REVIEW: Agatha All Along – Season 1, Episode 2, “Circle Sewn With Fate/Unlock Thy Hidden Gate”

Television Reviews

For the purpose of reviewing them separately, I watched the first two episodes of Agatha All Along a day apart. Having now seen them both, I understand why they were paired up for the show’s debut (aside from Disney wanting to put the finale – also a two-fer – on Halloween week). “Circle Sewn With Fate/Unlock Thy Hidden Gate” is another setup episode, with Agatha still preparing for her quest to regain her powers. It’s also probably a better look at how the series will play out, and it’s a mess of conflicting tones, corny jokes (plus a few good ones), and nonsensical plot points to stretch out the series. In other words, it looks like Agatha All Along will be your standard Disney+ Marvel series.

Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) teams up with the stranger she dubs “Teen” (Joe Locke) to put together a coven so she can traverse the Witches’ Road and get her powers back. But the witches she needs are, for various reasons, hesitant to join forces with Agatha. Meanwhile, Agatha spies a series of animals watching her.

“Circle Sewn With Fate/Unlock Thy Hidden Gate” begins with Agatha sorting through her damaged home, putting an ensemble together as Teen tries to convince her to let him join her. This is where the character falls apart; in the first episode, Teen acted more or less normally, speaking like a human being as opposed to a fabrication of a person that bad screenwriters think is funny. Here, it’s the opposite, and Teen is soon making overly dramatic hand gestures and getting the vapors over anything Agatha says. He gets annoying really fast, and it’s a shame because there are signs in the first episode that Joe Locke (an actor I’m unfamiliar with, though, in real life, he sounds like an asshole) can play the role just fine. But this is current Marvel, so he’s the obnoxious fanboy they assign to their main characters nowadays. Teen is an Agatha Harkness megafan, and he just can’t wait to help her become a powerful witch again. It’s eye-rolling cringe, and it goes on throughout the whole episode.

***SPOILERS***

The other witches are a mixed bag. “Circle Sewn With Fate/Unlock Thy Hidden Gate” is the putting-the-band-back-together episode, with Agatha and Teen finding all the witches within thirty miles of Westview (there’s a line about how a certain number of witches will always exist within a thirty-mile radius, which doesn’t make much sense but is very convenient for the plot) and convincing them to join her new coven. (I was dying to hear a Rick and Morty “You son of a bitch, I’m in!”) They’ve all heard of Agatha Harkness, and thankfully, they contrast with Teen in that they want nothing to do with her for various reasons. Lilia Calderu (Patti Lupone) is one of those dime-a-dozen storefront psychics who appears at first to be a charlatan but, of course, really does have magic powers. Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata) owns a hippie-dippie candle store that sells stupid nonsense to suburban housewives who think they’re, like, totally spiritual and stuff because their soap has a weird mark engraved on it. Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn) is a former cop and current mall security guard who is a witch because her mother was one, which makes her a “blood witch.” And they’re all… fine. There isn’t much to them yet, probably because they’re all introduced within a few minutes of each other in a thirty-minute episode of television.

This is the catch-22 these Marvel series always seem to have: they’re both too long and too short, with the plot getting drawn out and rushed in various stages. Here, we’ve got the introduction to Agatha’s quest spread across two fairly slow episodes, but instead of using that time to make these characters pop and feel like real people whose stories interest us, they’re all thrown in one after the other and given very basic motivations that don’t have time to resonate. Lilia needs money; Jennifer is about to be sued for fraud and criminal endangerment and maybe go to jail; Alice can’t hold a job. Okay, but these are all quick explanations for why they’d join a quest they want no part of instead of character-building backstories. Why did Jennifer sell dangerous products to her customers? Why is it so difficult for Alice to keep herself employed (aside from this job, which Agatha sabotages)? Lilia at least gets a bit of characterization; she uses cheap cold-reading tricks nobody will suspect because she’s experienced things like the Salem Witch Trials and has always been punished for using magic, even when she tried to go good with it. That makes sense, and the dire straits it put her in explain why she’d join up with Agatha. But the other two are just kind of there because Agatha needs a whole coven.

The final member of the coven – the “green witch” – is held till the end. For some reason, Agatha resists talking to her, and for the bulk of “Circle Sewn With Fate/Unlock Thy Hidden Gate,” we’re led to believe it’s Rio Vidal, Aubrey Plaza’s character from the first episode who was called the “Green Witch.” But nope; it’s “Mrs. Hart,” the sweet neighbor from WandaVision played by Debra Jo Rupp, whose real name is Sharon Davis. A green witch is one whose power revolves around earth – they’re all elements, I guess – and Sharon is very proud of her front yard garden. This is fine with me, and the scene where Agatha invites her to a “party” is funny enough, but again, it’s not much characterization. Maybe Agatha’s coven will be fleshed out as the series goes along, but given how the other Marvel shows unfurled, I’m not betting on it. At any rate, the coven chants, a door opens, and Agatha and her crew begin their journey down the Witches’ Road, barely escaping the Salem Seven. This is another problem; the Salem Seven show up as Agatha and the coven are chanting, and they… just stand around doing nothing so Agatha has time to escape them. This is a major plot contrivance that wasn’t necessary. Why not just have the Salem Seven show up as the chant is completed, so they don’t look like a bunch of idiots? Why is Marvel determined to yank the teeth out of all of their villains?

Otherwise, “Circle Sewn With Fate/Unlock Thy Hidden Gate” is the usual Disney+ Marvel fare. Most of the jokes fall flat to the extent that you’re embarrassed for Kathryn Hahn, who deserves much better. She gets a couple of good lines, though, and I like that she’s allowing Agatha’s sinister aspects to show. She has no problem getting Alice fired, for example, and she tricks Sharon into joining the coven, making no bones about dragging this sweet old lady into a dangerous trek through a dark realm. I hope the show leans into this rather than doing what Marvel and every other Disney branch does nowadays and excusing an evil woman’s actions, no matter how terrible they are. It’s fine to make it funny (in theory) and have Agatha be the protagonist as long it understands that she’s not a good person. I also wonder if they’ll go deeper into Sharon’s role in the coven. Was she really the name Agatha saw, or did she choose her instead of Rio because she and Rio are enemies? Does Sharon even have witch powers, or is Agatha taking a complete novice into danger? As long as it’s executed well (I know, good luck), I’m fine with either explanation. As for Rio, I’m pretty sure those animals were her, or she was using them to watch Agatha. Maybe she’ll be one of the villains as well, trying to stop Agatha from getting her powers. There’s a lot they can do with this, and I don’t want to be too negative right off the bat, but Marvel has burned me every time I think they’re onto something with one of these shows. I will say that I like the production design so far; the Witches’ Road and whatever magical realm it inhabits are suitably weird and a little creepy, like Agatha is in a dark fairy tale. I hope the show capitalizes on this, but again, I’ll believe it when I see it. So far, Agatha All Along isn’t particularly good, but it’s not as bad as I thought it would be, and certainly better than some of the other Marvel series. We’ll see how long it holds on to mediocrity.

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