Long-Term Lesbian Relationships: A TV Roundup
Featuring my profound feelings about "Agatha All Along"
On a recent Friday night, I went to a lesbian bar with a lesbian friend, and I was determined not to talk about Agatha All Along, because I am embarrassed by how much I have over the course of this month brought up Agatha All Along to coworkers and friends and even my mentally unstable aunt. It turns out my friend was wearing purple, which I may have taken as a sign. One second, we were discussing proper things like Lysistrata and the Bakkhai and then suddenly there we were: furiously gushing about Kathryn Hahn and Aubrey Plaza, whom we compared to goddesses, and how much we hated the finale. We were eager to reassure each other that this was a confusing situation for both of us. Not soon after, another friend was hit with a similar affliction. The term she used was “hyper fixation,” and like me she had watched the entire show twice in a row.
What exactly has magnetically drawn us all to Agatha All Along, Agatha Harkness, the Green Witch Rio Vidal, their stupid sexual tension, etc.? I’ve wondered which psychological trauma or arrested development I might be processing by diving back into the outer-rim territory of lesbian message boards and Tumblr. My friend said she needed some time to think about it. What follows is me thinking about it. Spoilers below.
[Quickly, just in case: Agatha All Along is the comedy-horror spin-off of another Marvel spin-off, Wanda Vision, which was the show about the Scarlet Witch, Wanda Maximoff, grieving her robot husband, Vision. Agatha All Along focuses on Wanda Vision’s villain, the centuries-old witch Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn). Agatha has been trapped in Wanda’s spell, stripped of her magic, and winds up recruiting a small coven of disempowered witches to go on a perilous quest and regain their powers. The show is an obvious allegory for the later stages of a woman’s life, but it manages to transcend corny messaging in a very inventive spin on the evergreen 1939 The Wizard of Oz. In fact, Agatha All Along felt far closer to the Wizard of Oz than the brand-new Wicked movie, no further comment.]
When at its best, Agatha All Along goes against the grain of what Marvel has been diligently cultivating: made on the cheap with a middle-aged female cast (the median age of which is 57), much of its success comes from the bravura of its performances, in particular Kathryn Hahn’s, who seems to be having more fun than any actor I’ve ever seen in any Marvel product ever. The lovingly made special effects—puppeteering, hand-built models, dancers, fog machines—feel intentionally quaint and fun, and impart physicality and inventiveness to the jewel-toned production, which gestures at Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches, and Suspiria, and maybe a little bit of The Neverending Story. And for all its pointing at Oz, midcentury Americana and horror tropes, the show’s underlying Romanticism (in the cultural sense)—with its dark forests and moonlit nights and sexually charged danger—resembles something out of German poetry and Lied, with echoes of those nightmarishly punitive Grimm’s fairy tales.
Like in the best fairy tales and romantic poems, the show is preoccupied with death, loss, danger, and delirium. Trapped without her powers (her “purple”), Agatha Harkness is stuck in her own psychotic self-hypnosis, which, it so happens, resembles HBO’s self-serious Mare of Easttown—only now it’s called Agnes of Westview. Personally, that really cracked me up. Agnes/Agatha is a gritty small-town detective on a cold case, and into this fantasy Agatha manages to project her own ex-girlfriend (Aubrey Plaza) as an inexplicably hot, finger-wagging rival FBI agent with a just slightly too-unbuttoned shirt and erotic-thriller-like lines that go like “…if you wanna be in control, you can be.”
At that point we’re probably less than fifteen minutes into the pilot episode, there is no backstory or explanation, but it’s basically the most insinuating scenario I have ever seen on television. It’s like the preamble to when Gentleman Jack goes to visit her ex (remember that show?), or that time The L-Word’s Bette and Tina get stuck in that elevator, or Alex and Piper in the prison chapel in Orange is the New Black. Except because it’s a Marvel show, we don’t actually see any of it, and yet because of Hahn and Plaza’s chemistry the insinuation is still really there, and I suspect this is the reason why within two weeks Agatha All Along mushroomed from zero to 2,000+ fan fiction stories listed on Ao3, several of which have exceeded novel length.
This bratty ex-girlfriend—whom we later know as the “Green Witch” Rio Vidal—helps Agatha claw herself out of her crusty realist cop fantasyland and into the real world, which is populated by witches and superheroes. What happens next should clearly be a sex scene, because of all that detective-themed foreplay. But because it’s a Marvel show, all we get is a fight scene. Which is even crazier because Agatha is fully naked throughout, except for a thin bathrobe, and Rio cuts, teases, and terrorizes Agatha but also professes her undying love and licks blood from Agatha’s hand (??). At that point, Agatha All Along had shockingly surpassed the Killing Eve madness from several years ago, and my brain had fully broken.
