Agatha All Along Mystery Solved: Why Did the Westview Population Plummet After WandaVision Finale?

The following contains spoilers from the first two episodes of Agatha All Along, now streaming on Disney+.

Where in the world did nearly half of Westview, N.J. disappear to?!

During Episode 2 of Agatha All Along — the follow-up to Disney+ and Marvel’s first live-action, MCU-based TV series, WandaVision — the titular sorceress (played by Kathryn Hahn) and the curious Teen (Joe Locke) who helped free her from her hex persona took a trip out of the fictional Westview, to recruit others to their makeshift coven.

As they crossed the town line, the Welcome sign that we first saw in WandaVision listed the current population as 2,251 — meaning, 42% fewer people than lived there three years ago.

Was there a frightful amount of unseen collateral damage from Agatha’s airborne clash with the Scarlet Witch in the WandaVision finale? Or did a huge chunk of Westviewers simply pack their bags and leave after emerging from the hex that Wanda had cast, forcibly consigning them to false identities?

TVLine brought that burning, very granular Q to Jac Schaeffer, the executive producer for both WandaVision and Agatha, and she indicated that one of the two suggestions above is to blame for Westview’s plummeted population.

“Don’t take this as canon…,” Schaeffer told TVLine, “but we did have a lot of conversations about, ‘What is Westview like after the hex comes down?'”

After all, coming out of WandaVision‘s climactic battle, there was only a brief glimpse of Wanda’s walk of shame through and away from Westview, where she was met with disapproving glares from the mild-mannered citizens who’d been enslaved by her witchcraft. (Speaking of Wanda, here’s why her face was never shown in Agatha‘s series premiere.)

“We don’t show a lot of that, but the general vibe is that [the hex] was a traumatizing experience,” Schaeffer says. “So we talked about, ‘Would there be a mass exodus? Who would stay and why?’ So that little piece [of the Welcome to Westview sign] is a nod to that.”

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