Agatha All Along

 I've been watching a bunch of Marvel TV shows lately.  I'm not proud of that fact, but it is what it is.  I'd always liked MCU movies, but somehow the shows felt like too much work.  Well, now--perhaps in an effort to distract myself from The Horror--I'm delving into them, perhaps TOO much.  Maybe I'll say more later.  Some of them are pretty good!  But right now, I just want to talk about goddamn Agatha All Along, a terrible show that sucks but has both critic and audience ratings in the eighties on rotten tomatoes.  I hate it when people insist on having objectively bad opinions like that.

Okay, so before I can talk about AAA, I have to briefly talk about Wandavision, I suppose, which also sucked, in spite of a level of artfulness that eludes its spinoff.  The basic problem was, Wanda was absolutely fucking awful--trapping thousands of people in what is explicitly characterized as a fate worse than death so she can live out her dumb sitcom fantasy.  And she's just SO self-absorbed, and SO self-righteous about her shittiness.  But we're supposed to sympathize with her, because her brother and her husband died, and at the end she did the bare minimum to make things as close to right as possible.

Agatha was, I suppose, the antagonist there, playing Wanda's comic sitcom neighbor.  But she's secretly a witch!  And I've gotta say, when she got the upper hand on Wanda, it felt SO cathartic.  Because okay, fine, she's a villain, she wants to take Wanda's powers, whatever, but did she cast a whole town of people into a living death?  I submit to the court that she did not.  And yet then, at the end, we're apparently suppose to be happy that Wanda consigns her to that same fate.  I don't know how it's possible for a writer to so misread their characters, but here we are.

That, at any rate, was why I was at any rate eager to see Agatha All Along--because I wanted the character to get a better deal.  But...well.

As AAA opens, Agatha is still under the curse Wanda put on her at the end of WV, only not quite--not that I care about this that much, but it doesn't feel like I'm nitpicking too badly if I point out that the form she was trapped in at the end of the earlier show was a bubbly, nosey-neighbor type.  Whereas here, she's nothing like that; she's a hardboiled detective in what feels like a miserabilist Scandinavian crime drama (and unlike Wandavision's sitcom pastiches, there is ZERO reason why this should be structured as a TV show).  Why would you just change that?  Is this the same character?  Well, she gets out of her trap thanks to this teenage kid known only as Teen in the first part of the show (look at me, I'm avoiding spoilers!), and then we start on the show's quest, which is to go down this nebulously-defined "Witches' Road," a strange and deadly place where you can get what you want if you get to the end, apparently (I kept thinking it seemed a bit like a Zone in Roadside Picnic, but that's neither here nor there).

First, she has to get a 'coven'--this is a witch show!--so we get a rather hackneyed series of scenes where she recruits other witches, generally in the "join us!" "never!" "come on!" "no way" [fifteen minutes later] "oh, okay, fine."  So we have these extremely poorly-defined characters going on this extremely poorly-defined quest.  The only one of them who really seems promising is Kitty Forman (reprising her role of a few episodes in WV) as a woman who doesn't appear to actually have witch powers or know anything about what's going on but is just kind of tagging along with the others in a bewildered way, and you think, okay, THIS could go somewhere super-interesting...but nah, she's just the first to be killed off, quite unceremoniously, she didn't have any meaning.  It feels like a joke without a punchline.

But anyway, the others scuffle around a bunch.  There is A LOT of bickering in this show, and not fun, MCU-style banter.  Mostly just people yelling at one another over things that you may or may not understand.  But the real problem here is Agatha herself.  I think the show might be trying to make her seem complex, but it more or less settles for muddled, as she's portrayed as a good or bad guy according to the whims of the writers--until the end, when it's established extremely clearly that she's a very, very bad guy--we see a montage sequence of her murdering other witches she's established a coven with by provoking them into attacking her (because she needs them to do that for her to steal their powers), and turning them into wizened corpses.  It's pretty bad...but also--this fucking drives me NUTS--we are STILL supposed to sympathize with her, to some degree, because she's sad that her young son died.  In 1756, I might add.  And then the ending just fucking assaults us with stupidity: Agatha, along with all the others, is dead, only for some goddamn reason, she comes back as a ghost, and Teen tries to exorcise her--as well one might--only then for some incomprehensible reason he decides to spare her and they go off together for further adventures.  Teen and Malevolent Spirit.  A future spinoff that nobody needs or wants!  What the FUCK is this?  Who was this meant to satisfy?  

It's also a little, I dunno, on-the-nose that we see here the exact same fatal flaw that Wandavision had: wildly unsympathetic characters that we're meant to sorta-kinda like anyway because of personal trauma in their pasts.  Okay, fine, hurt people hurt people, but that doesn't make them likable solely by virtue of having been hurt.  I mean, I suppose they had little reason to change course after Wandavision, given that it's still very well-liked in spite of sucking, but it's still a LITTLE dispiriting...and yet everyone likes it!  I hate to cast sweeping judgments based on very little evidence, oh okay I don't hate it that much, so you might have other reasons for liking these shows, and if so cool, but if you like either of the title characters--which we are supposed to!--I think you might have some sort of personality defect.  Sorry not sorry.

Okay, in fairness, there ARE a few things I liked about it, as follows:

-On a pure craft level, I appreciated how in the last episode the show circles back to the coven scene, when they're all singing together, and makes it clear that she was just trying to provoke them to steal their powers, as she'd done so many times before, only she was interrupted.  And I REALLY don't think this would actually work; you say something dickish and all of them just immediately attack you at the same time?  Come on.  Okay, I guess I half-liked this.

-"Down the Witches' Road," the song that repeats in several versions throughout the show, is an absolute banger.  I wasn't convinced at first (probably because I'm somewhat snobbish about folk music), but it won me over.  Look it up.

-Some people praise the show because of the portrayal of Teen--a gay Jewish teenager.  And I'll grant you that--in the one episode that delves into his past--he's quite well-written.  But by the end of the show, who even knows WHAT he is.  Not interesting, that's for sure.

-Aubrey Plaza as Death, spoiler.  She's really great in the role, and I want to see more of her.

-Okay, one of the coven members survives: the African American one, who escapes to the surface, tastes freedom, and joyfully zooms away.  And no, she wasn't much of a character or anything, but she's the only one who successfully managed to escape this shitshow, so good on her.