Agatha All Along Just Gave Us a Saw-Meets-Beaches Mashup

The third episode of Marvel’s latest Disney+ series presents our first trial of the Witches’ Road—with unexpected results, to say the least.

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And we’re off: now that Agatha has awakened from the Mare of Easttown-inspired spell she was under, formed a coven, and successfully landed on the Witches’ Road, the latest episode of Agatha All Along finds our heroes traversing their first “trial”—a gauntlet of tests we discover are tailored specifically to the fears and anxieties of those who participate. After two very different opening episodes, in episode three—titled “Through Many Miles of Tricks and Trials”—we finally get to see what the series plans to be going forward. For all its pop culture and witchcraft set dressing, that appears to be an homage to the two Escape Room survival horror movies from five years ago. We weren’t expecting that, either.  As our episode begins, the larger coven learn a spell has been put on Teen to shield his identity from witches. As Madame Calderu opines, “it looks like someone put a sigil on you…” While anyone with a fleeting interest in witchcraft knows a sigil is a tailor-made symbolic representation of its caster’s desired outcome, it apparently has a whole other meaning in the MCU. Teen, a self-taught expert in witchcraft and Agatha’s biggest fan, asks the group, “A sigil is a spell?” Alice replies, “A sigil is a redaction spell that hides something.” Since the word “sigil” derives from the Latin “sigillum,” meaning “seal,” I suppose that’s where they got the idea, so we’ll just go with it. While this is happening, Sharon/Mrs. Hart wanders off and her handbag from Talbots is sucked into a bog. As the lyrics to the “The Ballad of the Witches Road” state “do not stray from the road,” and Agatha reminds the group there’s nowhere to go but forward. It’s here the path takes them to a beach house straight from a coastal grandmother vision board, with a front door emblazoned with a full moon, suggesting the tide will be coming in soon. As they head inside, the character’s outfits suddenly morph into Diane Keaton-inspired ensembles from Something’s Gotta Give, replete with white turtleneck sweaters and salmon-colored slacks. Teen finds a welcome card confirming the group is now in the thick of their first trial—and there’s a riddle: “My age has value, I’m no fun alone, I mess with your mind, my tricks are well known.” Sharon/Mrs. Hart unpacks this to mean “wine,” and discovers a nearby bottle of red surrounded by five glasses—one for each, excepting the underage Teen. Apparently, this ancient occult trial still respects 20th century drinking laws.  While searching for a corkscrew, Jennifer Kale warns Teen not to trust Agatha as she “traded her child for the Book of Damned” and poor Nicholas Scratch may now be working as “an agent of Mephisto.” Alice additionally reveals she has a tattoo serving as a ward against evil that her rock star mother, Lorna, made her get. We’ll have to wait for another episode to learn more about that, though, since upon imbibing, the group’s faces explode into exaggerated parodies of botox recipients. All except Agatha’s, naturally, who did not drink the wine herself. Jennifer deduces they’ve been poisoned by “Alewife’s Revenge,” and are doomed if they do not find an antidote—which, by no coincidence, happens to be her specialty. It’s at this point in the episode the Escape Room/Escape Room: Tournament of Champions comparisons really begin to shine as the coven essentially embark on a scavenger hunt around the house to find the ingredients necessary for their potion. Naturally, knowledge of middle school-level science comes into play, as the seemingly outrageous elements they’ll need are in fact everyday household items. For the antidote to work, Jennifer will need frankincense, eye of newt, “the gut of a eusocial insect,” and “the corpse of something that’s been decaying for at least 30 million years.” Agatha reasons petroleum jelly would qualify for the latter, while “eye of newt” is also known as mustard seed. It’s also reasoned honey would be a perfectly acceptable alternative for insect gut, and Teen finds the frankincense, but doesn’t reveal where or how (a perfume, maybe?). As the group searches the house, each are met with disturbing spectral entities from their pasts. Calderu meets up with a woman in Regency-era attire flanked by the Grim Reaper, Jennifer a mid-century doctor who calls her an “inconvenient woman” and tries to drown her, and Alice her own mother who says “I can’t protect you” and possibly attempts to set her on fire. Naturally, they all escape as these are hooks for future episodes. Agatha, too, receives a vision of her son crying in his crib, only to discover he’s been swapped out for the Darkhold like a changeling. However, the tide has come in and is now breaching the windows of the beach house, so the witches must throw all their potion ingredients into an industrial-sized sink, quickly. They hit a snag though, upon realizing the water needs to boil, too. Thinking quickly, Teen uncovers a sous vide, a fancy kitchen tool for cooking meat evenly, and is told to stir the brew counterclockwise, which must be explained to him. Finally, everyone must add a strand of their own hair to the pot. However, the concoction is not turning cerulean blue, meaning Jennifer has forgotten the final ingredient. Turns out, they need the untainted blood of someone who did not drink the poisoned wine, and luckily, Teen has got them covered. The group manages to drink the potion in the nick of time, barring Sharon/Mrs. Hart, who succumbs—presumably allowing Debra Jo Rupp to fulfill her contractural duties to That ’90s Show. In a nod to Hansel and Gretel, the door to the kitchen oven opens, forming an exit from the first trial and into the second. They’re not fast enough, though, and the ocean water finally shatters the windows of the house, sweeping the coven through the stove doorway and down a water slide, in a clear but not-very-witchy homage to the water slide scene in Goonies. Down one member, the coven steel themselves for their next adventure as “Heads Will Roll” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs leads us into the end credits. For all the discussion of witchcraft and witch-related media the series has been hyped to focus on, it seems (if this episode does indeed confirm where we’re heading from here on out) this was all a ruse to revisit the tropes of the Saw and Cube franchises with additional comedic leanings. As a fan of the Saw, Cube, Meander, Escape Room, etc. genre of film in which disparate characters are forced to solve puzzles together while being picked off one by one, I’m not disappointed in this development, but it certainly feels like a bait-and-switch. The episode’s rom com-inspired beachfront  setting is also perplexing, as it’s meant to evoke Desperate Housewives instead of, you know, the seaside witch media promised. Instead of The Witch Who Came From the Sea or Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, this latest installment takes its cues from Mamma Mia! and Mermaids. Honestly though, if the entire series turns out to have been a roundabout justification for Cube-meets-Beaches, I really can’t be too upset. All things considered, I’m curious to see where we end up next week. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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Maximum effort, indeed.
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