I will confidently say that Agatha and Rio are the most successful ingredient of Agatha All Along. It’s the reason I watched it, it’s what has got the show populating all over lesbian social media and meme-accounts, also because it happens to be, historically, the first Marvel product to showcase a kiss between two women. And maybe it’s the fact that they are played by two inordinately beloved character actresses, but I was struck by how familiar Agatha and Rio felt, as if I had seen them together before and knew exactly who they were. Really however the information sketched out about Agatha and Rio is painfully vague. All we know is based on inflections in the actor’s performances and little snippets doled out here and there. For instance, we know Agatha and Rio are not over each other because of the equal amounts of glaring, furtive glancing, blushing, sighing, and bickering. Also:
Agatha scoffs that she knows exactly how many scars Rio has on her body (none)
Rio says she very much does have a scar (the scar is Agatha) </3
But when and how these two witches fell in love and why they ever only romanced each other for over 400 years is not clarified. What we do know is: Agatha, a certified meanie, grows her powers by absorbing other witches’ life force. She has done this so often over so many centuries that she’s the most powerful witch in the world as well as a noted serial killer. Rio’s power meanwhile is that she is literally Death. That sounds like a New Yorker cartoon, and I don’t fully understand the theology of the Marvel Multiverse and what literally “being Death” could possibly mean, but it explains why Death/Rio is so (in the showrunner’s words) “enthusiastic about Agatha’s career.” And despite being totally beholden to Agatha, Rio is the one rare character who poses a threat to her—as the grim reaper, Rio really would like to collect Agatha for the afterlife but because she’s such a softie and likes terrorizing Agatha so much, she somehow won’t.
This whole “Death is a Beautiful Woman”-idea is not just Schubertian (because this is a lesbian relationship, death is not only the maiden; death literally is the ultimate erotic fantasy. In that vein, Rio also kept reminding me of the witch Lorelei in Schumann’s Waldgespräch) it’s fairy tale cruel. The writers gently tease the knife lodged within Agatha and Rio’s backstory and so, gradually, we understand their break up. Back in the 18th century, Agatha had a son, and Rio took him. For most of the show, the backstory of Rio taking Agatha’s son is only hinted at, and it was all I really needed to know to satisfyingly illustrate the depth of the relationship and its anguished core, a powerful idea because it laces Agatha and Rio with the most unbearable real-life tragedy—the death of a child—while also keeping a supernatural nuance (taking the son is the Green Witch’s job; she even announces that it was a job she did not want to do, in the most sulky brat tone Aubrey Plaza can manage). But the show’s final episode twists the knife a little further, in a very Brothers Grimm way: it turns out that Rio was supposed to take Agatha’s son at birth, but because Agatha threatens to hate Rio for forever, Rio bends her own rules and grants Agatha and her child six years. Six years go by, Agatha absolutely loves her son, and then one night Rio reappears and blithely guides the boy into the afterlife.[1] Agatha viciously shuns Rio from that moment on, and only briefly warms up to her throughout a short stretch of the series, during which she assumes Rio may have brought her son back. It’s Rio who gently quenches Agatha’s hope, and in return she suffers another rebuttal. Their rift, a fundamental disagreement about universal laws, exceeds their control while also seeming like the most base and unfair of relationship misunderstandings.
What makes all of this so heartbreaking and also funny are the performances of Hahn and Plaza, who oscillate between baffling earnestness and slapstick. Plaza, who is not exactly the most versatile actor, hit a tonal gold-mine with Rio: there’s Plaza’s brand deadpan and gleeful sadism, but because she keeps hitting the wall of Agatha’s grief, the rejection imbues Rio with genuine melancholy, even desperation. When in the finale Agatha finally gives in and melts away in Rio’s orgasmic kiss of death, it comes as a Wagnerian kind of relief, a Liebestod liberation. So much yearning!!! Who knew Marvel could do that!!
And honestly, Marvel did not do that. They busied the final episodes of the show up with such an overfill of threading needles and placing puzzle pieces for other products, Agatha All Along winds up feeling more like a checklist than a satisfying series. Show runner Jac Schaffer mentioned a surprise at how audiences were “in love and in lust” with Agatha and Rio, which is exactly how I feel, so I find it extremely irritating that the writers did not anticipate the unfolding of a quality they themselves put in place. Luckily there is the absolute abyss of fandom creativity to fill the void. Given just the right amount of negative information, not to mention the various scenarios in which we get to see the characters—from prestige TV-detective pastiche to 18th century garbs—it’s like a collective imagination has erupted in flames. Fans have come up with the “Agathario song” (Silver Springs by Fleetwood Mac, which apparently inspired the show’s writers); they have developed their own “head canon” (that Agatha and Rio were 18th-century homemakers) and insist that Rio is Agatha’s child’s magical “father.” Both fan theories were almost instantly sanctioned by the show runner and writers, who publicly confirmed casting a child actor to resemble Aubrey Plaza.
