2021 was a big year for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We finally met the Eternals, came face to face with Kang the Conqueror in Loki, and watched as Pizza Dog earned his sacred moniker in Hawkeye. However one Marvel moment reigns supreme above all others and it happened all the way back in February. WandaVision on Disney+ wasn’t just the first or best MCU title of the year, but it gave us the best Marvel moment of quite some time. I’m talking about “Agatha All Along.” Never before has a villain’s evil plan been so delightful or a plot twist so catchy.
“Agatha All Along” is hands down the MCU moment of 2021.
Marvel kicked off its busiest year yet with the premiere of its first Disney+ show, WandaVision, back in January 2021. Set after the events of Avengers: Endgame, WandaVision started off as a kooky ode to classic American sitcoms. We watched as Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) got to live a Dick Van Dyke Show-esque dream life with her one true (dead synthezoid) love Vision (Paul Bettany). Each episode paid homage to a different decade of family sitcoms and each episode featured a hint that all was not well in Wanda’s world. Did Wanda break bad? Was Mephisto involved? What the heck was going on?
Finally in WandaVision Episode 7 “Breaking the Fourth Wall,” Wanda’s neighbor and bestie Agnes (Kathryn Hahn) revealed that she was actually the witch Agatha Harkness and that she had been manipulating Wanda all along. To explain this plot twist, WandaVision gave Agatha her own delicious number bragging about her malicious actions. She introduced Evan Peters’s “Pietro” and killed the kids’ dog. Why? Well, it would take another episode to learn that she wanted to understand the source of Wanda’s power so she could steal it. But basically because she was a power hungry villain and Wanda’s grief created a major magic even that Agatha was drawn to like a magnet.
Plot-relevance aside, “Agatha All Along” was a banger. The song, penned by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, is an absolute earworm, full of catchy lines like “she’s insidious, so perfidious!” “Agatha All Along” was a rare confluence of perfect plotting, tongue-in-cheek humor, and a banger of a performance (from the great Kathryn Hahn). The song instantly flooded social media, prompting Decider’s Alex Zalben to call it “the song of the summer” (in February) and for numerous covers to flood the internet. The greatest is still Leland Philpot’s joyous trap/hiphop remix.
Since WandaVision‘s finale, there have been four more MCU shows on Disney+ — The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, Loki, What If? and the currently running Hawkeye — along with three motion picture releases: Black Widow, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and The Eternals. Still “Agatha All Along” feels like the most universally beloved scene of the MCU’s year. It is a song that provokes glee and encompasses the wonder that WandaVision gave us all. “Agatha All Along” has yet to be beat!
As the year winds down, let us all remember that the biggest, most beautiful, and universally beloved moment in a superhero franchise was the great Kathryn Hahn singing a taunting theme song. It was “Agatha All Along.”
Where to stream WandaVision
