Agatha All Along brews together WandaVision, Doctor Strange, and Darkhold lore

[Ed. note: This post contains end spoilers for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and WandaVision, and setup spoilers for Agatha All Along’s premiere episodes.]

When Disney Plus’ new Marvel Cinematic Universe show Agatha All Along picks up the story WandaVision started, protagonist Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) isn’t quite in reality — or even the MCU’s version of reality. As WandaVision ended, Wanda bested Agatha in a battle of explosive CGI magic, and locked her away in her “Agnes” persona. Wanda went on her unhappy way, headed for a different showdown in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. And Agatha apparently simply went along as Agnes, trapped in a spell.

But the premiere of Agatha breaks her out, dangling a tantalizing detail along the way by teasing the importance of the Darkhold. If you remember your MCU factoids, you’ll recall that this is the book Wanda turned to in the teaser at the end of WandaVision, and the thing that ultimately corrupted her in Multiverse of Madness.

The Darkhold is basically the Book of the Damned, Marvel’s version of H.P. Lovecraft’s cursed Necronomicon. The in-universe lore is that an ancient Elder God wrote down all his evil works and spells at Mount Wundagore, and those writings became a textbook of magic that could corrupt people. That is exactly what happened to Wanda in the MCU: She turned to the Darkhold after defeating Agatha in an effort to resurrect her happiness (and the imaginary children she created with her powers in WandaVision). She isn’t alone, either: As we saw in Multiverse of Madness’ alternate universe led by Professor X, trying to use the Darkhold to defeat Thanos led Earth-838 to a universe-destroying incursion, which ultimately led to the rise of Dark Strange.

Eventually, however, Wanda realizes the error of her ways and joins the good side again, sacrificing herself to destroy all copies of the Darkhold throughout the multiverse. Which leaves Agatha in quite a pickle at the start of Agatha All Along…

Kinda? When Agatha believes she is Agnes, a hardboiled detective in a drama called Agnes of Westview, she’s investigating a mysterious corpse that showed up on the outskirts of town. It’s a bit of a wink-wink reference to WandaVision’s gimmick of basing individual episodes on specific series from throughout TV history.

By the end of the episode, it’s revealed that the dead body is Wanda. (Her face is never revealed, likely so Disney didn’t have to pay Elizabeth Olsen for the cameo — or create a disturbing CG version of her crushed face.) Agatha visits the morgue, and as the truth dawns on her, the previously blank toe tag on the corpse shifts to show the name “W. Maximoff.” It isn’t that Wanda’s corpse is physically in Westview; it’s a symbol that the witch who cursed Agatha is dead, and her spell is warping, either because of her death or because the Darkhold has been destroyed. Agatha needs a little help to break that curse.

Though technically, even before Wanda’s name appears on that toe tag, there are a number of clues hinting that she’s the mysterious (and metaphorical) corpse.

When Agatha first encounters the body, the police on the scene tell her that it appears the victim died from crushing damage, caused by heavy falling objects. This tracks with how Wanda died in Doctor Strange 2, after she destroyed Darkhold Castle and it came crumbling down on her.

Later in the episode, another officer tells Agatha that the soil beneath the corpse’s fingernails contain a microbe sample only found in Eastern Europe. In the comics, Mount Wundagore — where Wanda eventually sacrificed herself back in Multiverse of Madness — is located in Transia, one of the various fictional Eastern European countries in the Marvel universe.

The officers find a library check out card on the body, indicating that the corpse checked out a book whose title anagrams out to “DARKHOLD.” Agnes goes to investigate the library, but learns that the book was stolen and all the other copies have been burned. That isn’t exactly the way the Darkhold was destroyed across the multiverse, but turning a big cosmic event into a mundane fire tracks with the genre shift for Agatha All Along’s premiere episode. And the hole blasted in a shelf full of books also reflects the fight Vision and his counterpart White Vision had in the library right in WandaVision, right before deciding to talk their problems out via Ship of Theseus metaphor — another little callback that makes its way into Agnes’ delusion.

And finally, right before the reveal, Agatha describes the body as 5 feet, 7 inches (Wanda Maximoff’s canon height), with green eyes, and (she takes a dramatic pause here) scarlet hair.

There are other details — like the theory that the body was moved by a specific car from a different town — that don’t necessarily add to the procedural or the metaphor. But what’s a good mystery without some scarlet red herrings?