Mid-season of the Witch

Up until episode 6 of Agatha All Along, I’d been enjoying it a lot, if not exactly loving it. I couldn’t help but compare it to WandaVision, which I loved for being so aggressively meta and having each episode feeling like a dense puzzle box. But if Agatha All Along had tried to be as gimmick-driven, it would’ve come across as an uninspired retread.

So I think the show runners used the extended gag of the first episode for all that it was worth, and then wisely set off in a new direction and allowed this series to be its own thing. Instead of each episode being themed to a different era of sitcom, each episode has been an escape room themed to a different decade. They’re still packed with easter eggs and references the MCU hyper-fans crave, but the episodes have felt a little more straightforward as a result.

Which feels odd to type, when I think back on stuff like battling fire demons with prog rock, or an extended Evil Dead slumber party with Agatha hanging from the ceiling and backwards spider-walking. This is still some spectacle-driven television, high-budget even if not quite high enough budget to avoid cutting away right as someone turns over Elizabeth Olsen’s body. And all the elements of horror-comedy are there. The series deserves a ton of credit for sticking to its dark and weird tone without watering everything down. But for whatever reason, it hasn’t felt as cohesive; I haven’t gotten a larger sense of this is what the series is all about.

Until episode 6, which jumped back in time to tell the Teen/Billy’s story from the start. And which was so well done that it’s retroactively made the entire series better. There weren’t any incredibly surprising reveals1, but it all fit together perfectly, and it answered questions that I didn’t even know I had. There was way too much I liked about this episode for another “one thing I liked,” so here’s a bunch of barely-organized observations (with spoilers).

To start with: as somebody who never read Marvel comics, during WandaVision I was constantly going to YouTube to let the nerd channels put everything into context. Which means I saw the story recap about Wanda and Vision’s kids from the comics countless times, which means I kept seeing the same batshit panels over and over again. The poor people compiling all this info for a video every week were getting obsessed with easter eggs and mentions of Mephisto, convincing themselves that the MCU was somehow going to ram years worth of the weirdest and most convoluted stories into the last couple of episodes of a TV series.2

The version of Billy’s origin in Agatha All Along is elegantly simplified, but it’s still one of the weirdest in the entire MCU so far. And best of all, it manages to be really creepy — it is the spirit of an imaginary person who’d only existed for a few days at most, inhabiting the body and taking over the life of a recently-dead teenager, after all — but without the extremes of the comics’ stretching continuity way past any sense of credibility. 3 Even those of us who didn’t follow the comics could predict that he’d turn out to be Billy, but I didn’t consider all the weird implications of that. How do you tell your foster parents, “Your real son died on the day of his bar mitzvah and I’ve been living in his body?”

It also reframes the entire series in a couple of interesting ways. I knew that this series would end up introducing a new member of the Young Avengers, just like Hawkeye did, but I didn’t expect that the new character would take so much of the focus from the title character4. I’d also assumed that Billy’s goal for the end of the Witches Road would be to find Wanda, and hadn’t considered that he’d be trying to find his brother, which actually makes a lot more sense. That would mean this series is introducing at least two new members of the Young Avengers, or maybe three if Billy’s boyfriend turns out to be Hulkling.

I never read Young Avengers, so I have even less attachment to that series than any other MCU-adapted property, but I really like all of the characters they’ve introduced so far. Since Kate Bishop already pointed out “I’m 23 years old” when Kamala Khan tried to call the group the “Kid Avengers,” maybe it’ll be so long before they get the team together for a movie, they’ll just be The Avengers.

The episode also clarifies what we’ve been seeing in the end credits for the series so far: essentially, Billy’s research. The end credits have always been one of my favorite aspects of this series, because it’s the part where they get to show off some blatant artistry instead of having to organically incorporate into set decoration. This episode changes it from being “history of witches in pop culture” to an in-universe illustration of what Billy’s been obsessing over for the past three years. It feels like giving the series the sense of purpose it’s been missing so far — after all, the title character has been more reactive than proactive, and it’s been a mystery what she plans to get out of the whole experience — while also making it clear that it wouldn’t have resonated as much without the five episodes that preceded it.

