Agatha All Along review: a wild joyride through the magical world of Marvel

WandaVisionThe creative approach to combining different forms of storytelling has made it one of the most compelling pieces of television Marvel has ever produced. The show became appointment viewing week after week as it fulfilled its central mystery in a way that was fun to follow. And for a long time, it was heard WandaVisionMarvel’s story was part of an ambitious strategy to push Marvel films in an exciting new direction.

Marvel seems to have lost the streak for that show somewhere in between WandaVision again Doctor Strange in Various Madness Circles – a follow-up film that glosses over the show’s sweet emotional beats in favor of confusing spectacle and more vivid horror vibes. But Agatha Everything Goesnew MCU series for Disney Plus from showrunner Jac Schaeffer, feels like a sign that the studio has learned a few important lessons from its mixed-race exploration.

Set a few years after the events of WandaVision again Various Madnesses, Agatha Everything Goes tells the story of its witch (Kathryn Hahn) at a time when everything about her world seems to be set right again – albeit under slightly different circumstances. Although almost everyone remembers what happened the last time witches were seen in Westview, New Jersey, the town is actually a peaceful place where people have learned to move on with their lives.

When people like Sharon Davis (Debra Jo Rupp) are used to running through the deserted area where the Maximuff / Vision family used to live, their collective trauma prevents them from speaking. his name for fear that he might return. But it also makes it easier for them to accept Agnes/Agatha Harkness (Hahn) as a normal person, if she’s a woman trying to deal with something they’ve been through. For them, Agatha’s mood swings and insistence on “Agnes” are just strange ways of coping. But in truth, those are some of the first signs that Agatha knows about the magical prison she’s trapped in when we last saw her.

Agatha Everything Goes it seems to hang around a bit at first as it throws you into WandaVision-esque send-ups of crime dramas (rather than sitcoms) are similar Mare of Easttown again The Truth Detective. But the show quickly shifts gears in a way that reads like Marvel understands the show’s need to move past the gimmick-inspired gimmicks of its predecessors. It’s not long before Agatha regains her senses with the help of her former lover Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) and a smart young man she calls Teen (Joe Locke). With all of Agatha’s powers now gone, however, she must make a pact and travel the Witches’ Road to restore herself to her former glory.

Although WandaVision only became properly magical in its last few episodes, Agatha Everything Goes dives deeper into this magic as it focuses on painting a more detailed picture of who Harkness is and how witchcraft (which is completely different from what Doctor Strange says) works. WandaVision alludes to Agatha’s treacherous past, but the new show explores how her path to power made her a disgraced old woman in the witch community long before she arrived at Westview.

Sitcom Agnes / Agatha was outstanding WandaVision, where his unstoppable energy helped sell the show’s swagger and left viewers guessing as to who was really pulling everyone’s strings. But Agatha Everything Goes gives Hahn more room for flexibility and vamp as Agatha’s hunt for the coven leads her to other witches such as health singer Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata), fortune teller Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone), and bodyguard Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn) – all of whom see him as a threat. They know that Agatha killed members of her coven before and that there’s something about the way Teen can’t tell them anything about where she’s from. But the Road of the Witches can give each of them something they want most if they join Agatha on her quest.

Although it’s interesting to see a lot of Marvel’s “based” magical world is over Agatha Everything GoesThe new characters, the show has a pronounced “I’m putting together a rag-tag group” vibe that makes its beats feel somewhat contrived at times. The young man – Agatha’s wisecracking follower Locke plays with charm and in a remarkable way that’s hard to place – is meant to be one of the show’s most compelling mysteries. But he’s also an audience member whose interviews with other witches sometimes seem like a show that takes a while to overexplain plot points that don’t really need spelling out.

All the world-building tropes the show has established – in a three-mile radius, there are always people “witchy enough” to form a pact, for example – are followed by a reiteration of why everyone is after Agatha. At times, it makes the show feel unsure that it’s introducing too much stereotype. But when Agatha Everything Goes hinges on its resolution and trusts you to bring things together, the series becomes a magical delight that expresses Schaeffer once again trying to bring a unique dynamic to the MCU.

You can hear and see this clearly when a group of criminals is on the path of witches – an otherworldly place where they face a series of trials aimed at testing their magical knowledge. It’s the same way WandaVision combines the styles of various sitcoms, Agatha Everything Goes sounds like an ode (musical features a lot) horror that will never fade as Rosemary’s baby and new fares such as American Horror Story: Coven.

While some of the trials are slightly different — at one point, witches battle a generational curse — each highlights how much Agatha Everything Goesmagic is produced to compliment the complex sets of the show. It makes the show stand out compared to Marvel’s usual CGI-laden projects and feels like a solid example of the studio prioritizing art over whizbang spectacle.

Agatha Everything Goes it’s still Marvel’s latest project, which means there are times when your appreciation of what it’s doing will depend on how familiar you are with the most recent events in the cinematic universe. But for viewers who have been following along and hoping that the studio will go back to releasing weird and playful snippets in the comics rather than talking about the next big event, Agatha Everything Goes should be a joy to watch — especially when it starts revealing its big secrets later this fall.

Agatha Everything Goes with Paul Adelstein, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Okwui Okpokwasili, Emma Caulfield, David Payton, Kate Forbes, and Asif Ali. The first two episodes of the series hit Disney Plus on September 18.