It was at about the 20-minute mark of this past week’s episode of Agatha All Along that I remembered I was watching an MCU show. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that. I like the MCU, and I generally enjoy the movies and shows enough to spend a good chunk of my time talking about them, and writing about them. But if there’s one thing the rest of the running time of this latest MCU series has proved, it’s that “actual” spells are far more interesting than witches and wizards randomly blasting each other with different colors.
Spoilers for “Darkest Hour, Wake Thy Power” past this point, but in the episode, Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) and her makeshift coven are trying to complete their latest trial when she’s possessed by the ghost of her mother. Aiming to free Agatha, Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn) runs forward, and does something that surprises even her: she begins to blast Agatha with orange beams of energy. As established in WandaVision (where Agatha first appeared) and then in the first two episodes of the season, Agatha is a siphon. Blast her with energy, and she absorbs it, ultimately sucking the life essence out of the witch, as well.
That’s exactly what happens here, as Alice blasts Agatha with her orange, Agatha turns it into her purple, and then Alice dies. We get one last color towards the end of the episode when it’s revealed that Teen (Joe Locke) is secretly the son of the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). And guess what? He’s got blue powers, which he uses to control the minds of Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata) and Lilia Calderu (Patti Lupone), making them toss Agatha into the mud on the side of the Witches’ Road. And then he blasts them back into the mud themselves — presumably because if he tried to blast Agatha, she would siphon him, as well.
So now we’ve got orange blasts, purple blasts, and blue blasts in the same episode. That’s in addition to Scarlet Witch’s appropriately red blasts, Doctor Strange’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) orange blasts, and Loki’s (Tom Hiddleston) green blasts. Almost got a full rainbow there, fellas!
The issue here is that it whittles them all down to the same thing. There are some variations, of course. Strange has his sparkle circles (all credit to Deadpool on that one) and protective shields. Loki does some illusion stuff. And Scarlet Witch does other things that are also red, like controlling people’s minds, but in a red way.
But for the most part, they blast colors. And usually, someone else is blasting colors back at them. Whoever has the strongest color overtakes the other color, and then they fly backward and say something like “he’s too strong!” This is the same thing that happens in almost any superhero movie where two characters shoot rays (think: any Superman movie where there’s another Kryptonian), and basically every magic movie in existence (think: Harry Potter).
To venture a guess, it’s likely because it’s cheaper to run with a variation of models that have already been built in VFX than come up with something completely new. But it’s short-hand, and it’s frankly, boring. In fact, one of the biggest criticisms of WandaVision was that after nearly a full season of visually and structurally creative episodes that sparked the excitement of fans and critics, it ended with Wanda and Agatha witch-blasting each other in the skies over Westview… Something that undercut any of the, by comparison, nuanced discussions of grief and loss that preceded it. The witch blast fight also succeeded in turning Agatha into Generic Marvel Baddie #38, instead of the excellently enigmatic villain she was previously.
That’s why it was so refreshing to see Marvel not doing the color blasts for the first four and a half episodes of the season. The whole premise of the show is that Agatha is powerless, and for the most part, so are the other witches in the coven. It’s led to far more creative and intriguing iterations of witchcraft throughout the series to this point. A makeshift potion built from household ingredients in Episode 3. An incantation and ritual to summon Rio in Episode 4. Episode 5 started with a neat, simple spell to infuse logs on the Witches’ Road with the power of flight.
All of these spells, too, have been about the witches in the coven cooperating, something these loners have had to learn how to do if they’re to rely on each other. While those first two spells mentioned were finding disparate parts to make a whole, the broomstick spell involved chanting in pairs and then exchanging their brooms. And we’re told that the coven flies together, or not at all. It also leads to a delightful sequence where they fly over the Road, an enormous blood moon in the sky behind them.
It’s an enchanting scene… But it all fizzles out later in the episode the second Alice starts blasting orange rays of light. Granted, this sort of thing was always going to be Chekhov’s Witch Blasts. Agatha explains the whole siphoning thing in Episode 1. She yells, “Blast me you b**ches!” in Episode 2 when they seemingly fail to open the door to the Witches’ Road. And we’re helpfully reminded at the beginning of Episode 5 that she siphoned her entire coven, killing them, including her mother. Heck, Disney put up stills from the season’s eighth episode showing Agatha about to blast some purple, before the season even started streaming. There was no way we were getting through nine episodes without some color blastin’ action.
It will be unfortunate, though, if this is what the season ends up as. Knowing that ending was less than satisfying on WandaVision, and then doing it again — rather than finding a creative ending that leans into the fun, spooky witch vibes that have been established early on — would be easy, and disappointing. Fingers crossed that now that Agatha All Along has gotten the witch blasts out of its system, we can move on from there, and back to the far more interesting spells seen previously. And perhaps if Scarlet Witch does return as suspected, the show can also figure out something else for her to do in the MCU, other than “red.”
Agatha All Along Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
The first two episodes of Agatha All Along premiered September 18 at 6 pm PT / 9 pm ET on Disney+. It streams weekly, leading up to the two-episode finale on October 30. There are nine episodes, in total.
Here’s the full list of episodes in Agatha All Along, with premiere dates:
- Wednesday, September 18, 2024: Agatha All Along, Episode 1: “Seekest Thou The Road”
- Wednesday, September 18, 2024: Agatha All Along, Episode 2: “Circle Sewn With Fate Unlock They Hidden Gate”
- Wednesday, September 25, 2024: Agatha All Along, Episode 3: “Through Many Miles of Tricks and Trials”
- Wednesday, October 2, 2024: Agatha All Along, Episode 4: “If I Can’t Reach You Let My Song Teach You”
- Wednesday, October 9, 2024: Agatha All Along, Episode 5: “Darkest Hour, Wake Thy Power”
- Wednesday, October 16, 2024: Agatha All Along, Episode 6
- Wednesday, October 23, 2024: Agatha All Along, Episode 7
- Wednesday, October 30, 2024: Agatha All Along, Episode 8
- Wednesday, October 30, 2024: Agatha All Along, Episode 9
Where To Watch Agatha All Along:
Listen to MarvelVision:
Discover more from Comic Book Club
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.