Opinion
Agatha & Rio’s Love Story in ‘Agatha All Along’ Is Paving a New Road for the MCU
Agatha All Along is giving the Marvel Cinematic Universe something the 34 movies and more than a dozen television series that came before it never could — the chance to be unabashedly horny for love.
That’s right, kids. Agatha Harkness (the divine Kathryn Hahn) is hot for Rio Vidal (the sublime Aubrey Plaza), and there’s nothing the Salem Seven or the threat of eternal damnation can do about it. But why, you ask, are we so excited about the palpable attraction between Agatha and Rio, who may or may not be Death incarnate? Well, this is a Disney+ series, after all. Forgive us if we didn’t expect the Mouse House and the MCU to give us the sexiest enemies-to-lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers romance of the year.
Yet here we are, basking in the heat of a queer love story like Agatha and Rio that is too often relegated to subtext, especially in big-budget franchise stories, where it is played out in stolen glances and grazed hands. In Agatha’s story, they are the text. Their magnetic pull to each other is actively steering the action as Agatha and her merry band of misfit witches mosey on down the Witches’ Road.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s step back and look at what we know. In the series premiere of the spinoff to 2021’s WandaVision, Rio playfully pays Agatha a visit inside the spell that has forced her to live a small-town life on a loop as punishment for crossing Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen). Once Agatha is freed, Rio blows through her front door and threatens to end the immortal witch’s life with a scythe-shaped knife — only to get distracted from her mission by comments about getting Agatha horizontal (in a grave, mind you) and licking the blood from her hand.
Chuck Zlotnick / Marvel
Rio later shows up on the Witches’ Road after Agatha and her coven lose Mrs. Hart (Debra Jo Rupp), and they summon a green witch to replenish their ranks, literally giving Rio a chance to crawl back into Agatha’s life. Ever since, the two have oscillated between white-hot hatred and goosebump-inducing lust, never willing to give themselves over to each other but also not trying that hard to pretend like it’s not exactly what they want.
We don’t yet know what Agatha and Rio’s love story looked like in the past and why it turned so sour. There have been hints that it has to do with Agatha’s late son, Nicholas Scratch, who is starting to seem like an unintended victim of his mother’s unique ability to reap every ounce of a fellow witch’s power and suck the life out of them in the process. If that is the case and Rio is, in fact, Death, then Agatha’s girlfriend may have had no choice but to claim her son after she killed him — something that really kills the romantic buzz.
All of this gives the traumatizing trek down the Witches’ Road a sultry tension that uses love and its many shades in a way that Marvel never has before, especially with queer love. In most cases, the world-ending stakes and galactic genocide that typically furthers the MCU has relegated moments of love to the sidelines as pay off for being the hero.
That doesn’t mean they haven’t been genuine moments of love along the way. We still sob thinking about Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) dancing in their living room of their happy ending in Avengers: Endgame. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) was never better than when he and his daughter Morgan quantified their love with what would become their tear-jerking goodbye: “I love you 3000.” The subtle and unrequited love story between Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) throughout the franchise remains one of the Avengers’ most heartbreaking sacrifices for the greater good of, quite literally, everyone.
But all of those grand displays of love have been the emotional periods put on stories that had their minds elsewhere.
What Agatha All Along is doing with the notion of love really started in WandaVision, where Wanda’s all-consuming grief for Vision (Paul Bettany) becomes a fight to protect her children, Billy and Tommy, whom she magically manifested from that swirling chasm of love and loss. That series offers what is, perhaps, the MCU’s most poignant moment ever, when Vision dried Wanda’s tears by relaying a universal truth that transcends the multiverse: “What is grief if not love preserving?”
Carried through to Agatha’s story, the audience now gets to live each episode with the increasingly complicated tendrils of Agatha and Rio’s romantic history as they resist and give in to each other in equal measure. We are treated to the overt ways in which two women who have countless centuries between them would show their affection. A kiss isn’t strong enough. Instead, Rio is ready to fight the ghost of Agatha’s venomous mother Evanora to protect her. Agatha, in turn, can’t help but embrace Rio after she admits that in all the lifetimes she has lived, her past with Agatha is her “scar.”
Yet, perhaps most consequential for the series as a whole is how their aching romance is peeling back the layers of Agatha, a witch who has spent an eternity making herself unknowable as a form of protection. She’s a witch who does not relinquish control willingly, but she has no choice but to succumb to her emotions in the presence of what seems to be her great love.
Agatha All Along makes the case that love is more powerful than any spell, superpower, or galactic predestination. And while Agatha, Rio, and their coven occupy a very niche corner of the MCU, it is a lesson that could benefit every facet of this franchise’s future.
As the lyrics to “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” muse, “The road is there and so I dare to risk this heart of mine.” Agatha Harkness is coming undone by that risk with Rio in real time. If love can do that to this witch, imagine what it can do to everyone else.
Agatha All Along, Wednesdays, Disney+
