This post is kind of being rushed out to capture a mood from the most recent episode of the Disney Plus show Agatha All Along. This post contains spoilers about one episode’s minor plot point. It also contains minor spoilers for Back to the Future, The Time Travellers Wife, Shuffle and the ending of Derren Brown’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.
It also uncorks some deep feelings about showbiz which have nothing to do with any of that but we’ll get there later.
For those who don’t know, Agatha All Along is a TV spinoff from Wandavision, which itself is a TV spinoff from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, focusing on the characters of Wanda and Vision, both of whom were kind of side characters in other people’s movies. It’s a fringe on a fringe on a fringe and it’s only available on one highly specific streaming platform. It’s okay if you’ve never watched it, honestly it wouldn’t surprise me if you’d never heard of it. To top it all this entire artile spins off from a single episode, which is about a tertiary character in the main cast. Despite being about something brand spanking new, it may be even more niche than the usual references I drop to forgotten Sci-Fi channel miniseries and feature length independant experimental animations.
The show is about a bunch of witches who set out on a quest to blah blah, magic powers, dark pact, yawn. You’ve watched TV before. This particular episode however activated a very specific part of my brain. The part of my brain that loves time fuckery.
Sequence Break
Time fuckery comes in many distinct flavours, from recontextualsing flashbacks, to events being shown out of order, to events actually being out of order. I’m not just talking about time travel movies where characters can go back and change things, I’m talking about characters being tossed back and forth in time uncontrollably. Future influencing past in a loop, accidentally causing the thing you’re trying to prevent. All of that.
Back to the Basics
Robert Zemeckis is a coward and it’s about time we talked about that. When he made Back to the Future, he had no idea that an actual sequel would be made. The cliffhanger ending was supposed to be a hint at what the characters did next rather than a sequel hook. In fact they didn’t even sign all the original actors on for the sequel, which is why a different woman plays Marty’s girlfriend Jennifer in the second film, and the entire epilogue of the original was re-shot for the opening of the sequel to add context for the continuing plot and introduce the new actress.
As no sequel was originally planned, the fact that the sequel later intersects with the plot of the original had to be very carefully done to make sure Marty didn’t change the events of that movie.
They already knew however that there would be a third part to the trilogy. Heck the film even ends with a trailer for part 3. Knowing this there was scope to do something incredible; Making a time travel film with a pre-written sequel lets you add unexplained coincidences and chance occurrences to the plot which the events of the third film will explain as a further overlapping timeline. Imagine the time fuckery. But instead the sequel was set in 1885, a hundred years before the original, with zero chance of directly influencing the events of either movie.
Boo¹.
Out of Sequence
The Time Traveller’s Wife is a movie based on a book of the same name. I haven’t read it, so for the duration of this synopsis the time Traveller’s name is Eric Bana.
Eric jumps back and forth in his own lifespan at random, appearing and disappearing right before people’s eyes, so while we see the events of his life in order, from his first time jump as a child to his eventual death, the people around him, who he considers his best friends and closest confidants might not even know who he is if he encounters them before they were properly introduced. Similarly there are times when he jumps forward and encounters strangers who know things about him and his future. As an adult he jumps back in time and meets his wife as a child. This is doubly creepy because he disappears out of his clothes when he timeskips and reappears naked at his destination.
Somehow the movie never adresses the weird grooming vibe this gives. It’s okay though, because at the end of the film he time jumps back to this same location where he is mistaken for a deer and gets shot by his father in law, bleeding out giving him just enough time to vanish appear back at his house as a corpse in front of his family.
Shuffle has a very similar vibe to it, in that the pritagonist jumps back and forth in his own life, but the difference is that he doesnt disappear. To the people around him he just appears to be eccentric, forgetting things or suddenly knowing bits of the future. He just experiences the events of his life out of order. His mind jumps back and forth but his body experiences a single continuity.
All these things are movies though, so they keep their causality contained and show everything from the perspective of the time travelling protagonist without much concern for how it appears in the sequence everyone else experiences.
Thats where Agatha All Along is able to do something clever.
Lilia All Along
Agatha All Along opens with extricating the titular Agatha from her predicament at the end of Wandavision, and then follow the creation of her new coven that the rest of the series follows through the trials of The Witches Road. It’s a journey, she refuses the call and crosses a threshold and everything. Dan Harmon would be very happy².
Every member of the coven has a different reason for joining and a different speciality, such as potions or blood magic. The divination specialist is Lilia Calderu and episode 7 is basically her episode.
Episode 6 has already shown a flashback to recap older episodes of the show from a different perspective so the audience has been softened up for time fuckery by this point. You see it’s been implied for the last 6 episodes that Lilia is just a dotty old woman who reads tarot cards at bar mitzvas and sometimes eccentrically says random stuff.
