Familiar By Thy Side
Now that Teen’s identity has been revealed, viewers learn more about Billy Maximoff’s backstory in episode six of the Marvel and Disney+ Original Series, Agatha All Along.
William Kaplan
The episode starts as a young man named William Kaplan is turning 13-years-old and preparing to celebrate his bar mitzvah. This is set during the events of WandaVision, three years prior to the events of Agatha All Along. William stops by a psychic’s booth during the party and ends up spooking her. This leads her to put the sigil that the witches referenced in earlier episodes on the boy.
The Kaplan family has to flee the bar mitzvah due to an FBI warning about the “anomaly in Westview” referencing the ending of WandaVision. The Kaplans are involved in a crash where they smash into a tree, specifically the rear passenger door on the side where William was sitting. It appears William dies, but then he regains consciousness and says one word, “Tommy!”
Billy Maximoff
Billy and Tommy Maximoff are the twin sons of Wanda Maximoff and Vision introduced in WandaVision. The pair were created by Wanda using chaos magic as part of the Hex. When she chose to end the Hex, their spirits were supposed to go away with it. But, since the Hex disappearing happened at the same time as the Kaplans’ crash, it’s apparent that Billy has managed to inhabit the body of William Kaplan.
Billy spends the next three years trying to figure out who he is as he is a witch who can read people’s minds when they experience intense emotions. After deciding to be both Billy Maximoff and William Kaplan, he and his boyfriend, Eddie, work together to learn more about who he is. Once they learn about Agatha Harkness, Billy takes it upon himself to try to find her, setting up the funniest part of this episode.
The Other Side of the Coin
Viewers get to see Billy’s view of the events of episode one when Agatha was stuck in the Mare of Easttown true crime procedural television show. While Agatha’s side looked like good investigative police work, from Billy’s perspective, it looked crazy. We see how he’s able to get through to her about the pictures of flowers which helped her break free from Wanda’s spell that she’d been under for three years.
Down the Witches’ Road
At the end of episode five, Billy controlled Jen and Lilia to throw Agatha off the road to sink into the ground before tossing them both off the road himself. Agatha manages to crawl free from the ground and addresses Billy. Agatha was the primary antagonist of WandaVision but tried to be friendly to the Maximoff family. She remembers Billy and figures out that he went down the road to try to find his brother (although she called him Toby instead of Tommy).
This episode marked the return of evil Agatha which is the best Agatha. While she was friendly to start WandaVision, it quickly became clear she was evil, and Kathryn Hahn clearly relished playing the character in an evil way. To start this series, Agatha has been trapped in delusion and playing a nice character to her coven while trying to regain her power. When she returns here, there’s no pretense. She is evil and can’t wait to continue down the road with Billy.
The Coven Returns
Despite appearing to be dead, the rest of the coven returned in this episode. Lilia served as the psychic who put the sigil on William. This means she may be responsible for the events of Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness as Wanda went crazy being unable to find Billy and Tommy.
Alice, who Agatha killed in episode five, returns as the police officer who responds to the Kaplans’ car crash. She referenced in episode two that she had once been a police officer, so the Chekhov principle determined we needed to see her as an officer at some point.
Jen used her potion skills to make a skincare line that Billy used, and you could see her on the packaging. Meanwhile, Sharon Davis/Mrs. Hart appears helping Agatha capture Billy during the Mare of Easttown sequence when she opens her car door, and it hits him. I’m not sure if this will be their last appearance with only three episodes left, but it was nice they each got another appearance after their apparent deaths.
Ralph Bohner
One of the wilder WandaVision characters returns to help Billy figure out who he is. Ralph Bohner (yes, it’s an elaborate erection joke) meets with Billy and Eddie to describe Agatha and the events in the Hex. During WandaVision, Ralph appears to be Wanda’s brother, Pietro Maximoff, who was killed during the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron. It was a nice touch as QuickSilver (Pietro’s superhero name) appeared in both the Avengers and X-Men universes. Aaron Taylor-Johnson played him in Avengers, but Evan Peters played him in X-Men. Peters shows up making it look like a “recasting.”
Peters’ version of Pietro was actually Ralph Bohner, the man who lived in the house Agatha took over while inside the Hex. He’s an actor whom she has portray Wanda’s brother. Bohner is experiencing PTSD from his time in the Hex as he regrets the evil things she had him do. He also left his entire life behind giving her the home citing her actions “greatly reduced the resale value” which is the ultimate adult joke for this series.
Rating
If you like connective tissue, this episode delivers. It ties together the events of WandaVision and Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness into Agatha All Along. It also gives viewers a deep look at some of the personas Agatha has taken through history when Billy is researching her. My favorite was probably the revelation that Agatha was actually the “Jolene” who inspired the hit song by Dolly Parton. It’s a nice little Easter egg.
The problem with this much connective tissue, however, is that it can confuse those who jumped in late. For those who didn’t see WandaVision, they probably didn’t understand the Hex/Westview aspect of the episode. It required more exposition dumps than the majority of the series has so far.
This episode also felt a lot like episode five of The Book of Boba Fett. In that Star Wars series, much of episodes five and six were dedicated to a character called The Mandalorian who has his own show on Disney+. While they were great episodes of The Mandalorian, they weren’t great episodes of The Book of Boba Fett. This is how this felt. This episode felt more like a great episode for a Billy Maximoff/Wiccan series rather than an episode of Agatha All Along. While Billy’s backstory was necessary, it probably could’ve been sprinkled in rather than dumped in one entire episode. Still, I liked it overall, even if it was a bit disappointing for the Witches’ Road aspect.
Check out Agatha All Along exclusively on Disney+.
Article Written By: Jeremy Brown for Stelmach Brown Media 2024
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