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

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. Agatha All Along A day apart. Having now seen them both, I understand why they were added to the beginning of the show (besides Disney wanting to put the finale on Halloween week – also a two-fer). “Circle Sewn With Fate/Unlock Thy Hidden Gate” is another setup episode, with Agatha still preparing for the quest to get her powers back. It also perhaps gives a better look at how the series will play out, and it's a mess of conflicting tones, corny jokes (as well as some good ones) and nonsensical plot points to keep the series moving. In other words, it feels like Agatha All Along This will be your standard Disney+ Marvel series.

Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) teams up with a stranger she calls “Teen” (Joe Locke) to help her follow the witch path and regain her powers. But the witches she needs are hesitant to team up with Agatha for a variety of reasons. Meanwhile, Agatha notices a number of animals watching her.

“Circle Sewn With Fate/Unlock Thy Hidden Gate” begins with Agatha sorting through her damaged home, forming a group while Teon tries to convince her to join him. This is where the character arc falls apart; First EpisodeTeen acted more or less normal, talking like a human, not a made-up story 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 annoyed by everything Agatha says. He starts to get annoying pretty quickly, and it's a shame because there were hints in the first episode itself that Joe Locke (an actor I'm unfamiliar with, although, in real life, he seems like a nerd) could 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 can't wait to help her become a powerful witch again.

***SPOILER***

Other witches are mixed in. “Circle Sewn With Fate/Unlock Thy Hidden Gate” is the episode that gets the band back together, in which Agatha and the teens find all the witches within thirty miles of Westview (there's a line about there always being a certain number of witches within a thirty-mile radius, which doesn't make a lot of sense but is very convenient for the plot) and convince them to join their new troupe. (I was dying to hear that again rick and morty (“You bastards, I'm in on this!”) They've all heard of Agatha Harkness, and thankfully they're different from Teen in that they want nothing to do with her for various reasons. Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone) is one of the dozens of storefront psychics who seems like a charlatan at first glance, but of course, she actually has magical powers. Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata) is a hippie-dippy candle store owner who sells silly things to suburban housewives who think they're totally spiritual and that's because they have a weird mark etched on their soap. Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn) is a former police officer and current mall security guard who is a witch because her mother was a witch, which makes her the “Blood Witch.” And they're all… fine. Not much is known about them yet, probably because they're all introduced within a few minutes of each other in a thirty-minute episode of television.

This is a case that always happens in Marvel series: they're both too long and too short, with the plot drawn out and rushed at various stages. Here, we get an introduction to Agatha's quest in two fairly slow-paced episodes, but instead of using that time to make these characters engaging and feel like real people whose stories we find interesting, they're thrown in one after another and given very basic motivations that don't have time to resonate. Lilia needs money; Jennifer is about to be prosecuted for fraud and criminal endangerment and probably go to jail; Alice can't hold down a job. OK, but these are all quick explanations for why they would join a quest they don't want to participate in rather than character-building backstory. Why did Jennifer sell dangerous products to her clients? Why is it so difficult for Alice to keep herself employed (except for this one job, which Agatha sabotages)? Lilia at least gets a little characterization; She uses cheap cold-reading tricks, which no one would suspect because she's experienced things like the Salem Witch Trials and has always been punished for using magic, even when she tried to do good with it. That makes sense, and the terrible situation she got stuck in explains why she wanted to join up with Agatha. But the other two are simply there because Agatha needs a whole coven.

The final member of the coven – the “Green Witch” – is kept on hold until the very end. For some reason, Agatha avoids talking to her, and for most of “Circle Sewn With Fate/Unlock Thy Hidden Gate,” we are led to believe that it is Rio Vidal, Aubrey Plaza's character from the first episode who was called the “Green Witch.” But no; it is “Mrs. Hart,” the “Green Witch's” sweet neighbor. WandaVision Played by Debra Jo Rupp, whose real name is Sharon Davis. A green witch is someone whose power revolves around the earth – those are all the elements, I think – and Sharon is very proud of her front garden. That's fine by me, and the scene where Agatha invites her to a “party” is pretty funny, but again, it's not much characterization. Maybe Agatha's troupe will be fleshed out even more as the series progresses, but given the other Marvel shows, I'm not betting on it. At any rate, the troupe chants, a door opens, and Agatha and her entourage begin their journey down the witches' road, barely escaping the Salem Seven. That's another problem; the Salem Seven show up while Agatha and the troupe are chanting, and they… just stand around doing nothing so that Agatha has time to escape them. This is a major plot point that wasn't needed. Why not just show the Salem Seven as soon as the incantation is complete, so they don't look like idiots? Why is Marvel so intent on pulling out the teeth of all of its villains?

Otherwise, “Circle Sewn With Fate/Unlock Thy Hidden Gate” is typical Disney+ Marvel fare. Most of the jokes fall flat to the point that you're embarrassed for Kathryn Hahn, who deserves much better than this. She does get a few good lines, though, and I like that she allows the sinister aspects of Agatha to show through. She has no problem getting Alice fired from her job, for instance, and she tricks Sharon into joining the Coven, having no qualms about dragging this sweet old lady on a dangerous trek to a dark realm. I hope the show focuses on this rather than doing what Marvel and every other Disney branch does and forgiving the actions of an evil woman, no matter how horrible they are. Making it fun (in theory) and making Agatha the hero is fine as long as it's understood that she's not a good person. I also wonder if they'll go deeper into Sharon's role in the Coven. Was that really the same name Agatha saw, or did she choose him instead of Rio because she and Rio are enemies? Does Sharon have witch powers as well, or is Agatha putting a complete newbie in danger? As long as it's executed well (I know, good luck), I have no problem with either explanation. As for Rio, I'm pretty sure those animals were her, or she was using them to watch over Agatha. Maybe she'll even be one of the villains, trying to stop Agatha from getting her powers. They could do a lot with this, and I don't want to be too negative right from the start, but Marvel has burned me every time I think they're doing something with one of these shows. I will say that I like the production design so far; The Witches' Path and whatever magical realm it inhabits is appropriately strange and a little scary, like Agatha in a dark fairy tale. I hope the show takes advantage of this, but again, I'll believe it when I see it. So far, Agatha All Along It's not great, but it's not as bad as I thought, and it's certainly better than other Marvel series. We'll see how long it stays mediocre.

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