key plotlines. Agatha mixes up mythology and archetypes like a haunted game of Old Maid, as it explores how its central character, left ineffectual and trapped in an illusion after the events of WandaVision, tries to regain her magical abilities. The mood is zippy; the aesthetic swings between repressed domestic formality and trippy supernatural neon.
How Agatha came to lose her powers requires backtracking, given her introduction. Debuting almost a decade after the first Avengers movie, WandaVision was a metafictional, ingenious series centered on Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), an Avenger with telekinetic and other magical powers. Mourning the loss of her lover, Vision (Paul Bettany), Wanda revived a version of him and orchestrated the mass enchantment of an entire New Jersey town, forcing its residents to perform supporting roles based on old TV sitcoms in her retro nostalgic fantasy. Agatha was there too, masquerading as Wanda’s cheerful, nosy neighbor “Agnes,” the kind of bit character that Hahn spent her early career playing. In the series finale, cleaved open with grief and rage after losing not just Vision but also the family she’d conjured for them, Wanda defeated Agatha in a climactic battle, stealing her powers and condemning Agatha to continue to live as Agnes. In Agatha All Along, this enchantment still holds, though it has a new TV genre at its core: Agatha believes that she’s a slovenly, workaholic detective in the Mare of Easttown mold, solving murders against the chilly backdrop of a Scandi-noir.
The conceit underscores that what made WandaVision so clever was its deftness with tropes. Adopting different sitcom types across different episodes—a 1950s housewife, a beleaguered parent of twins, a zany mockumentary mom—Wanda was able to try on different guises of motherhood while demonstrating how incompatible they all were with her own simmering powers. But her character, at least as portrayed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was always aligned more with superheroes than with witches. With Agatha, Schaeffer gets to play with a comic-book character more deeply rooted in American lore, who was present at the Salem witch trials, owns a black cat, and is highly educated in the magical arts.Early in the show, as Agatha fights her way out of Wanda’s spell, Hahn seems to shed layers of fury, resentment, and confinement in the process, stepping out of Agatha’s old sitcomic personas as a woman reborn. Freed, she’s a lip-curling, calculating, deviant thrill. “How long have I been living in this cesspool of a town?” she asks a neighbor, standing in front of him stark naked and unafraid. Later, told that too many people still want to see her “burn, or hang, or drown,” Agatha hisses, “There are no new options?”
Agatha has darkness at her core, but the show is sly in how it presents her and how it understands witches in our cultural imagination. A brooch she’s seen wearing in the series with three female figures on it seems to represent the three stages of womanhood: maiden, mother, and crone, each one passive and limiting. (You might ask, again, whether there are no new options.) Agatha wants power for herself because the lack of it, for her, is unbearable, but the show realizes how unusual that makes her as a central character. Hahn is never funnier than when Agatha is trying to summon some of her own swagger while forced to wear Agnes’s drab clothes—a cobra stuck in the mundane form of a hamster. In one scene, she flings a scarf around herself in a way that would be more dramatic if the garment in question weren’t so resolutely signaling midwestern mom.
In the second episode, Agatha seeks out a coven to help her, pulling together a group of down-on-their-luck misfits. Lilia (Patti LuPone) is a centuries-old Sicilian witch moldering as a strip-mall psychic; Jennifer (Sasheer Zamata) is a potions expert whom a binding spell has left selling scented candles and jade eggs to wannabe girlbosses; Alice (Ali Ahn) is a former police officer wasting her time in a dead-end security job. A character known only as “Teen” (played by Heartstopper’s Joe Locke) also attaches himself to Agatha in the hope of finding mentorship. Many covens, the Teen explains in one scene, are just people “drawn together by mysterious forms of fate,” who find “the truest form of sisterhood” when they unite.
In that sense, the reaction to the show even before it aired was telling, with conservative commentators attacking Disney for Agatha’s celebration of witches as subversive icons, and its—as of yet faint—homoerotic subtext. Outraged by Zamata’s argument in an interview that witches are inherently queer, National Review’s Rich Lowry even huffed in a video response that “Samantha from Bewitched was happily married.” (Witch, please.) I can only counter by borrowing Agatha’s own insight: The things that most reliably aggravate some people about women—our desires, our autonomy, our choices—are indeed the things that make us dangerous. Happy witching season.
