Sinful Sunday: "Agatha All Along" Gives a Queer Villain The Depth She Deserves
Unlike so many other stale stories, the new Disney+/MCU Television show boasts strong performances, nuanced writing, and a sapphic romance, all of which make Agatha a queer villain for the ages.
Hello, dear reader! Do you like what you read here at Omnivorous? Do you like reading fun but insightful takes on all things pop culture? Do you like supporting indie writers? If so, then please consider becoming a subscriber and get the newsletter delivered straight to your inbox. There are a number of paid options, but you can also sign up for free! Every little bit helps. Thanks for reading and now, on with the show!
Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious queer villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
I can say without exaggeration that Agatha All Along–the new Marvel TV series focusing on Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha Harkness, the villainous witch from the series WandaVision–is my favorite thing that the studio has ever produced. Don’t get me wrong; I am a casual fan of the MCU, and I think many of their films are more subtle and complicated than their critics like to claim. However, there’s no denying that the studio has been notorious for its queer-baiting, often promising “groundbreaking” moments of queer representation that end up landing with anything but.
Agatha All Along, by contrast, wears its queerness on its sleeve. It is, as one reviewer pithily remarked, the queerest thing that Marvel has ever done. And, as EW’s Nick Romano so aptly puts it, queerness is “in the very DNA of the show, which embraces so much of what many LGBTQ audiences came to love: camp, musicals, queer icon Patti LuPone, and horror.” As if that weren’t enough, showrunner Jac Schaeffer has spoken about the yearning to “infuse the show with joyous, dark, resplendent queer energy.”
There’s always been something queerly appealing about Agatha. Whether it was her too-cheery demeanor as Wanda’s do-gooder neighbor Agnes or her flawless fashion sense, one always got the sense that she was performing, that there is more to her than meets the eye. Even though she seemed to be Wanda’s ally the truth, as it turns out, was that she was pulling the strings, all in an effort to get her power for herself.
For the most part, though, Agatha’s personal life was always left up to the viewer’s imagination; her primary narrative function was as a foil for Wanda. At the end of WandaVision all of her schemes and manipulations come to nothing, as she is cursed to stay within her identity as Agnes. For someone like Agatha, whose entire sense of self seems predicated on her identity as one of the most powerful witches in the world, this is in some ways a fate worse than death.
Thus it is that Agatha All Along opens with Agatha trapped in a crime drama eerily similar to those like Mare of Easttown. As the episode goes on, Agatha is slowly drawn back to her real self, thanks in large part to the witchy fanatic simply named Teen (Joe Locke, most famous for being queer icon Charlie in Heartstopper). As the series has progressed Agatha has gathered a new coven about her in an effort to regain her power and, as I write this, they are currently making their way down The Witches’ Road.
While queerness certainly suffuses every aspect of this series, it comes most forcefully to the fore in the relationship between Aubrey Plaza’s Rio Vidal and Hahn’s Harkness. From the very beginning, when Vidal comes striding into “Agnes’s” precinct, it’s clear that there’s history there. That sense only grows more intense several episodes later, once Rio is drawn into the world of the Witches Road. The chemistry between Plaza and Hahn is truly off the charts, not least because the two of them both appeared in Parks and Rec way back in the 2010s (that show was the first time that I remember seeing Hahn, and even then I was blown away by her performance). Any time the two appear together they strike sparks–their first two encounters in the alternate reality of the first episode are particularly sultry–and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one on the edge of my seat waiting for them to finally seal the deal and kiss already.
It all comes to fruition in the fourth, most recent episode, in which Agatha and Rio share a tense private moment, after the latter admits to the rest of the coven that she once hurt someone that she loved, that person’s continuing existence a scar she can never erase. It’s clear that she’s talking about Agatha and the two come so close to kissing that you can practically feel it. Some hurts, however, cannot be so easily wished away. Whatever happened between the two of them, it’s clear that it’s going to take a lot more than just a heated intimate moment to assuage the damage.
Just as importantly, though, this whole sequence is also remarkable for the extent to which it reveals a certain vulnerability to Agatha. For all that she might like to appear cold and unfeeling and selfish, she still has a heart. Her many exchanges with Teen show that there is something about him that calls to her–though whether he is in fact her son is very much an open question, for all that Rio seems to put the kibosh on the idea that he is–and the chemistry between Locke and Hahn is as intense in its own way as that between Hahn and Aubrey.
At the same time, the series doesn’t sugarcoat the fact that its title character has, in the past, been incredibly self-centered and destructive. This is the woman, after all, who did more than almost anyone else to further damage Wanda’s already-fragile psych, even going so far as to recruit a young man to masquerade as her brother. (And, lest we forget, she also killed a dog). Like all good queer villains, however, she also gets to grow and change and become something more than just a comic book cut-out.
In other words, this series has done something that very few other recent fictions have been able to do in a way that feels authentic: give true depth and complexity to a queer villain. Yes, we’ve seen some of this already in the numerous nauseating live-action remakes that have become de rigueur for Disney, with Maleficent being the most high-profile examples. Almost without exception, however, those stories don’t feel particularly authentic, and Maleficent itself feels like something that was a decent-enough concept before it was cobbled together out of disparate elements into a Franktenstein’s monster of a narrative. Agatha, however, benefits from both a tremendous performance from Hahn and strong writing–as well as a reliance more on practical effects than budget-bloating CGI–and, as a result, her story and her struggles come to feel more authentic and organic.
In an era of stale IP and utterly flavorless remakes and reboots and frantic IP-based cash-grabs, Agatha All Along is nothing short of a queer miracle.