Agatha All Alongside rushed its journey down the ‘Witches’ Highway’

When Agatha All Alongside was first introduced again in 2021 as a music-heavy follow-up to WandaVision, it was onerous to think about how showrunner Jac Schaeffer might recreate the magic that made the unique such an impressed piece of storytelling. WandaVision’s shows-within-a-show premise and intelligent use of sensible results, together with being one of many first Disney Plus sequence, helped to set it other than earlier Marvel initiatives. However Schaeffer additionally used WandaVision to weave beats from the franchise’s tentpole movies right into a cohesive narrative that helped deliver the whole MCU into its multiversal period.

From its very first episode, Agatha All Alongside went to nice lengths to indicate us that, even with WandaVision’s lead killed off in Physician Unusual within the Multiverse of Insanity, there was nonetheless loads of — and maybe an excessive amount of — meat for Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha Harkness to chew on. The present’s two-part finale caught the touchdown by residing as much as its title in additional methods than one. Although the MCU’s interconnectedness has felt more and more wobbly post-WandaVision, Agatha All Alongside led to a manner that feels poised to place (a minimum of a few of) the franchise again on monitor. And with one other follow-up sequence already in growth, it looks like Marvel has found out that these particular tales are those it has the perfect shot of knocking out of the park.

This piece comprises spoilers about Agatha All Alongside’s finale.

WandaVision briefly touched on covens in a flashback to the seventeenth century when Agatha killed her mom Evanora (Kate Forbes) and their group of sister witches. However Agatha All Alongside digs deeper, introducing characters like Agatha’s ex-lover Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) and a mysterious teen who’s unable to share his identify (Joe Locke). As a result of Agatha herself was already framed as a novel risk to magic customers, it was troublesome to suss out what sorts of risks have been mendacity in look ahead to the coven as she and the teenager recruited fortune teller Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone), potions grasp Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata), safety witch Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn), and odd Jersey girl Sharon Davis (Debra Jo Rupp) to their ranks. 

However Agatha All Alongside established a really clear focus for all of its gamers. The “Witches’ Highway” — a realm entered by covens singing “The Ballad of the Witches’ Highway” — and its capability to grant needs to those that handed its trials gave the witches a cause to work collectively. And much like how Agatha All Alongside’s send-up of Mare of Easttown was a callback to WandaVision’s sitcom spoofs, the Witches’ Highway felt just like the present’s greatest manner of emphasizing the ability of sensible results.

The Highway, with all of its hand-painted leaves and timber that reworked the set into an otherworldly forest, hammered residence how Agatha All Alongside’s artistic crew was neatly utilizing its lean funds to create magic that felt extra actual than its predecessor’s. And the Highway’s horror movie-inspired trials to check witches’ abilities gave the present a story construction that was much like however distinct sufficient from WandaVision’s to make it seem to be Agatha All Alongside actually was the second chapter in a trilogy of tales somewhat than only a spinoff.

As tends to be the case with style TV reveals with massive casts, Agatha All Alongside sometimes struggled to maintain all of its plates spinning on the similar velocity as Agatha’s. Every witch bought an opportunity to shine when dealing with a unique trial, however a few of their backstories — particularly Jennifer’s and Alice’s — felt rushed and went largely unexplored. A few of the trials themselves have been a bit shaggy. (At one level, the witches brew a poison antidote by dumping a bunch of components right into a sink.) As unwieldy as Agatha All Alongside typically was, although, it was additionally keen to kill characters off with a finality that helped it grow to be sharper because the season progressed.

There was nonetheless some query as to what Agatha All Alongside’s massive unhealthy may find yourself being by the season’s halfway level, when Sharon and Alice had already bitten the mud. However all the present’s puzzle items started becoming collectively in episodes 5 and 6 as the teenager was revealed to be Billy Maximoff / William Kaplan, one of many Scarlet Witch’s sons, who had possessed the physique of a useless individual.

One of many extra spectacular issues about WandaVision was the best way it managed to remodel a few of Marvel’s most convoluted Scarlet Witch and Imaginative and prescient comics arcs right into a story that was concise and compelling sufficient to maintain individuals who weren’t readers of the comics constantly engaged. A lot of Billy’s comics lore — he and his brother wind up having their souls reabsorbed by the demon Mephisto earlier than being reincarnated as strangers — is even wilder than his religious mom’s. However Agatha All Alongside made fast work of incorporating a lot of these beats with a narrative harking back to WandaVision’s “We Interrupt This Program,” which cleverly stepped exterior of the sequence’ sitcom conceit.

In contrast to Alice’s and Sharon’s arcs, it was clear early on that Agatha All Alongside was teasing one thing essential with Lilia’s many moments of confusion stemming from her energy to see the longer term. What was far much less apparent, nonetheless, was that the present was utilizing her to set the stage for a time-jumping episode that would offer key context for a few of the present’s most satisfying twists: Rio was truly the personification of loss of life in disguise.

Of all of the Marvel characters who may pop up in a Disney Plus present, it was genuinely stunning to see Dying given how, within the comics, she’s a cosmic entity most frequently related to Thanos (and sometimes Spider-Man’s clone). However Dying’s arrival additionally introduced a captivating gravity to every part occurring to the coven. It added some context to the present’s rising physique rely and a brand new layer of intrigue to Agatha and Rio’s romantic previous — one other beat that might have benefitted from extra fleshing out. Dying gave Jennifer, Billy, and Agatha a clearly outlined foe to rally in opposition to as they neared the Highway’s finish. And whereas the witches’ remaining battle in opposition to Dying wasn’t all that a lot to put in writing residence about, it introduced Agatha All Alongside’s personal story and its deeper connections to WandaVision into a lot clearer focus.

Agatha All Alongside’s remaining two episodes set up how, proper up till Agatha and Billy’s coven sang the ballad collectively and created a doorway, the Witches’ Highway by no means actually existed. It was only a fantasy that started in Agatha’s early days of being a witch and a brand new mom to her son. Spreading the thought of the Highway’s existence gave Agatha a simple technique to lure witches into the woods underneath the pretense of opening a portal, just for her to steal their magic. That was her plan all together with the present-day coven, and she or he in all probability would have gotten away with it, too. However within the present’s remaining episode, Agatha returns as a ghost to inform Billy that issues labored out very in a different way on this occasion due to his need for the Witches’ Highway to be actual.

That plot level and Agatha’s insistence on remaining with Billy as a spectral mentor crystalized the diploma to which Agatha All Alongside actually was persevering with WandaVision’s story — pushing ahead its characters and likewise what a Marvel present can do.