Agatha All Along Actually Is the Gayest Marvel Show Yet

This article contains spoilers for Agatha All Along episode 4.

Watching the first episode of Agatha All Along, it’s hard to deny that the tension between Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) and Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) is a lot more than antagonistic. It didn’t take long for viewers to pick up on the intense chemistry between Agatha and Rio, even as they try to kill each other, and speculate that there must be more to their relationship. Now that Rio has returned in episode 4 “If I Can’t Reach You, Let My Song Teach You,” the series doesn’t seem to be shying away from the allegations that Agatha and Rio are ex-lovers. In fact, this episode essentially confirms it.

That’s right. The rumors that Agatha All Along is the “gayest Marvel project yet” seem to actually be true. It’s kind of hard for Marvel to turn back and say “Oh, no, they were just friends! Or…really close roommates!” when Agatha nearly kisses Rio at the end of this episode. And then there’s every other clue the show has given us thus far that these two were once romantically entangled.

When the two are fighting in the series premiere, Rio says that she prefers Agatha “horizontal” and pauses ever so slightly before she says “in the ground.” She says that her heart is black and beats for Agatha before licking her hand to heal a cut. Agatha recruits Sharon (Debra Jo Rupp) as the coven’s “Green witch” to explicitly avoid having to ask Rio to join them, as the black heart on Lilia’s (Patti LuPone) list seemed to indicate that she was the true final member.

The next time we see Rio, she crawls her way out of the ground and appears with the coven on the Witches’ Road, immediately conjuring a flower to coyly give to Agatha. Even though the two literally tried to kill each other the last time they saw each other and Rio sent the Salem Seven after Agatha. When the two share a semi-private conversation in the recording booth Rio says that maybe this journey could be “like old times,” to which Agatha replies “work and play.”

As the coven shares stories of their scars, Rio says that “A long time ago, I loved someone, and I had to do something I did not want to do, even though it was my job, and it hurt them. She is my scar.” To which Agatha replies by stealing a glance at Rio and immediately saying she needs to go stretch her legs as an excuse to leave the conversation. Rio soon follows, and the rest is history.

As Sasheer Zamata so eloquently put it in a recent interview with Variety, “Witches are queer, inherently, just because we are outcasts and set aside for many reasons. This show shows a really good representation of different types of people and that we can all use the power we have within to go forward and be great.”

Agatha All Along already had an inherent queerness to it just by existing. It’s a show about women cast out from society, trying to reclaim their power. Then they added the Teen (Joe Locke) who is established as canonically gay in the second episode when we see his boyfriend call. But most other Marvel projects likely would have stopped there. 

The first confirmed queer character in the MCU will forever technically be a Russo brother cameo in Avengers: Endgame because a scene confirming Valkyrie’s (Tessa Thompson) bisexuality was cut from Thor: Ragnarok. She finally got her moment in Thor: Love and Thunder, 18 Marvel projects later. Loki (Tom Hiddleston) was confirmed as bisexual in season one of his show slightly before that, and Eternals featured the franchise’s first gay couple not long after, but queer representation is still not where it should be in a series with such a large volume of content. We shouldn’t have to beg for crumbs in order to see ourselves on screen.

Agatha All Along doesn’t just have characters that happen to be queer for the sake of being able to check that box – Agatha and Rio’s relationship is an important part of this story. Whatever happened between them in the past is influencing their decisions in the present, and contributing to the greater mystery of the series at large. Queerness is woven into this show’s witchy DNA, and it is all the better for it.