Having escaped last week’s deadly beach house, our episode—the fourth entry in Agatha All Along, titled “If I Can’t Teach You/Let My Song Reach You”—begins with Agatha and company pausing along the Witches’ Road and studying the blue-tinged corpse of Sharon/Mrs. Hart.
Naturally, this prompts our heroes to discuss death—both Sharon’s (confirming she is indeed truly, most sincerely dead following the poisoned wine debacle of episode three) and Alice’s mother Lorna’s, previously said to have “died on the road.” Not the Witches’ Road, we learn, but “on tour” in a hotel fire. Though this information comes as a shock to the members of the coven, it was previously stated Lorna authored the greatest-selling rock single of all time chronicling the very life-or-death adventure they’ve embarked on, so how this factoid fell into cultural obscurity makes no sense. According to Alice, her mother told her “the Road would save” her, prompting Jennifer to ask, “from what?” As you may have guessed, today’s episode will be an Alice-centric one.
As this moment, Agatha blithely waves her coat around, attempting to get the rest of her coven’s minds off the doom and gloom of their fallen comrade while displaying the same sense of misunderstood sociopathy as Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor. “What’s the problem now?” she asks the group. “A woman is dead,” answers Calderu. Exasperated, Agatha replies, “Yes, and Alice and Teen are kindly digging a grave for her,” before suggesting they “catch up” to current events. Dismissing the late Mrs. Hart as a “bad draft pick,” the coven protest they need a new Green Witch to replace her, prompting an argument over the lyrics of “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” and whether they need a full roster to continue forward. As we’re reminded Alice’s mother wrote “the most popular version of the ballad” (ie, 40 million copies sold worldwide, the equivalent of the Eagles’ greatest hits collection), her expertise is deferred to: “We shouldn’t go forward. Not without a replacement Green Witch.”
Enraged, Teen interjects “people can’t be replaced,” suggesting Sharon’s death was “everybody’s fault. We were supposed to look out for each other, but we didn’t. That was our fatal mistake.” “Fatal for Ms. Hart,” Agatha corrects, and I have to agree with her. The group attempted to save her life without any sort of skullduggery or subterfuge (after the fact, anyway) so his outrage seems misplaced. Agatha suggests summoning a back up Green Witch, leading to a ritual in which each member of the coven makes a personal request for their ideal replacement, similar to the “Perfect Nanny” number in Mary Poppins. Jennifer hopes she’s hot, Alice wants her to bring Advil, and Agatha merely asks she’s “not annoying” or “super political.” Thus, the new Green Witch is born from the Earth itself, and by gum, it’s Aubrey Plaza’s character, Rio Vidal!
Though Agatha is displeased by the reveal, the rest of the group continually hem and haw over how sexy and frightening and cool she is as the road leads them back to the exact same house from the previous episode (Disney+ keeps raising its subscription fee for what, again?).
Upon entering, the coven is welcomed to the redecorated set—now a ’70s-inspired recording studio—each in their own bespoke outfits. Agatha enjoys her own plunging neckline gown, Calderu gets Liza Minnelli’s haircut, Jennifer takes a page from disco diva Amii Stewart’s wardrobe, Teen looks like Marc Bolan from T. Rex, Alice wears the same outfit as her rock star mother, and Rio looks like a member of Marc and the Mambas, or something. Returning to the scavenger hunt escapades of the previous episode, the gang split up and search for clues. Calderu is spooked by stained glass windows depicting various historical witch-killings and Jennifer is unnerved by a wall of Japanese masks. Amid the search, Alice reveals her mother fell on such hard times, she had to sell her catalog of songs in order to keep her house. However, this moment is undercut when Teen spots a record with the attached note, “play me,” which imprints a curse on our crew by spinning backwards. As it happens, Alice’s generational trauma has spread to the other witches as a scorching burn mark on their shoulders. The only corrective, it’s reasoned, is to form a rock band and perform “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road.” I mean, why not, right?
Teen takes up the guitar, Jennifer’s on bass, Rio plays drums, Calderu finds some zils (which somehow turn into a pair of maracas between shots), and Agatha sings while Alice carries them on piano. The performance invokes the ire of the “curse” manifest, revealed in physical form to be a harpy-like ghoul. By simply playing the song, the demon is dispelled as we discover Alice’s mother wrote the song as a protection spell for her daughter, who I suppose was so Gen X she renounced her natural talents as a performer due to the stigma of being a “nepo-baby,” or something. Honestly, it all feels a bit undercooked—a word that springs immediately to mind since this is the “fire” trial, opposite last week’s “water” ordeal. Presumably, we can expect “earth” and “air” traps using the same set in the coming weeks.
While Mrs. Hart was the casualty of the first trial, it appears Teen rocked too hard and now lies comatose. Waiting for him to recover, Jennifer reveals she was formerly a midwife who became stripped of her magic following an invitation to the Obstetrics Association of Greater Boston, but does not elaborate further. Calderu opines that though they hated each other at first, the coven has since become great friends through the course of the episode—between scenes, presumably. Teen awakens from his spell once the exposition is finished.
Immediately upon awakening and apropos of nothing in particular, he asks Agatha if she was the one who cast the sigil upon him, but due to the nature of the spell, she’d be unable to remember whether she did or not. Returning to the group, Agatha and Rio share scars in an homage to Jaws (since sharks are a type of witch, too, when you think about it… always moving from one thing to the next… ). Much like Matt Hooper stating his heart was broken by Mary Ellen Moffat, Rio suggests her greatest scar accrued when she “had to do something” she “didn’t want to” to someone she loved, heavily implying her mysterious betrayal to Agatha. In an odd final scene, the pair head off into the woods to reconcile, but Rio spoils the moment by telling Agatha “that boy isn’t yours.”
So, that was episode four. I suppose we can expect another vaguely witch-inspired trial next week, too? I’m still not sure how to feel about Agatha All Along. While the cast is perfectly entertaining and most of the humor lands, the story itself feels so unrealized it’s difficult to get particularly invested. I was actually disappointed the episode didn’t end with another casualty, which would have at least raised the stakes. Since Jennifer and Alice have already had their showcase episodes, I hope the series finds more interesting things to with them besides being two separate shades of snarky. Honestly, Alice biting it immediately after finally coming to terms with her mother’s death in a hotel fire 40 years ago would’ve at least had that “oh, shit!” quality that made Lost so exciting before we realized it wasn’t heading anywhere particular. We’ll just have to wait and see where this nine-episode limited series ends up. Four down, five to go.
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