Obviously the whole pregnancy-between-two-witches thing really gets me. Agatha All Along dabbles in a lot of botanical symbolism, and the general gist is that Agatha’s son came “from nature” (the Green Witch’s zone), that he is a dandelion seed, and that he was “made from scratch” (his comic-book name is Nicholas Scratch)—and so we go from toxic exes to the other most fundamental of lesbian of fever dreams: to conceive and gestate a baby solely among women.
Agatha All Along left me feeling how I assume Agatha might feel about Rio: drained and irritated but also filled with respect and, uhm, love. I never wanted to see it again and I also immediately did see it again. And I am deeply grateful there won’t be an Agatha All Along sequel. The weekend the finale aired, I felt such an alarming annoyance that I called a friend, a seasoned expert in Marvel comic books and movies. My friend has seen me through several superhero obsessions (including the Johnny To Heroic Trio movies). He assured me that as a rule, Marvel season finales tend to suck. That made me feel better. A few days later, Alice and I queued up Kathryn Hahn in the oddball HBO comedy Mrs Fletcher, which thankfully felt like another iteration of Agatha All Along, if only missing a certain Green Witch.
A similar long-term relationship between supernatural women played by middle-aged actresses can be found in Amazon’s Wheel of Time, where Rosamund Pike and Sophie Okonedo play Moiraine Damodred and Siuan Sanche, two Aes Sedai (witches and high priestesses rolled into one) who are in a hot secret century-spanning long-distance-relationship. I have a real soft spot for Wheel of Time, and how its characters are constantly taking baths in enormous tubs. In terms of breadth and depth, Moiraine and Siuan receive a lot more storytelling than Agatha and Rio ever will, and they are thoroughly disarming as secret wives—though by the next season, I expect Moiraine and Siuan too to be exes.
This spring, Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough played ex-girlfriends in real-crime drama prestige TV Under the Bridge. I loved the tone and striking landscape of the show, which is set in British Columbia, but it also felt weirdly perverse (not the good kind of perverse). The heat of the actors’ chemistry, the dank and delightful atmospheric tension, and the series’ preoccupation with hyper-nuanced storytelling did not gel for me—the true crime at its center, about a first-generation immigrant girl who was beaten to death by her classmates, is simply too grueling. I kept thinking about how much I rather would have seen Gladstone and Keough’s pairing in wholly different show—one about a totally made-up murder or supernatural mystery.
Under the Bridge ran almost parallel with the hammy recent season of True Detective, starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, and both shows’ politics seemed accidentally identical: on the one hand, trying to spotlight racism and injustice faced by Native Americans while also harvesting atrocities for the show’s narrative benefit. It’s creepy, and I watched all of it, but I also noticed how this kind of pseudo-political angle makes me feel like I can’t take anything seriously anymore.
To counterpoint Under the Bridge’s remote location, I much preferred the extremely silly 2023 Australian detective-comedy series Deadloch, a show that proposes the Tasmanian coast as a kind of lesbian paradise and features a lesbian detective, her veterinarian wife, and a cohort of extremely lesbian dilemmas mixed with macabre mystery. Somehow I felt like I had never seen anything so funny and endearing. Deadloch came recommended to me by a very dear straight friend, and I was struck by how it seemed like the most lesbian show since Orange is the New Black, and yet somehow my lesbian media world had missed it completely.
For myself, I think the sour aftertaste of Under the Bridge and True Detective really illuminates the quality of Agatha All Along—or maybe more the power of fantasy and fairy tales for processing grief and trauma, and how far inventiveness and ideas can go in expressing complicated emotional nuances.
And that’s that. I hope I can move on with my life now. Thank you for reading!
PS: Alice’s holiday ceramics sale will take place at Grimm Artisanal Ales in Bushwick on December 15, 12PM-6PM! This year, Alice and I have been working on a special collaboration—Alice has allowed me to paint the underglaze on her charming mugs and bowls. It’s very exciting! We hope to see you there!
[1] The whole set-up reminded me of the most gruesome poem from German romanticism, the Erlkönig, which resulted in the probably greatest song of the 19th century Lied tradition, in which a singer must impersonate a narrator and three characters: a father, riding his dying child to safety, the terrified child, and the mysterious and gleeful supernatural entity Erlkönig, who seduces the child into death.