One thing the MCU has managed to do well thanks to its gargantuan scope and fifteen year plus reign is to really go deep and flesh out some impressively drawn out origin stories. Take Captain America for example – sure the basics of how he came to be was laid out in the first film, The First Avenger, but it also took The Avengers and The Winter Soldier to give us a fully formed Steve Rogers and what else was Spider-Man’s MCU trilogy but a long and winding road to get him closer to a more classic iteration of the character.
However, arguably the grand champ of a multi movie build up has to be Wanda Maximoff who first popped up 2014 and didn’t get referred to as the Scarlet Witch (not to mention snagging a comic accurate costume) until WandaVision in 2021. Well, like mother like son I guess, because the riddle of the Maximus twins seems to be rivaling her epic arc thanks to Agatha All Along, who finally let the cat out of the bag last episode with the reveal that the Teen is in fact a grown Billy Maximoff. But how could this have happened? What plot machinations led to this reveal? And what does it all mean?
Not to worry, folks, Episode 6 has got you covered.
In the wake of the reveal that the Teen is actually somehow Billy Maximoff, we take a episode-long stroll down memory lane in order to backtrack and discover how such a thing is possible and we’re spirited back to the time when a big, red hex still looms over the town of Westview. In Eastview, young Billy Kaplan is celebrating his Bar Mitzvah when he bumps into Lilia who has been hired to tell fortunes at the party and after seeing something screwy in his future, decides to protect him with that sigil spell which causes her to forget him immediately after. However after a report that suggests an evacuation due to something dramatic happening with the Westview Hex, but while Billy and his parents witness Wanda’s creation shrinking, they have an accident that leaves Billy dead… until he isn’t.
In the aftermath, doctors and psychiatrists claim that Billy is suffering from amnesia as he struggles to adjust back into normal life, but he keeps the fact that he can now read minds from everyone until he confesses everything to his boyfriend three years later. However, by this point, Billy is determined to discover what the hell happened to him that day and manages to track down an unlikely insider to what occured within that that Hex – Ralph Bohner.
Not only does a jumpy Bohner fill Billy in on Scarlet Witch, the Vision and their “fabricated” twin boys, he tells him all about Agatha too, but as Billy realises that when Billy Kaplan died, Billy Maximoff’s essence entered and took possession of his body – but if that’d what happened to one of the Maximoff children, what happened to the other; what happened to Tommy?
After Agatha manages to crawl out of the bog that Billy had her hurled into, his plan to walk the Witches’ Road becomes clear – while the duplicitous witch wants her powers returned, Billy walks the road to find his brother.
If you needed any more proof that Agatha All Along was a direct sequel to WandaVision (although by this point you really shouldn’t) the long awaited reveal of Billy Maximoff really tops off matters nicely. Not only do the earliest seeds of it link up intimately with that earlier show with characters and events being referenced all the way through, but the very fact that the origin of Billy Maximoff is given its very own episode very much in the same way that Wanda did near the end of her own show, which seems extraordinarily fitting considering Billy’s parentage and power set.
So we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming of trials, costume changes and snark in order to get some long overdue back story done on one of its most enigmatic players and while it admittedly ditches the established formula and tone of the series in order to clear up some things, there’s more than enough surprises to make this diversion from the Witches’ Road very worthwhile.
Basically, Joe Locke gets the space he needs to finally expand on who Billy both is and was as a young Jewish boy who has come of age and is looking forward to the rest of his life before the fateful car accident essentially turns his dead body into a vessel for the essence of Billy Maximoff. From here, we basically follow this new version of Billy struggle with both his identity, memory and sexuality as poor Maximoff not only has to try and pick up where Kaplan left off, but he has to wrestle with what he remembers from before as well which all plays off as a fitting metaphor for the identity issues kids can have to face as they muscle their way through adolescence.
The episode is a great source of some foreshadowing cameos too as Patti LuPone’s Lilia, Ali Ahn’s Alice and Sasheer Zamata’s Jennifer all pop up here and there and it’s an interesting point that it was Lilia who put the protection sigil on Billy in the first place after a chance meeting. However, as cameos go, the grand champion turns out to be a face from WandaVision who proved to be fairly controversial when he first appeared – but even so, it’s a genuinely pleasant surprise to welcome back Evan Peters as the bumbling Quicksilver imposter, Ralph Bohner, who seems to have lost a few more marbles after being under the thrall of Agatha. Watching Peters do anything is always fun, but watching him now play Bohner as some overly paranoid Deep Throat type (the informer, not the porno) gives the returning character a weird sort of legitimacy that Ben Kingsley’s similarly controversial Trevor Slattery received after popping up in Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings or Kat Dennings’ Darcy got after moving on from the Thor films into WandaVision.
Finally, we also get to see the first episode again through the eyes of Billy while Agatha was still locked in that True Detective style reality and once we finally get back to the present, we find that the titular witch has survived being dumped in the sinking bog and now finds that she has to now regard Billy as something of an equal. But as they trade threats and barbs in true, Agatha All Along fashion, there’s a very real sense that now all the secrets are out, there’s less trust between them than ever with Harkness repeatedly calling his bluff by solidly maintaining that he’s essentially a little goody two shoes, just like his mother.
Of course, anyone who has seen Doctor Strange And The Multiverse Of Madness knows that Wanda wasn’t that good and Billy’s final line of the episode (“I’m not that nice.”) may hint that there’s still a chance that he could still embrace the darkness in order to be reunited with his brother.
However, with only three episodes to go, there’s still plenty of questions to be resolved: where is Rio while all this is going on and who the hell is she? Are Lilia and Jennifer really dead? Is the Salem Seven still a threat and does Agatha have any more schemes up her sleeves? As the Witches’ Road comes to an end in around two weeks, expect some rapid-fire spell casting from the writers, but until then, a stroll down Billy’s memory lane proves to be a nice and timely fork from the main path.
🌟🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 