A cruel irony occurred to me while watching Agatha All Along. One involving comics, comic adaptations and a bit of history from when I first got into reading comics. So if you might indulge me for a moment (and you might) let us go back to the year 2000 and the first X-Men movie.

When the first wave of Marvel movies came out, Marvel Comics were incredibly insular. Despite the first X-Men and Spider-Man movies being blockbusters, there was no corresponding boost in comic sales. This was because any aspiring reader asking for a good entry point into the X-Men comics would be looking at an investment of several hundred dollars. And forget about finding a good Blade trade paperback, as this was just before trade paperback collections of historic runs became commonplace.

Today, the reverse is true. Marvel Comics renumbers and restarts its core titles on a regular basis, usually whenever a new creative team takes over. While this plays merry hell with librarians trying to keep straight just which Captain Marvel Vol. 1 TP they need to order, it does make it easy for new readers (kids in particular) to find a place to start. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, by contrast, has become the dragon eating its own tail. You can’t just watch an MCU movie or show. You have to watch all of them to understand just what is going on.

That brings us back to Agatha All Along, which is the embodiment of everything wrong with the post-Endgame MCU.

Agatha All Along builds off of the events of Wandavision and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Our central character, Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn), is a wicked witch, who was condemned to a mundane life in the suburbs after crossing Wanda Maximoff. However, with Wanda’s recent death, the spell clouding Agatha’s mind has become unstable. This apparently leads to her terrifying her neighbors, even as she acts out the role of Agnes: an embittered detective trying to solve a murder despite FBI interference and her own prickly personality.

Her memory is restored thanks to a magic-wielding burglar with his own identity crisis (Joe Locke). Unfortunately, Agatha has still lost her magical mojo and a lot of her old enemies are out for revenge. This leaves Agatha and her new Teen sidekick hitting the road to find other practitioners desperate enough to join them on a journey that will either give them power or get them killed.

Agatha All Along takes a while to get moving. Indeed, half of the first episode is devoted to Agatha’s life before she wakes up. It is also taken as-read that the audience has already seen Wandavision, explaining Agatha’s sudden shift through several forms as she tries to reveal her true self amid all the incarnations of Agnes, the wacky next-door neighbor.

This is one example of the show’s relatively weak writing. While it is unlikely anyone is jumping into Agatha All Along just because of the spooky title card on the Disney+ menu, a little more effort could have made it stand on its own. Again, we have that requirement, as in the old Marvel Comics, that you already be in the know before you can come in and enjoy the party.

Another problem in Agatha All Along and MCU Phase 4 in general is the dependence on coincidence. It is sheer dumb luck that Agatha is freed from her mind wipe just before the Salem Seven come looking for her in a powerless state. It is just dumb that she is able to talk rival witch Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) into giving her time to regain her powers, so she can have the satisfaction of beating Agatha Harkness at her best.

The one thing that makes Agatha All Along work is the same thing that led to a character like Agatha Harkness getting her own MCU spin-off series in the first place – the cast. Kathryn Hahn is a great actress who enriches anything she appears in and she sells a lot of the stupid writing, which has no justification beyond “it’s magic, we don’t need to explain it.”. Joe Locke has great wit as the sarcastic Teen. And Aubrey Plaza threatens to steal the show the same way Kathryn Hahn stole Wandavision.

Agatha All Along is not a bad show. It is, however, symptomatic of how inaccessible and dependent on star power over writing the MCU has become in recent years. Fans of the setting and the actors involved will likely love it. More general audiences, however, will be confused.