"Agatha All Along": Gay teen and witch trapped in a bad-tv show world. With bonus nekkid guys

 

Link to the nude photos

Agatha All Along appeared without warning on my Disney Plus page, showing two elderly women and a teenager on a dark wilderness road.  The teenager is Joe Locke, who played a gay character in Heartstopper, and came out in real life twice, at age 12 and 15, so no doubt he plays a gay character here.  I'm not even going to bother with preliminary research.

Scene 1: An elderly woman, maybe Agatha, driving to a crime scene: she's a small town cop suspended for punching a suspect,  but called back for a case only she can work on -- a woman has been found dead in the woods.  Why is it always a woman, never a man?  

Crushed by a heavy object, no id except for one of those old library check-out cards. 

Scene 2: Wait -- her name is Agnes, not Agatha, so who is "all along"?  

She goes to the library, where there's a long line to check out books. Have you been to a library lately?   She cuts -- "Only suckers wait their turn" -- to ask the sarcastic librarian Miss Jones about the check-out card found on the victim.

Miss Jones: "Ooh, is she dead?"

Agnes: "Why do you assume it was a woman?"  Because it's always a woman, nitwit.

Miss Jones: "It's more tit-ilating." Boob joke, har har.

They don't use old-fashioned check-out cards anymore.  The book -- Dialogue and Rhetoric: Known History of Learning & Debate, was marked stolen three years ago.  But there are lots of other copies in Natural Sciences.  Not in English?.

Agnes hits the stacks, and there were indeed a dozen copies -- all burnt up. "There was a fire," a mysterious man whispers.  Odd that Miss Jones didn't know that.

Scene 3: At the station, the Chief is played by David Lengel, who looks like Ross from Friends with a porn stash.  

The body shows traces of "a particular microbial sediment found only in Eastern Europe."  That makes no sense.  The woman was killed across the ocean and transported to their quiet New England town. 

Scene 4: In other news, Agnes has to work with the snarky Federal Agent Vidal, whom she hates.  To be fair, Agnes hates everyone.  They may be ex-lovers: Agnes thinks that she requested the assignment just so they could get back together.

Ex-Lover notes that there are no drag marks on the soil, nothing disturbed: the body just got zapped there, as if by magic! 

Agnes scoffs. "In stories about small-town murders, it's always about the hidden secrets of the townsfolk, so let's investigate those."

Scene 5: Norm the pawn shop guy,  played by Asif Ali,  is examining a cameo locket that Agnes brought in: New England, late 17th century, with a lock of hair inside.  He offers $200. 

She just wanted an expert opinion so she could sell it on ebay, har har.  Agnes is rather a jerk, isn't she?

Scene 6: Late at night, Agnes is fiddling around at the station.  She discovers that the first letters of the book's title spell DARKH.   So?

Later, in her huge "TV middle class" house, Agnes goes into a child's bedroom with a teddy bear on the bed and drawings on the table, and music awards: "Nicholas Scratch, First Place." Dead kid?  But Nick and Scratch are both names for the Devil.

Scene 7: Knock on the door: It's the Ex-Girlfriend, with pizza!  Isn't it, like, the middle of the night?

Agnes has a lead: car crash in the town of Eastview an hour before the body was found. Ex-Girlfriend wants to know if she's ever been to Eastview.  "Sure, I'm a world traveler."  Wait...it dawns on Agnes that she's never actually left town.  How is that possible?  

Next Ex-Girlfriend asks "Do you remember why you hate me?"  "No."  It's like it was written into the script, with no back story.  Something is wrong here.

They're interrupted by a clattering -- an intruder in her bedroom, going through her stuff!  She chases him out onto the roof, down a gutter, and through the deserted streets, until Debra Jo Rupp, Grandma Kitty on That 90s Show, accidentally hits him.

Scene 8: The perp is a teenager, played by Joe Locke.  He's sarcastic and insulting, leading Agnes to kick him -- that's what got you suspended, Girl.  Finally he admits that he broke in to look for the Road. 

Agnes thinks he means the road to the murder site, so he's a suspect!  "What you were doing last night between 1 and 3 am?"  "Asleep in bed." "Loser!"  Wait -- being asleep in the middle of the night makes you a loser? 