In episode 7 however we learn that her divination has another facet to it. Specifically the fact that she can occasionally, sometimes accidentally, jump into her own body at different moments in time. On the one hand this means she catches glimpses of the future, which is helpful, but she tried to stop doing it when she was younger after seeing her own death. In stressful times however it escapes her control and of course this show is about a pretty stressful series of events. Episode 7 is seen from her perspective, as she bounces back and forth in her own life. The first impact of this is a nice little bootstrap paradox where Lilia has no idea whats going on and Jennifer tells her some exposition from the previous episode. Trouble is, there’s no way Jennifer should have known that info because neither of them were there when it was revealed. Lilia asks how she knows all this and Jennifer’s reply is “You told me.”
A few scenes later we return to the moments leading up to that first scene, and now Jennifer has no idea what is going on, so Lilia tells her what she learned from Jennifer earlier (or later depending on her perspective).
As events get more fraught this jumping happens more often and goes further, once again seeing herself falling to her death in the future and then as a little girl, where her mother immediately recognises that she is speaking to an older Lilia and wants to know if she’s doing well in the future. Of course at this point in time the future is pretty relative because what counts as now keeps changing.
Finally, as the events of the episode come together, we see a montage of all Lilia’s weird outburts and tangential sentence fragments, only now see see them in order as a rapid sequence of Lilia jumping through time, where stitched together they make the complete sentence: “Get off me! We really hated each other from the beginning but now, I love you guys.”
Trust me it makes sense in the context of the episode, but those 3 punctuated fragments actually occur in reverse order in the show, dotted out of place into the middle of different episodes.
It tickled part of my brain that connected it to something similar, and I wondered if you could incorporate a plot like this into a magic show.
All The Right Notes³
There’s an episode of the TV show Jonathan Creek which has a wonderful solution. Ordinarily a murder mystery, it would occasionally have a more general impossibility to explain. One such episode is Angel Hair, from season 4 (the last good season, dont @ me).
The mystery from this episode is that of a woman apparently attempting to defraud a man she is having an affair with, filming a fake kidnapping to extract ransom money from him. Except that moments before they prematurely find the tape, she is dragged across the garden by her hair, hair which is entirely shaved off in the video. How can someone have their head shaved on camera and then a day later be dragged by said hair? The solution to the mystery is quite ingenious and is preceded by a wonderful line from Julia Sawalha, “The Two events – a woman having her head shaved, and being dragged over the grass with a full set of hair – weren’t impossible in themselves. We were just looking at them the wrong way around.”
This is the priniple with which I open my shoelace routine with the bachelors needle; showing three events far apart: a rope seperate from a loop, me threading the loop, and the spectator holding the end of the rope. Then I bring the events together by threading the loop so fast they don’t see me do it before I had them the end. A sort of extreme edge of possibility. Then finally I show the events in the wrong order, them holding the end, the rope separate, and then some how the rope threaded through the loop while they’re holding it.
When you think about it a lot of magic can be explained by events being out of order, so why not theme an entire show out of it? Individual effects where you apparently visit the future or the past to perform actions or collect information. Fill it with occasional moments of apparent madness where you blurt out nonsense and then at the end play those moments together to create a sentence in which you actually conclude the show, with the story being that just before you ended the show you went back and did a bunch of stuff to produce the final effect. Sounds extreme, sure, but it’s actually been done before.
Something Wicked Came This Way
Derren actually does flashbacks tying into a final reveal in his show Something Wicked This Way Comes but this effect is used to show hidden messages rather than actual time fuckery. His premise is that he was secretly dropping influences ahead of time to convince people they acted the way he wanted.
But what if instead those moments told a narrative of a secret set of actions to set up a finale which only make sense when shown out of order, actions which could only be done by someone from the future with foreknowledge of the events of the show?
The Tower
This is possible, and it may be great, but I cannot do it. As much as it pains me to admit it, a lot of the ideas I come up with are simply not achievable in an amateur setting. They would require a team and a technical setup beyond the means of all but the top tier of celebrity magicians⁴. Derren could do this but it’s not his style. Perhaps it’s in scope for one of the big Vegas performers, but they already have shows. In Many ways it speaks to the difficulty in writing a show from scratch with a theme or narrative through line. To get into a position career wise where you can do something so experimental and actually get it into a theatre, you need to be well established. Most acts accrue naturally overtime, starting with a five minute open mic spot that cannbe extended into a fifteen minute cabaret bit, then a half hour after dinner show, forty-five minutes for a fringe act. Then you can start switching in new segments until you have a whole different forty-five minute show, mash the two together and you have a full theatre show.
Maybe, if you can get sufficiently established you can get a production company to invest in the process of writing and technically designing a whole new show from scratch but that rarely happens. The ultimate goal for most magicians is to get that first show together and tour it for as long as possible, swapping bits in and out as they develop new material, in the hope that by the end of the tour they will have changed the act sufficiently that they can lure back the old audience with the new show.
Ben Hart does a new show regularly, and they tend to have a theme but they don’t really have much of a narrative, and every time I’ve seen him live he did the diminishing cards routine which made him famous on BGT.