And finally, the two best scenes in this episode — Billy and Eddie meeting Ralph Bohner, and Agatha’s police interrogation of Billy — were fantastic at delivering the tone of comedy + horror from WandaVision’s best moments. I liked the “interrogation” scene because the actors have such good chemistry together, it was fun seeing Kathryn Hahn fully hamming it up including the accent, and I loved all the details like Agatha using a watering hose nozzle as her “gun.”

We’ve gotten hints before of what it looked like to outsiders when the people of Westview were acting under Wanda’s spell, and one of the many things I like about these two series is they emphasize how deeply unsettling it would be to spend all of your time acting like you’re in a TV show. It was left as a gag at the end of WandaVision, and still played for laughs here and in the first episode of Agatha All Along, but here, it invites you to really think about how horrific it would be. Even as Agatha is wearing a Bohner family reunion T-shirt saying “Pitch a Tent!”

Having the scene play out after the one with Ralph Bohner/Bohnerrific69 was important to making it creepy, since he served as a reminder of how traumatic it was to be under the spell of these witches. I was wondering whether he was left particularly traumatized compared to the other people in town because he was under the effect of two spells, or because Wanda hadn’t been intending to harm anyone, while Agatha deliberately controlled him to do her bidding.

Which goes back around to the apparent change in focus, and how this is still Agatha’s story. At this point, it seems to me that Billy’s story is driving the plot, but Agatha’s arc is what’s going to give the series its purpose. I’m (prematurely?) predicting that the overall message is going to be a variant of what she tells Billy at the end of this episode: don’t let other people tell you who or what you are. So far we’ve seen Agatha be extremely manipulative, callous, and self-centered, and she’s at least inadvertently caused the death of two people. But in dramatic/narrative terms, she hasn’t been proved to be capital-E Evil. Characters keep describing all the horrible stuff she’s done, but we haven’t seen proof of it. And in fact, we have seen how much she’s willing to let her reputation do the work for her.

I’m guessing that this series will turn out to be a kind of redemption arc for Agatha. I can’t tell whether it’ll end with her as an ongoing character in the MCU, or end with her dying, and I’d be fine with either ending.5 Either way, it seems to be taking a plot-heavy series format based on comic book characters, and turning that into an exploration of the most interesting and relevant aspect of witches: women being branded as evil by their society, and then refusing to live their lives merely in response to that, and instead choosing to define themselves.

1
My fiancé predicted the one returning character from WandaVision in another bit of stunt-casting, but I hadn’t seen it coming at all.

2
Even though one of the main reasons for the MCU’s existence is to simplify and consolidate every character’s storyline into the most straightforward and least goofy possible version, so…. maybe they should have seen it coming by now?

3
Which was one of the issues I had with the X-Men 97 series, and continuity-laden comics in general: they try to get real human drama out of characters who have been through so many existence-altering experiences that they’re no longer even relatable as human beings.

4
In retrospect: just like Hawkeye did

5
Especially if the rumors about Aubrey Plaza’s character’s identity are true.

1 My fiancé predicted the one returning character from WandaVision in another bit of stunt-casting, but I hadn’t seen it coming at all.

2 Even though one of the main reasons for the MCU’s existence is to simplify and consolidate every character’s storyline into the most straightforward and least goofy possible version, so…. maybe they should have seen it coming by now?

3 Which was one of the issues I had with the X-Men 97 series, and continuity-laden comics in general: they try to get real human drama out of characters who have been through so many existence-altering experiences that they’re no longer even relatable as human beings.

4 In retrospect: just like Hawkeye did

5 Especially if the rumors about Aubrey Plaza’s character’s identity are true.