She pulls out pictures of the murdered woman to confront him with, but suddenly they turn into pictures of flowers on someone's front lawn!   He starts chanting in Latin....and now her Ex-Girlfriend has vanished!  There never was a murder, so of course she would not have been called in.

Scene 9: Agnes visits the coroner's office  -- no body.  Until one appears, with a check-out card instead of a toe-tag, and the last person who checked the book out was Wanda Maximoff!  Agnes is shocked!

Who the heck is Wanda Maximoff?  Answers and nekkid men after the break

Wandavision: More Sitcom than Science Fiction

 For months, Netflix has been a wasteland, mostly a lot of  "dead girl in a small town" cop shows and "poor boy and rich girl fall in love" Korean melodramas.  So we have pulled the plug and switched to Disney Plus, which allows us to finally see what all the fuss is about with Wandavision.

The series has been showing up on my Twitter and Facebook feeds a lot: "The staggering surprise of the last episode!": "Wasn't the last episode the best thing you ever saw?"; "Fifteen top theories about the new Disney Plus hit!"  But what was it?  I figured the video blog of Wanda from Corner Gas.

I started watching with only minimal research, enough to determine that Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olson) and Vision (Paul Bettany) are superheroes in the Marvel Universe who are dating or married to each other.  So, if she was dating The Incredible Hulk, would the show be called Wandahulk?

In the first two episodes, they seem to be the stars of an archetypal early 1960s black-and-white sitcom with a "my secret identity" premise: Vision is a robot, and Wanda has magical powers.  Plotlines are about what you'd expect from old sitcoms, although you'll have to grow up with them to get all the references.

Episode #1: The living room is from The Dick Van Dyke Show, and the kitchen from I Love Lucy.  Vision has a job at an amorphous company that doesn't produce or sell anything, like sitcom dads of the era.  There's a wacky next door neighbor.  The plot: Wanda thinks that the "special night" is their anniversary, but it's actually dinner with the boss and his wife.

Episode #2: The living-dining room, front yard, and opening credits are from Bewitched.  The plot: Wanda and Vision are set to perform at a talent show to benefit the local elementary school, but Vision is incapacitated by eating chewing gum (apparently he can't eat, although, as Isaac Asimov pointed out in I, Robot, food is a part of so many social occasions that any robot designed to interact with humans should have the capability).

Of course, Wandavision is not a complete clone of these shows.  The friends and neighbors are racially diverse without comment; for instance, Vision's coworker Norm is played by Asif Ali (below), and future episodes will feature Special Agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park, left).  There were no black or Asian characters on early 1960s sitcoms, except for a very few episodes about them.  

There also seem to be more jokes about sex than appeared in the uptight sixties.    

And there  are occasional hints that something is wrong.  

1. Wanda and Vision don't want to say where they came from, how long they've lived in Westview, or how long they've been married.  I wasn't sure if they were trying to avoid being outed as superheroes, or they really didn't know.  Maybe they can't remember anything before the "series" began, like the residents of Storybrook in Once Upon a Time.

2. At dinner, the boss starts choking on a piece of food, and his wife laughs and tells him to "Stop it" over and over.  An inappropriate affect.

3. People keep announcing that the talent show is a benefit "for the children," and everyone repeats "for the children" in a robotic drone.

4. In the second episode, red objects occasionally appear in the black-and-white world, and then suddenly everything switches to color.

5. Wanda asks a new acquaintance her name, and she doesn't know.

I would prefer more hints.  Most of each episode's dialogue, characterization, and plot so closely matches early 1960s sitcoms that I wanted to turn it off and watch a real episode of I Love Lucy or Bewitched.  I want more evidence this is not actually a 1960s sitcom, it's a science fiction series about superheroes trapped in a sitcom world.

Beefcake: No.

Heterosexism: Wanda and Vision are a standard loving heterosexual couple.

Gay Characters: None specified yet, although I understand that the characters are all superheroes, and one of them is gay in other media.

Will I Keep Watching:  Sure.  I want to see their take on The Brady Bunch in the 1970s and the hip sitcoms of the 1980s.