Welcome to How Gay Is It? Out’s review series where, using our state-of-the-art Eggplant Rating System, we determine just how queer some of pop culture's buzziest films and TV shows are! (Editor's note: This post contains major spoilers from Agatha All Along.)
I'm not going to lie, if you asked me to list my 100 favorite things in the universe, Kathryn Hahn, Patti LuPone, Aubrey Plaza, witches, queerness, and depictions of Death as a Latina would all be on the list. So, in theory, Agatha All Along has all the ingredients to make up one of my favorite TV shows of all time. Instead, it left me feeling as hollow as one of its titular witch's promises.
Agatha All Along follows the breakout fan-favorite character Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) from WandaVision, an evil (but lovable) witch who's been around since the days of the Salem Witch Trials, and faced off against the Scarlet Witch.
In Agatha, she gathers a coven of fellow witches together to travel The Witch's Road, a fabled journey filled with danger and trials that is supposed to grant any witch who finishes it a wish.
The cast is stacked, with her coven consisting of witches played by Joe Locke, Patti LuPone, Sasheer Zamata, Ali Ahn, and AubreyWith a cast full of queer actors and queer icons playing queer witches, I fully expected to love Agatha All Along.
The problem is, the show is never as good as the original "Agatha All Along" song sequence that we experienced on WandaVision.
While Agatha, as a character, worked wonderfully and wickedly as a snarky and scheming witch in WandaVision, here, she's largely unlikable, continually being cruel to the other members of her coven. She is constantly lying, making quips that would be cut from any Joss Whedon script, and just not doing much to win us over.
I can't believe that I didn't enjoy a performance by Hahn — as someone who enjoys watching her making amazed faces at Rachel Weiss. I'd honestly watch her read the classified section of a newspaper, but I couldn't find myself having any fun watching her as Agatha.I did enjoy her coven more than I enjoyed Agatha herself. Zamata is a terrific actress and comedian, Locke is perfectly cast as the twinky gay superhero Wiccan, LuPone is divine as always, and for much of the series, Plaza looks like she's having an absolute blast flying on a broom, being spooky, and freaking out her fellow witches.
The clear highlight is episode 7, "Death's Hand in Mine," which focuses on Patti LuPone's character Lilia.
The episode, which jumps through time, reveals Lilia's prophecies and memory lapses, lets LuPone shine, and gives the actress room to deliver one of the best performances in the history of the MCU. Unfortunately, after her character dies, we have to go back to focusing on Agatha Harkness.
A decade ago, the news of Plaza, one of my all-time favorite actors, playing Death, one of my all-time favorite mythological/spiritual figures, would have been a wet dream of mine.
At first, I was loving her performance as Rio Vidal (get it? Her name means River of Life?), the green witch of Agatha's coven who is secretly also Death herself.
Plaza cackles and smiles like the devil, and her excitement for the role is palpable. In the final two episodes, however, her role is flattened in typical superhero movie fashion, and she simply becomes yet another MCU villain shooting beams and fighting while wearing a strappy costume with a crown similar to Scarlet Witch's. Her costume looks like it comes from Spirit Halloween, and it doesn't work for me at all.
Agatha All Along has its moments of campy fun, but overall, it fails to land when it needs to most, leaving you up a creek without a broom to fly on.While I didn't love the show, we've got to ask: How Gay Is It?
Where the show does succeed is in finally introducing some real queerness to the MCU. Nearly every character in the show is indicated to be queer, with Agatha and Rio being exes, Wiccan having a boyfriend, and both Zamata and Ahn's characters saying they are attracted to women.
These characters get to act out their queerness on screen as well. It's not blink-and-you'll-miss-it representation, it's not gay-in-name-only, these characters talk about and act on their queerness on screen.
I would've really loved to see Agatha and Rio kiss more than once. In Agatha's flashback episode (episode 8), we barely got to see them as a couple at all, despite that being teased for the entire season.
It is still a huge step forward for queer content in the MCU. Hopefully, other characters in other Marvel projects will get a chance to be gay like this soon.
Agatha All Along gets two out of five stars and four out of five eggplants.
All episodes of Agatha All Along are now streaming on Disney+.
