‘Agatha All Along’ Broke the Spell of MCU Misses

This post contains spoilers for the finale of Agatha All Along, now streaming on Disney+.

For a show where the power of witches’ circles was so prominent, Agatha All Along felt like an appropriately full-circle moment for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was a direct sequel to the very first MCU show to debut on Disney+, WandaVision, with the return of creator Jac Schaeffer, and various WandaVision supporting characters beyond Kathryn Hahn as Agatha herself. And it arrives at a moment when Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige is said to be drastically pulling back on the sheer tonnage of MCU output, in the hopes that reducing the quantity may bring back some of the pre-Endgame quality (or, at least, consistency). Like so many MCU projects, Agatha closes on a note that makes the whole thing feel like setup for a different show or movie, yet it’s one — an adaptation of Young Avengers, which would feature characters not only from this show, but from Hawkeye, Ms. Marvel, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the Ant-Man films, among others — that simply may not come to fruition in whatever this more restrained MCU turns out to be. There are still remnants of the more-is-more corporate philosophy in the can — earlier this week, Marvel released a sizzle reel of 2025 shows that includes one about Avengers C-lister Wonder Man(*) — but in light of where the studio is going, Agatha played more as the end of an era than the continuation of it.

(*) And I say this with love, as he’s somehow my favorite Avenger. 

If Agatha All Along was really the close of a chapter, it was an excellent one, hearkening back to arguably the best series of Feige’s tenure, not only by focusing on Agatha and on Wanda’s son Billy (Joe Locke), but in the way it embraced being a television show rather than being a very long version of an MCU film chopped up into weekly installments.

Schaeffer did this last time by making WandaVision into a TV show about why we love TV shows. The homage wasn’t nearly as overt with Agatha, though the premiere opened with an extended riff on gritty dramas like Mare of Eastown, before Agatha was freed from the spell Wanda placed her under. But long before we saw a poster from the iconic musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the new show felt like one made by someone who grew up watching and loving Buffy and other fantasy and sci-fi series of its era, which deftly mixed Monster of the Week adventures with ongoing arcs about the biggest of bads. As Agatha and Billy gathered a reluctant coven of witches to take them along the Witches’ Road of legend, Agatha took a similar approach. Several big mysteries — Billy’s identity, the nature of Agatha’s relationship with Rio (Aubrey Plaza), and whether Wanda herself might return after seemingly dying in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness — were teased throughout, even as each episode saw the coven dealing with a new mystical challenge, in a seemingly different genre each time (Nancy Meyers comedies, Eighties horror films, and The Wizard of Oz, among other riffs).

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Provided it’s done with enough imagination and care, this is a structure that tends to work very well, and it did so here. After stealing WandaVision out from under Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany, Hahn was more than capable of stepping into the lead, especially when flanked with so many terrific supporting performances by Locke, Plaza, Patti LuPone, Ali Ahn (having a heck of a month, between this and The Diplomat), Sasheer Zamata, and Debra Jo Rupp. Last week’s episode, revealing that LuPone’s Lilia experiences time out of order, was both a terrific showcase for the great star of stage and screen and an excellent example of using sci-fi/fantasy to tell a nonlinear story. Revealing that Rio was the Marvel incarnation of Death felt like an inspired use of Plaza, who can play menacing with the best of them(*), but can also nail the gentleness and vulnerability of an entity who simply has a job to do, and doesn’t need to do it maliciously(**).

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(*) See also her more monstrous role on a very different Marvel project, FX’s Legion, a few years back.

(**) The scene in last week’s episode where Death came to claim Ahn’s Alice felt more than a little influenced by the portrayal of Death from DC Comics’ The Sandman (and its Netflix adaptation).

In a twist from the two-part finale, we found out that Agatha had Buffy vibes for an in-universe reason, too. Billy is his mother’s son, with his mother’s reality-warping powers. Wanda used hers to retreat into a fantasy out of her beloved childhood sitcoms when she couldn’t deal with the grief of Vision’s death. Billy, meanwhile, had a Keyser Söze moment when he returned home from his adventure, realizing that everything on the Witches’ Road was inspired by some pop-culture knickknack in his bedroom, and that he had accidentally manifested the whole thing as a way to sort out his identity crisis. (An earlier installment explained that the spirit of Billy Maximoff possessed the body of Billy Kaplan, a local boy who died right as Wanda’s sitcom spell was undoing itself.) There never was a Witches’ Road; it was just a scam cooked up by Agatha as a means to both steal the power of other witches and cope with her own grief over the death of her son Nicholas. (Nicholas also turned out to be responsible for the song about the Road that Alice’s rock star mother turned into a Seventies hit. The tune was written in our world by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, just like the fake theme songs they composed for WandaVision, and it sounded fresh no matter how often it was repeated across this season.)

Agatha didn’t offer a line quite as resonant as the earlier show’s “What is grief, but love persevering?” But Agatha quietly declaring in the finale that “Sometimes, boys die” was powerful in its simplicity, and the meditation on the ways we cope with grief made the two series feel as much of a piece as the presence of Hahn, Schaeffer, the songwriters, and so on. The finale was a significant step up from the end of WandaVision, for that matter, sticking with character work over spectacle. Even the respective endings for Agatha herself feel linked. In WandaVision, Wanda turned her into the wacky sitcom neighbor that Agatha had once pretended to be. Here, Agatha sacrifices herself to save Billy, but winds up sticking around as a wisecracking ghost who can help Billy (now wearing his Wiccan costume from the comics) search for his lost brother Tommy, in a dynamic that felt very much out of a Sixties sitcom. (Though “helpful ghost” is also a role Agatha has played in the comics.)

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If there’s frustration to be found in the ending, it’s in the nebulous quality of Billy’s future. Maybe he and Agatha continue their quest in the Vision-centric spinoff that’s coming in 2026. Maybe Marvel does, in fact, put Locke, Hailee Steinfeld, Iman Vellani, and company together in a Young Avengers movie or show. Or maybe Feige goes back to focusing on Marvel’s big guns, and this is the last we see of this magical boy and his spectral sidekick. Like last year’s Ahsoka finale, the amount of behind-the-scenes secrecy with these sprawling Disney franchises, and the lack of messaging about when, how, or even if certain stories will continue, can make it harder to enjoy them in the moment.

Still, Agatha All Along cast a far more successful spell than the MCU seemed capable of in its weakened state, and maybe this isn’t the last we’ve heard of Kathryn Hahn’s infectious laugh in this role.