<i>Agatha All Along</i> Breaks the Westview Bubble (Again) in “Familiar by Thy Side”

Billy Kaplan? Maximoff? The answer is a little more complicated that you might have expected.

Recap

The Teen is William Kaplan, and three years ago, it was the day of his bar mitzvah. During the celebration that follows, William goes into the tent of a fortune teller who is part of the entertainment: It’s Lilia. She notes that he has a broken lifeline, not an uncommon occurrence, but one that she feels is relevant—something frightening is in this young man’s future. She tells him to live in the moment, but once he’s left, she creates the sigil and slips it into his jacket pocket. She promptly forgets that she’s done this. Suddenly, the bar mitzvah party has to end: The bubble encasing the neighboring town of Westview is beginning to collapse, and everyone needs to return home for safety reasons.

William’s family is distracted by the changes to the bubble as they’re driving home and wind up in a car wreck. William appears to be dead, but once the Westview bubble is gone, he wakes, calling for Tommy. Alice, currently a police officer, arrives on the scene and tells William’s parents (Maria Dizzia and Paul Adelstein) to keep him still until the ambulance arrives. William has developed amnesia and doesn’t remember his life before the crash, but the doctors insist that he’ll be okay. He notices that he can hear people thinking when their emotions are heightened. He’s eventually released home and heads up to his old room, trying to recall something of his life and who he is. Three years later, William is making out with his boyfriend Eddie (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), and admits that he never recalled his past from before the accident—he just pretends he has to make his parents more comfortable.

William wants to tell Eddie the truth, so he shows him everything he’s pieced together about the Westview bubble, which most of the public believes was just an “Avengers training incident.” William has figured out that there were runes on the bubble and magic at play. He’s been talking to a former Westview resident online about this and is supposed to go meet the man. He asks Eddie to go with him as backup, and Eddie agrees. They meet with Ralph Bohner (Evan Peters), who is extremely erratic, but tells them about his time being mind-controlled by Agatha and watching what Wanda did to the town. He tells them about Wanda’s family, and how both Billy and Tommy Maximoff disappeared following the events. He also tells them that Agatha is still in Westview.

William—now certain that he is Billy Maximoff—goes home and starts searching for information on Agatha Harkness. He finds out that she’s reportedly the only witch to have ever survived the Witches’ Road, the place referred to in the song he has on record by Lorna Wu. Thinking that this might be the key to finding his brother, Billy heads into Westview to find Agatha, stealing her locket in order to break Wanda’s spell. We see the “cop show” premise from outside Agatha’s mind, and how Billy keeps trying to break through to her, finally managing it with the spellwork.

In the present, Agatha emerges from the mud to talk to Billy. Jen and Lilia are gone, and he asks her how long she’s known who he was. Agatha admits she suspected from the beginning. They learn that the sigil has finally been destroyed and Agatha teases Billy about what he truly wants on the Road, figuring out that he’s looking for his brother. She tells him that she’s still needed for this quest since Billy is not fully in control on his abilities and she already has experience with this. The two continue toward the final test on the Road.

Commentary

There are a lot of great choices made by this episode, so let’s get into them.

First, the choice to make William Kaplan Jewish is important on several fronts: Billy Kaplan is Jewish in comics text because, according to the most common backstory, Magneto is the father of Wanda and Pietro Maximoff. So while we have no indication that the Maximoffs of the MCU have this lineage, the choice to make the life that Billy overtakes one of Jewish descent effectively keeps that background for the character.

It’s also excellent because it allows them to use William’s bar mitzvah as the springboard for all these massive changes, which is both textually accurate—according to Jewish law, William has become a man and is now responsible for his actions—and a great way of having all these bits and pieces coalesce at once. The presence of Lilia makes perfect sense; it indicates that William is into witchy/magic things well before Billy drops into his body, and it’s common for parents to engage entertainers for bar or bat mitzvahs that play into their children’s interests. Fortune tellers aren’t uncommon in this at all.

