What “Agatha all along” knows about power

Forgive me, but have you felt as though some of the oldest misogynistic winds have been blowing lately? Distrust of childless women, working women, postmenopausal women? Feverish tirades about missing pets and made-up rituals? Far too much talk about cats? It can be no coincidence that every time the fear of female power and autonomy manifests itself in public discourse, it takes on a familiar, paranoid form. And so: The time of the witches is here again. This time, however, there is no point in resisting it. As Marvel sorceress Agatha Harkness (played by Kathryn Hahn) says in the first episode of the new Disney+ series Agatha all the time“The things you mock me for are the things that make me dangerous. So do you want to provoke the bear further?”

I expected Agatha all the time to be Fun—Hahn alone is a godsend in this regard—but I didn’t expect how cheap it would feel, at least judging by the first two episodes. The show, a spin-off of the acclaimed 2021 series WandaVision, was announced in the same year, so it is hard to imagine that Jac Schaeffer, the creator of both projects, expected that Agatha would premiere at a moment so steeped in 17th-century misogyny. (Sometimes we just get lucky.) Still, the series’ portrayal of a woman seeking power and refusing to conform fits almost too well with 2024’s central storylines. Agatha mixes mythology and archetypes like a spooky Old Maid game as it explores how its main character, who is lost after the events of WandaVisiontries to regain her magical powers. The mood is bubbly; the aesthetic oscillates between repressed domestic formality and trippy, supernatural neon.

Read: The deep sadness of WandaVision

How Agatha lost her powers is something to be traced back to when she was introduced. Almost a decade after the first Avengers film, WandaVision was a metafictional, ingenious series centered around Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), an Avenger with telekinetic and other magical powers. Mourning the loss of her lover Vision (Paul Bettany), Wanda resurrected a version of him and staged the mass enchantment of an entire New Jersey town, forcing its residents to play supporting roles from old TV sitcoms in her nostalgic retro fantasy. Agatha was there too, disguised as Wanda’s cheerful, nosy neighbor “Agnes,” the kind of supporting character Hahn played in her early career. In the series finale, torn by grief and anger after losing not only Vision but the family she had conjured up for her, Wanda defeated Agatha in a decisive battle, stealing her powers and dooming Agatha to continue living as Agnes. In Agatha all the timethat magic is still there, although it has a new TV genre at its core: Agatha believes she is a sloppy, workaholic detective in the Mare by Easttown Schimmel, who solves murders against the frosty backdrop of a Scandi-noir.

The imagination underlines that what WandaVision so adept was his use of tropes. By taking on different sitcom types in different episodes—a 1950s housewife, a beleaguered mother of twins, a mad mockumentary mom—Wanda was able to try on different maternal roles while showing how incompatible they all were with her own simmering powers. But her character, at least as portrayed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was always more associated with superheroes than witches. With Agatha, Schaeffer gets to play a comic book character more deeply rooted in American lore, who was present at the Salem witch trials, owns a black cat and is well versed in the magical arts. Early in the show, as Agatha breaks free from Wanda’s spell, Hahn seems to be shedding layers of anger, resentment and imprisonment, emerging from Agatha’s old sitcom roles as a woman reborn. Freed, she is a lip-curling, calculating, perverse thrill-seeker. “How long have I been living in this cesspool of a city?” she asks a neighbor as she stands before him stark naked and fearless. When she is later told that too many people still want to see her “burn, hang or drown,” Agatha hisses, “There are no new options?”

Agatha’s inner being is dark, but the show is sly in its portrayal and in its way of understanding witches in our cultural imagination. A brooch she wears in the show, with three female figures on it, seems to represent the three stages of womanhood: maiden, mother, and crone, each passive and limiting. (Again, one might wonder if there aren’t new options.) Agatha wants power for herself because the lack of it is unbearable to her, but the show recognizes how unusual that makes her as a central character. Hahn is never funnier than when Agatha tries to summon some of her own pride while forced to wear Agnes’ drab clothing—a cobra trapped in the banal form of a hamster. In one scene, she throws a scarf around herself, which would be more dramatic if the garment in question didn’t so firmly signal a Midwestern mother.

In the second episode, Agatha seeks out a coven of witches to help her, bringing together a group of down-on-the-luck misfits. Lilia (Patti LuPone) is a centuries-old Sicilian witch who works as a psychic in a mall; Jennifer (Sasheer Zamata) is a potion expert who uses a spell to sell scented candles and jade eggs to wannabe girlboss girls; Alice (Ali Ahn) is a former cop who wastes her time on a dead-end security job. A character known only as “Teen” (played by Heart StopperJoe Locke (‘s Joe Locke) also joins Agatha in the hopes of finding a mentor. Many covens, the teenager explains in one scene, are simply people who are “brought together by mysterious twists of fate” and find “the truest form of sisterhood” through their union.

In this sense, the reaction to the show was telling even before it aired. Conservative commentators attacked Disney for Agatha‘s veneration of witches as subversive icons and their – so far weak – homoerotic subtext. Outraged by Zamata’s argument in an interview that witches are inherently queer, National reviewRich Lowry of the New York Times even snorted in a video response that “Samantha from In love with a witch was happily married.” (Witch, Please.) I can only respond to this with Agatha’s own insight: the things that upset some people most about women – our desires, our autonomy, our choices – are actually the things that make us dangerous. Happy witching season.