I’ve been told by other performers that the only way to get a theatre show booked in the UK these days is to be seen on TV, and outside of the Edinburgh Fringe I can’t think of any theatrical magic shows which don’t bank on the star power of a TV personality.
You may think this is less bleak than I’m making it sound, and perhaps correlation is not causation. The best magicians get theatre shows and the best magicians get on the TV. Stands to reason. Except we now have evidence that this isn’t true.
Derren Brown used his ingenious knowledge of magic and show construction to write a theatrical magic show without him in it. It was by all accounts every bit as ingenious as his own shows, but with a cast of professional actors doing the tricks.
It ran for three and a half months and then ended. There is no sign of a return. I know this because I know someone who worked on it.
The reason it closed? As soon as it got out that the TV famous Derren Brown wasn’t actually in it, no one went.
Nine of Swords Inverted
So for all the ideas I may have of what could be the bones of a good show, or even a good effect, unless I can carry it single handed into a church hall or hotel conference room and perform it right there with no special rigging or technical setup, it is never going to happen. The magic I write is complicated and large, but the magic I perform is small and functional. It can be sandwiched between other performers on a club night or open mic. It must be understood in the moment and untroubling after it is over, as the audience focuses on the next act. The magic I perform more than any other uses objects I keep in my pockets and occurs in the space between me and handful of spectators stood in a semi-circle. They don’t know who I am, they didn’t pay to see me. That’s the extent of my showbiz clout.
So how do you go from that to having your name on a poster with a full narrative show?
I used to believe that there was no way to break out of a rut like the one I’m in without some kind of leg up, and I still kind of think that, but I have come to realise that the size of the leg-up can be miniscule if it’s the right one.
Sure, getting noticed by the founder of Objective Media Group is probably gonna set you up, and being a student at one of the big universities gives you access to the footlights and all the theatrical performance space and colleagues you could need. But what is the smallest favour or fortune that that could shuffle you onto the stage?
A friend of mine recently performed a show at the free fringe, something I’ve been thinking of doing for years, the success of which gave her the required experience to then have 2 paid theatre shows locally. The real rub? She is a zookeeper who developed an interest in magic 2 years ago. Starting from zero magical knowledge she has had a themed ticketed stage show in just 2 years. She did it through pure grit, determination, trying stuff out at open mics and the one little extra favour – she has a friend who lives in Edinburgh.
She actually said to me the only reason she was able to do the fringe in the first place is that she could stay with a local friend for a week. During the fringe, accomodation in Edinburgh is excruciatingly expensive, especially since the arrival of Air B&B turning the city into a buy-to-let haven full of amateur hoteliers eager to harvest the August gold rush. Time will tell if this leads to a career with a world tour and a number of TV specials, but if you see a zookeper magician on BGT just remember I was there before she got big.
Four of Wands
I guess what I’m getting at in this post is that whilst it can be tempting to think that just like the people who crowd around Dynamo and Jeff McBride at blackpool the key to success lies in catching the favour of someone who can give you the golden ticket, the less cringey alternative is to look at what help you might obtain from the people you already know – and whom you might be able to help in kind.
The problem with show business is that it is, at its core, a business and a business is the spawn of capitalism. Capitalism is all about the hierarchy of haves and have-nots, the pile of crabs scrambling over each other to escape the pot, all the while dragging down the unlucky souls who are struggling alongside us.
I talk a big game about the possibility of a future revolution of the proletariat but I don’t often talk about the importance of grassroots anarchy theory such as mutual aid. Often we can help people around us in ways that they don’t even realise we are capable of, and of course vice versa. Perhaps a week in the spare beroom of someone in the right place could make all the difference. Maybe a colleague is a big deal in the womens institute and they would appreciate a show. There are a whole host of connections which might squeeze you into a place or a group of collaborators where your most bizarre creative impulses can be indulged. It may not lead to a fabulous career in the arts, but it will let you make some really really weird art.
¹ They could hypothetically do some of this if they ever made another sequel or a reboot or a soft reboot or a serialised streaming show, but let’s face it, if they ever did this you just know it would be terrible. Partly because it would be difficult to mesh the events of the first films with the actual events of 2015, partly because the modern cultural tentposts have a much shorter shelf life than the ones in 1985, so their new vision of the future will be dated within a year or so, and partly because studio execs will be desperate to shoehorn in not only cutting edge memes with a mayfly lifespan, but also references to the original movies. Where the originals kind of felt timeless, a new franchise would feel out of date on release day.
² Dan Harmon is a huge proponent of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey model of storytelling, even as far as adapting it to an episodic story circle model with which he writes every episode of Rick and Morty, even the gross ones about incest babies and sex robots.
³ This section header is a reference to Morcambe and Wise’s famous piano sketch with Andre Previn, in which Eric Morcambe, told that he is playing all the wrong notes replies, “I am playing all the right notes. Just not necessarily in the right order.
⁴ That is to say, magicians who are celebrities. There are also magicians who regularly perform for celebrities but this doesn’t necessarily equate to a lot of sway in the world of showbiz. After all, even a plumber to the stars is still just a plumber.