There’s also receiving the aliyah at the bar mitzvah, where the young man/woman/person in question reads a portion from the Torah before their community and sometimes discusses their reason for choosing the passage, and what lessons they believe are present in the text. William appears to be reading a passage pertaining to Nadab and Abihu, sons of Aaron, who were struck down for bringing “alien” fire into the community’s offering to God. I’m guessing not too much thought was put into this choice at the scripting level aside from “two brothers who get in trouble with the Almighty for going off-book,” but it makes me wish we’d heard William’s thoughts behind choosing this passage. It’s one that tends to divide scholars and students in terms of the reasoning behind their deaths, and I’m curious as to what William made of the story.

The idea that William and Billy are in some ways aligned brings up a lot of questions for me, including how much of Billy’s person is suffused with William’s in some way. In this version of events, Billy hasn’t actually been “alive” for that long—when he enters William’s body, he was essentially “born” in Westview a few weeks ago? Days? Which makes me assume that there are plenty of parts to William’s person that Billy accidentally absorbed just by virtue of occupying his body. For instance, I get the impression that William probably already knew he was gay, which then makes it possible that Billy’s queerness doesn’t entirely originate with him. And I love that, in concept? This idea that we don’t really know which parts are which, and how that must feel to Billy, who still can’t remember William’s life before he arrived.

I also love the juxtaposition of Billy and Eddie’s relationship to Agatha and Rio’s because it’s great to find multiple queer relationships in a story, but moreso when those relationships show a range of possibilities for queer romance. Billy and Eddie are so very young and sweet and figuring things out, next to Agatha and Rio’s ancient and forever toxic, fighty antagonism. I know which one I prefer, but queers deserve multiple options at once, and we don’t often get it.

We have the return of Ralph Bohner, whose identity was disappointing to me in how WandaVision played it out, but damn if it isn’t great to watch Evan Peters mess around in the part. There’s also Agatha’s “Bohner Family Reunion” shirt later in the episode, so there are endless gifts on this one. And the jokes about his online handles. If he’s going to be a punchline in this iteration, that’s pretty much the only way to deal with it.

But the best part is that we finally get to see exactly how Wanda’s spell had Agatha interacting with Westview, and the answer is so much better than I’d hoped. She’s just out there fully hallucinating her surroundings with every scene, and roping her neighbors into it despite the fact that they have no idea what she’s dreamt up. From the outside, it looks like the worst overacting possible, and Hahn doesn’t back down for a second. They seemingly let Joe Locke break on camera during the phony interrogation and why not? It’s easy to believe that Billy wouldn’t be able to hold it together either.

So that’s the backstory of Billy Maximoff. I’m admittedly not very interested in finding Tommy—he’s the least interesting of Wanda’s kids by far—but it makes sense that that Billy would want back the only member of his family that might be out there somewhere at the moment. Hopefully they won’t have to overtake another body to get him there.

Tarot Readings and Witchy Thoughts

• I know they didn’t want to recast William for the bar mitzvah scenes, but it’s very silly to have a twenty-year-old playing thirteen—which was true for all the other kids at the party, for that matter. Thirteen-year-olds are tiny! They do not seem like young adults at all!

• There are posters for things that Disney either has rights to or require no rights for on William’s wall, with a couple exceptions. The most noticeable one is a poster with a pirate ship for a movie called The Goofballs—clearly meant to be an alt-universe version of The Goonies.

• The bits of Agatha’s history that Billy finds online are very 2005-Doctor-Who in their photoshop silliness and joining Agatha up with amusing historical events.

• Really do love that Agatha attempts to wipe some of the mud/pitch coating off of herself once she’s emerged because that’s the thing that folks don’t usually do in movies or TV and it drives me nuts? Who is cool just wandering around coated head to toe in slime, it’s too distracting.

We’ve only got two more weeks. The end of the Road is near.