Good morning, friends and frenemies! It’s time for me to talk about this show that has had me buzzing for days. I’m at a Shut up and Write, and ostensibly, I should be working on The Psychic Out of Time, but I don’t have my glasses, OneDrive is taking forever to sync, and I feel a little bit distracted because I really, really want to talk about Agatha All Along.

If you haven’t watched it yet, let me say two things.

1. It’s very good. You should watch it. Watch WandaVision first to get context, then watch Agatha All Along. It really is better to go into it without spoiliers.
2. Stop reading this and go watch the show.

Spoilers beyond this point. You have been warned.

When they first started promoting the show, they did it with all the actors coming out on stage, singing the Ballad of the Witches Road. When I first saw this, I thought, “Well, that’s weird. Is this supposed to be a musical?” But it all makes sense in retrospect. The song is the throughline of the show. All of the threads are woven out of that song. It is the inciting incident that we get to witness in the epilogue.

Let’s pull on some of these threads and see where they take us.

We start the story with Agatha still under the spell Wanda used to trap her in Westview. Agatha imagines herself as a hard-boiled detective trying to solve a strange murder, but it’s all layers of metaphor symbolizing Agatha’s struggle to be reborn from her past life. The dead body looks like Wanda, but the toe tag tells us that it’s really The Darkhold, which weighed Agatha down as much as Wanda’s spell. The Darkhold is destroyed, Wanda’s spell is broken, and Agatha emerges from all of it, stripped down and free to start over.

But, this isn’t a redemption story, and Agatha is still a monster. We may sympathize with her, but she hasn’t changed. The only think that’s changed is her circumstances. She still chooses to do what she has always done, which is trick witches into giving her their power so that she can survive.

Let’s talk about some relationships and parallels in this story.

Agatha and Teen is obvious and sweet. Teen reminds her of the son she lost. In that way, Teen occasionally inspires Agatha to be a better version of herself, right up to the end where she finally takes the kiss of death, dying so that Teen can live.

Agatha and Lilia is a bit less obvious. They both see Death. Agatha has a tumultuous relationship with Death, and spends much of her life fleeing her, steeling power so that she can survive, and hating Death for taking her son. Lilia’s power forces her to see death, so she spends much of her life fleeing her power so that she no longer is tormented by the things that she sees. In the end, Lilia realizes that she loves herself, her power, being a witch, and she chooses to fall and embrace death. They both embraced death, for different reasons, and it’s beautiful in both cases.

Agatha and Jen are both witches that have lost their power and in both cases, Agatha is the one responsible. Jen lost her power because Agatha was paid to bind her, and didn’t even think about it. Agatha lost her power because she tangled with The Scarlet Witch. They are both restored, but Agatha lays down on the ground and becomes one with it, turning to soil and flowers, while Jen emerges from the dirt into the light, free to take flight and lift off into the sky.

Agatha and Alice are essentially opposites, and we have to include Alice’s mother Lorna to see the complete picture. Agatha is the witch that lost her child in spite her best efforts. Alice is the child of a witch that survived because of her mother’s best efforts. Agatha and her son made up the song as a kind of game, and when Nicholas Scratch died, Agatha used the song as a kind of weapon to take the powers of other witches. Lorna Wu adapted the same song and sang it to her fans, which she thought of as her coven, so the song itself became a kind of shield always there to protect Alice. In both cases, it’s a mother’s love. Agatha’s love twisted by grief into something dark, and Lorna’s love uplifted in hope to provide a light for her daughter.

That brings us back to Teen, Billy Kaplan, reincarnated son of Wanda Maximoff, because a mother’s love persisted.

I think I could go on, but that’s probably enough. I love this show. I’m looking forward to watching it again.

It’s good, clever writing, executed on a tight budget and punching way above its weight class. Consider the scene where Billy Maximoff takes over the body of Billy Kaplan. There aren’t any huge special effects in this scene. There is the sound of a slowing heartbeat, a subtle push-in with the camera, and then Billy shouts for his brother. It’s a flawless execution which tells the story as efficiently as possible. It’s perfect.

I hope you enjoyed the show as much as I did. Let me know if there’s some nuance that really speaks to you that I may have missed.