When Marvel Mania, the exhausting, suffocating takeover that has defined much of the last decade of entertainment began, I don’t think a single person would have predicted that the best performance we’d get in a MCU television series would be from Patti LuPone. It might have even seemed preposterous that the Broadway legend, who sets famously high standards for the work she chooses, would even be in such a project.
Yet here we are in the days after Agatha All Along aired the superb “Death’s Hand in Mine,” still stunned by her tour de force in that episode.
Agatha All Along is, by my count, the 23rd MCU television series. (Give me at least five minutes to seek shelter before pummeling me with “well, actually!” emails.) The range in quality in those shows is as wide as… The Hulk’s shoulder span? (Look, I’m not a fully fledged Marvel person. I’m trying here.) But there’s no denying some excellent acting has come from these series, work that is often dismissed because of the genre—a practice I hate!
The particular subset of what is now the WandaVision-verse, which spinoff Agatha All Along is now a part of, has featured some of Marvel’s best performances. Certainly Elisabeth Olsen and Kathryn Hahn, whose turn was so surprising, deliciously feral, and eerily funny that Agatha All Along was built around in the first place.
Still, I love that in this universe of hugely popular superheroes and A-list movie stars leading their own shows, it’s a supporting turn by Patti LuPone as a tarot card-reading witch that people are calling the best MCU television performance yet. Give Patti LuPone that Emmy nod, folks! (Shockingly, and unjustly, it would be her first! A world where Patti LuPone has no Emmy nominations is not a world I want to live in! What is grief, but love being impossible to ever attain again because Patti is nominationless?!)
(Update: I’ve been reminded that LuPone has a Guest Actress nomination for Frasier. She did not win, so if you’re following this labored reference to the WandaVision quote, the grief perseveres.)
The season-best episode centers on LuPone’s character Lilia, revealing her backstory.
The episode jumps back and forth in time, appropriate for an episode focused on a witch with a talent for seeing the future. Sometimes we’re with her as she’s learning her craft, centuries ago. Sometimes we’re revisiting her confused state of mind just seconds before.
Despite having just been betrayed by Teen (Joe Locke), her unmooring kaleidoscope of memories is point her towards her calling: She’s supposed to continue to the next trial, help Teen and Agatha, and bring Jen (Sasheer Zamata) with her to reunite the coven.
The patchwork of flashbacks serves to make sense of her erratic behavior, which had been dismissed as just another kooky divination witch. But it also serves to piece together fully who Lilia is, a witch who wasn’t sure what her life has meant or could mean, because it’s always been presented to her out of order. LuPone is fantastic in these scenes, grieving an existence that may have seemed purposeless, and overwhelmed at her realization, finally, of what that purpose is.
As she does the tarot card reading that will save the witches and allow them to continue on The Witches’ Road, she self-realizes. She pulls a Queen of Cups, revealing that she is an “empathetic, intuitive, inner voice to be trusted.” The Three of Pentacles indicates what’s been missing: a coven, which she now has. The Knight of Wands represents her past as a fighting spirit.
Each card is a moving tribute to the strength of a witch who had been crippled with self-doubt. LuPone’s depiction of discovery and emotion is heartbreaking and hopeful at the same time, a masterclass in subtlety—all delivered while wearing a cheesy Glinda the Good Witch costume that your friend who likes Halloween too much bought at a mall costume shop. (We can’t get into every plot detail here…)
To say anymore would spoil. But for a genre awash with heroes’ journeys of all kinds, Lilia’s in this episode is my favorite yet. And that my old gay self is here waxing poetic about a freaking episode of a Marvel series, of all things? Well, that just echoes the message of the episode itself: Never underestimate the power of Patti LuPone.
