This article contains spoilers for “Agatha All Along,” episode 7, “Death’s Hand In Mine.”
“Agatha All Along” and “WandaVision” creator/showrunner Jac Schaeffer is seemingly obsessed with time. Her debut feature, “TiMER,” is a sci-fi romantic comedy set in a world where a wrist implant countdown clock lets people know when they’ll meet their soul mate, completely altering how people spend their time on Earth anticipating when it’s time to settle down. “WandaVision” explores the way Wanda Maximoff’s Westview Anomaly manipulates an entire town’s sense of time through television tropes, while Agatha Harkness gets involved just to antagonize Wanda out of pettiness and a quest for power.
Now, with “Agatha All Along,” Patti Lupone’s Lilia Calderu has been revealed to be experiencing her life out of sequence, and her acceptance of living on a constantly jumping timeline becomes the key to understanding her tarot test while on The Witches’ Road. I recently had the chance to talk with Schaeffer about “Agatha All Along” ahead of the double-episode series finale on October 30, 2024, and wanted to know where this obsession with time comes from.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about my obsession with time. I’m so enchanted by stories that deal with time in sort of mind-shaking ways,” she tells me. She notes “Arrival” as one of her favorite movies of ever; Denis Villeneuve’s time-bending, sci-fi masterpiece about aliens and communication features Amy Adams turning everyone watching into a puddle of tears with her brilliant performance as linguist Louise Banks. (I still cannot believe she didn’t get an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.) But when it comes to Schaeffer’s affinity for timey-wimey storytelling, it was Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” that she cites as the movie that completely changed her life.
Memento’s non-linear storytelling inspired Agatha All Along creator Jac Schaeffer
For the uninitiated, “Memento” is the second feature film from Christopher Nolan and the one that helped skyrocket him in popularity. The neo-noir psychological thriller centers on Guy Pearce as a man named Leonard Shelby with anterograde amnesia who attempts to solve the murder of his wife, despite his inability to remember what happened 15 minutes prior. Told in a non-linear structure, “Memento” dazzled audiences and critics alike, and has become such a monumentally inspiring film that the reaction from confused viewers shocked Nolan. Jac Schaeffer tells me that “Memento” was the film that changed her trajectory as an artist because “I didn’t know you could be that smart and break story. I mean break story, like break, get into, and I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ I want to break it and then put it back together again.”
When “Memento” was released on physical media, the special features included the ability to watch the movie linearly, proof that Nolan understood Leonard’s story from start to finish and that the non-linear storytelling was an example of a creator having a masterful grasp on the “rules” before deciding to break them. But “Memento” wasn’t the only huge inspiration for Schaeffer’s work — she’s also a big fan of the TV series “Lost,” a show whose “true meaning” is still hotly debated nearly 15 years after its finale. “I was just like, ‘I am dazzled over and over again. I am gasping every episode. I’m leaning forward every episode. I have to use the fullness of my brain to follow this,’ and it is so rewarding,” Schaeffer said of her reaction to the show. “So it’s the mechanics of [telling stories about time] that I love, but I think the emotional part of it is … yeah, it’s me making sense of my time here.”
Schaeffer and I go even deeper into her thoughts on time-twisting storytelling during our chat, which can be heard on today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast:
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