When the going gets tough, witches start singing

If not a complete turnaround, Agatha All Along confirms that someone at Marvel hasn’t completely forgotten how to enchant the audience. Even if it’s against a truly mocking timing. WandaVision spin-off serieswhich gives Wanda Maximoff’s former rival a starring role, It comes at a time when superheroes, of their multiverses and their superproblems, simply, we don’t care about anything anymore.

With all due respect to Agatha Harkness, cruel character and proud of it. A rarity in a superhero and serial landscape in which behind every great villain – if looked at closely enough – hides a great founding trauma. Agatha the witch, on the other hand, is drawn to be evil, or at least biting, treacherous and proud of it. An old-school villain who laughs with delight when her spell has you in her grasp. Also played by Kathryn Hahn; face, age and comic talent sui generis, outside the usual Hollywood circles. An interpreter and a protagonist who in normal circumstances could just be the villain of the season. And instead.

Instead these were exceptional circumstances – the overwhelming success of WandaVision, the best MCU TV title produced for Disney+ to date – to allow the birth of a series dedicated to her. It is equally exceptional (but desperate) circumstances in which the storm-tossed Marvel ship relies on a helmsman out of her comfort zone.

Agatha All Along Pushes the Limits of Disney’s Permissions

Without being revolutionary or anarchist, Agatha All Along it immediately surprises you with how it is comfortable with more adult and dark tones than as we are used to from the very well-groomed Marvel superheroes. In the forty minutes of the pilot (a sort of spoof of a Nordic crime with a corpse found in the woods and an increasingly caricatural tone of the investigations) Agatha proves so at ease that she gives us content that is almost unprecedented in the Marvel world: sensuality, sharp irony, a single swear word that has a history flavour (a “bitches” that mischievously replaces a “witches”).

In the opening episode Aubrey Plaza, with a killer smokey eye, sensually licks Kathryn Hahn’s hand nailing her with a burning look, antechamber of the certainty that he has a hot and tormented past with her (“I have a black heart that beats only for you”). Far from lateral references to queer characters and the absence of recreational sex (or rather, sex in its entirety). Agatha shortly after leaves her house enraged when she realizes she has been deceived, complete with uncensored nude of a body not exactly in line with the Marvel aesthetic canon.

Not that the witches have really returned to what they once were, so transgressive and iconoclastic that they risked being burned at the stake. From what we can understand from the four of the nine episodes made available to the press to tell the series, Agatha All Along flirts with the dark, the queer and with a more adult approach, without actually entering heretical territory by the standards of the streaming catalog of one of the most rigidly familist entertainment companies in existence.

Agatha All Along makes non-canonical musical choices

It is intriguing to see how, thanks to desperation, the creative crisis and the uniqueness of the character, Agatha All Along casts her dark spell whenever she gets the chance. Just like in WandaVision, no opportunity is missed in the musical field either. In the pilot episode mentioned above, the Nordic detective atmosphere is also created thanks to a theme song complete with a sad blues song à la True Detective composed for the occasion (and of which an Italian version was made for the dubbed edition, in order to follow the puns of the text).

Surprise. In the second episode we discover that the piece is meant to be the hit of the series: the atmospheric “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road”, sung like a spell by Kathryn Hahn and the rest of the cast in a second version. The Sabbath atmosphere is there, thanks to a direction that focuses a lot on this moment. Rightly so, given that in the coven of witches that the protagonist, left without powers, puts together to regain them, there is also Patti LuPone, a living monument for anyone who is passionate about theater, musicals, Tony Awards and adjacent musical territories. That showrunner Jac Schaeffer has a passion for Broadway and beyond after all, it was already understood with WandaVision, which launched the song “Agatha All Along”.

Will “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” be the new “Agatha All Along”?

“The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” is the musical backbone of the series. Part musical, part orchestral piece, part Disney princess song that indulges in the dark arts, it always remains hidden but present in the soundtrack. At least in its version called Sacred Chant Version, present in the first episodes. We then arrive at the musical episode, the fourth, where Agatha’s witches face a psychedelic rock themed test and the piece is re-proposed with the piano, the guitars, the hypnotic sounds of a 70’s acid trip.

Always with the family on the couch in mind, always with an eye on who will follow the series to immerse themselves in the Halloween atmosphere, given that the episodes come out on a weekly basis and are nine in total.

From what we could see, Agatha All Along pushes the limits of what she can do. Of course it is often held back by other limitations, of an economic and productive nature. The material and “foam props” approach is intriguing until it gives the feeling of a remedy to a series that is asked to be infinitely more ambitious than the title of which it is an offshoot, but without opening the wallet too much.

This is also due to the fact that, despite being a Marvel movie, there isn’t even a hint of superheroes here, Agatha All Along goes her strange, feminine, just-right-singing way, that behind the light-hearted joke is sometimes sharp. Having only seen the first half of the series, for the writer there is no way to know if it will maintain its initial premises, collapse under the weight of expectations or grow unexpectedly, but Agatha has already worked a rather powerful magic: she made us want to give a Marvel product a chance again.

Agatha All Along is available on Disney+ starting September 19, 2024.