Agatha All Along’s Mephisto namedrop might’ve been more important than we thought: “That is larger than me and this show”

In its third episode, new Marvel series Agatha All Along looked to poke fun at all of our wild Mephisto-based theories surrounding WandaVision. According to showrunner Jac Schaeffer, though, that namedrop might wind up being more than just a throwaway gag…

“It was a conversation with [Agatha] executive producer Mary Livanos, [Marvel’s head of streaming] Brad [Winderbaum] and [Marvel Studios boss] Kevin [Feige], but it is a mention that is larger than me and this show. It is the larger Marvel-ness of it,” Schaeffer told The Hollywood Reporter. “So it is not about me bristling or having any kind of a reaction or agenda, mostly because that type of fevered discourse that is very, very rooted in the comics is not as interesting to me as the current story being told in the series at hand.”

In episode 3, titled ‘Through Many Miles of Tricks and Trials’, Sasheer Zamata’s Jennifer Kale suggests to Teen (Joe Locke) that Agatha Harkness’s son Nicholas Scratch could be “dead, a demon, or an agent of Mephisto.” When we asked Schaeffer about the ear-pricking reference, she simply referred to it as “a nod”, before going on to add: “The fan theories themselves don’t inform the actual plotting that I do, or that Marvel does either. I like to think [more] about the thing people are engaging on? Like, what is the thing that’s sort of lighting them up? And is it the thing that’s lighting me up?

“That’s where I feel that I’m successful and my team is successful, when we can find that sweet spot of we are excited about it, it’s making our brains tingle, and making us want to dress up, but it’s also having that effect on fans,” she concluded.