‘Agatha All Along’ Is The Evil Queerness We’ve Been Waiting For
Image; Disney
I walked away, loving Agatha All Along (2024), the WandaVision (2021) spinoff about the evil witch named Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) who goes on an adventure with a begrudgingly formed coven on the “Witches’ Road” for glory and power.
I loved the set design and cinematography. The use of color theory was quite apt, as every character was linked to a particular color that was tied to the greater mythology of the show (i.e., yellow for divination magic, red for protection, blue for potions, and so forth). This pattern was so ingrained that an astute viewer could tell what challenge was next based on the color of the leaves on the Witches’ Road.
As a musical theater nerd, I also couldn’t help but love the song The Ballad of the Witches’ Road, which the show was centered on. It thematically resonated with the major themes of the series and was additionally quite catchy.
The figure I loved most of all, however, was the titular Agatha, who represents a prime example of what queer evil can look like in media, and I think she’s iconic.
Evil never sleeps
Agatha is, to sidestep the pun for a moment, an evil b!tch. She is unapologetic in her cruelty, having hurt an untold number of people — something she hilariously jokes about in the episode If I Can’t Reach You / Let My Song Teach You, saying: “I mean, I’ve killed…my share.”
And then we get to the last episode, and I think the twist here is clever because it subverts our expectations. Throughout the series, we are led to believe that Agatha has valid reasons for her duplicitousness. It is revealed earlier that she had a son who died, and the grief of that is what is implied to have propelled her toward evil.
In Maiden, Mother Crone, we see how these events happened. Her sick son, Nicholas Scratch (Abel Lysenko), died during childbirth, but because she had a love affair with death itself (Aubrey Plaza), she was given more time with him, but it’s implied at a cost. Every so often, Agatha and her son (who played the role of the bait) had to kill other witches so he could go on living.
Yet one day, he refused to play his part in the deal, and so death came to collect.
Normally, this is where a morally “righteous” show would end. We would learn here that Agatha was only doing this evil to protect her child. It’s this history where the story of her evil would be born, morphing into something more fiction than fact. It would be a reputation she, as a good woman, bore quietly, all in the name of preserving the conservative family structure, and in that way, we would be meant to empathize with and maybe even (eventually) forgive her.
It’s the same rationale we saw in WandaVision and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), where the grief Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) had for her lost lover and children was what propelled her to commit evil. She is circumstantially evil, and her “sins” are ultimately balanced out with a heroic enough sacrifice.
And yet, that’s not what happened in Agatha All Along. Her murderous rampage picks up after Nicholas’s death, not before.
On their murderous adventure together, Agatha and Billy invented the song The Ballad of the Witches’ Road. It was something that they started to perform while traveling up and down America as part of the con to attract witches so that Agatha could kill.
After Nicholas’s death, The Ballad of the Witches’ Road had solidified as a piece of American folklore, and real witches started to pursue it. That’s when Agatha stepped in, offering guidance as the one witch who claimed to have gotten to the end of the road. It was all a con that Agatha pulled to absorb other witches’ powers (note: she has succubus-like powers that allow her to drain other witches if they attack her). And so, after performing the ballad to summon the Witches’ Road and failing (because it didn’t really exist), she would mock the aspirants until they attacked her.
In Maiden, Mother Crone, we see a chilling montage play as Agatha pulls this con throughout the ages. She has killed generations of witches, and there is no remorse there. Even the heroic sacrifice she makes in the penultimate episode to save the young witch Teen (Joe Locke) from Death isn’t really noble. “By the way,” she lectures Teen after becoming a ghost, “I did not sacrifice myself for you. I took a calculated risk.”
Agatha is not redeemable and does not particularly want to be.
In many ways, this embrace of evil is refreshing. We are still living in the shadow of The Hay’s Code (1934–1968) and The Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters (1952 to 1983), where narratives always had to have a morally clear message when dealing with “evil” characters.
When I think of many classic Disney Villains during the Code, particularly witches, they received unambiguous moral retributions: the Evil Queen (Don Brodie) falls to her death (see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937), Maleficent (Eleanor Audley) is slain by a prince (see Sleeping Beauty, 1959), and so forth. Even after both Codes were done away with, this legacy continued. The sea witch Ursula (Pat Carroll) is impaled by the bow of a ship (see The Little Mermaid, 1989). Voodoo priest Dr. Facilier (Keith David) is dragged to the other side (see Princess and the Frog, 2009).
Disney has started to reckon with this legacy. The Snow Queen Elsa (Idina Menzel) is not killed for plunging the land of Arendelle into snowy darkness (Frozen, 2013), and even the abuela (María Cecilia Botero) in Encanto (201) receives a hug rather than a poetic death. Likewise, the sequel to Hocus Pocus made pains to distinguish between the bad witches of the original film and the good ones who are our protagonists.
It’s refreshing to likewise see that empathy extend to an evil queer like Agatha.
A witchy conclusion
As I wrote in the beginning, Agatha is an evil b!tch. She has always been evil, and we are not meant to think anything differently as the season comes to a close. She sees no problem in sacrificing her own kind to get ahead, and while that makes her despicable, I don’t want to return to the morality of the Hays Code, where all art must end in a certain way to underscore particular values.
Furthermore, there is something beautiful about queerness, not needing to bend itself to modern morality, and on a Disney show, no less.
We were the villains for so long — the serial killers, groomers, and deviants — because it was an archetype thrust upon us. And for a while, there was a concerted effort to only push for “positive” representation to counterbalance that trend. Tropes such as the “depraved bisexual” and the “promiscuous queer” were seen as damaging by some advocates because they were all we could be.
Yet queer people are people, and our media representation should be as diverse as our humanity. We should not just be heroes and sidekicks but killers (see Killing Eve), criminal masterminds (see Mr. Robot), and everything dark under the sun — our humanity centered each step of the way.
For while I would hate Agatha in real life, on the screen, she’s an evil I adore.