Last time, on Agatha All Along...Teen killed absolutely everyone.
Seems like time for a flashback. And if Teen's your favorite character in the show like he is ours, you're getting your wish for the focus to just be on him for a little while. In what's a really cool transition, you go from Teen wearing his blue Maximoff crown as Wiccan to a blue kippah. Hebrew recitations are heard in the background, and formal preparations are being made. We're at Teen's bar mitzvah, with his parents.
If this doesn't seem correct, it isn't. After all, Wanda's not really into anything but witchcraft, and she didn't marry a kindly looking blond bearded guy. The name on the Bat Mitzvah program says William Kaplan. What's at play here? Teen goes through the motions of the bat mitzvah and heads into the party portion of the evening carefree and looking quite at home.
He walks into a tarot reading booth (which seems just a bit odd at this type of occasion) and it's Lillia. She's there to make a few bucks telling the kids they'll live long and prosper, basically. But when she takes Teen/William's hand, something is different. Her face grows concerned, the lights flicker. His life line is broken into two parts. She knows it's bad news, but she masks it as a time of life changes, a 'new you'. This isn't a party trick anymore. She pulls one tarot card, the Tower Reversed, before she flashes with recognition. 'I think I remember something.' Teen's not having fun anymore, and Lillia issues a rather ominous warning to enjoy the now. As soon as he leaves the tent, she takes a wood piece and scrawls...the sigil. She places it in the jacket Teen left behind and hands it to someone else, having completely forgotten everything that happened.
Just as soon as that happens, someone comes over the loudspeaker to announce that everyone needs to evacuate, as everyone gets emergency alert texts on their phones that say they need to evacuate and return home. Teen's 'parents' race home with him, as Teen actually locates the sigil. Looking back they can see the red light of Wanda's Eastview destruction - and while they're looking at that, his mom narrowly misses hitting another car, and they careen down a hill, hitting a tree, which directly impacts Teen's seat. His mom and dad wake up frantic to get help, and from all sides it looks like that's it for him. Then, a snippet of Wanda's voice saying goodnight to her sons, and something enters him, reviving him.
Help arrives soon after and Teen's brought to the hospital. Doctors say there's nothing wrong physically, but refer them to a psychologist. It's the old amnesia trope, this time with a body swap. Shortly after he's awake he finds he can read thoughts, and that he's going home. That goes as you'd expect, everyone strong emotions and Teen confused about literally everything. Even the dog knows something's up. Life's well and truly ruined.
Cut to three years later, and Teen's on a date with what seems like a pretty long term boyfriend. Teen hears him thinking he's going to say "I love you" and interrupts their kiss. He doesn't want to have any secrets, and he tells his boyfriend, Eddie that he can hear people's thoughts, if they're people he really cares about and the emotions are intense, and starts to relay the details of the car accident, including his death, and how he came back different. Eddie takes it remarkably well, and now with his secret out, he's free to tell Eddie that he loves him too. It's a tender moment in an otherwise dark episode.
It's not like Eddie doesn't have questions though, and he gets to the main one right away. "If you're not William Kaplan, who are you?" Cut to all William's musical posters gone and a large amount of research all over those walls instead. We see a brief youtube ad featuring Jen hawking her skin products, and then a YouTube video about the red bubble, or the anomaly. He recognizes it's a spell, but no one will talk about what happened that day, likely due to the intense amount of PTSD something like that would cause. Eventually though, through the power of the internet, they find someone who's willing to talk - Randall. (Quicksilver, as you know)
Randall describes what it was like living in the world of Wandavision, basically. The citizens of Eastview, being able to perceive themselves, but not control anything they said or did. Knowing who they were but not being able to cry out for help or live out their own lives, just watching themselves like they were on TV but in their head, as he points out. It's a perfect illustration of the intense amount of trauma Wanda caused for everyone else who participated in her world. I appreciate this because often Wanda's played as a tragic hero of a sort, but inflicting pain on people because of your trauma just isn't okay, even though it's hard not to do if you're suffering a great loss.
It's here in the show that I want to stop and say I think Agatha All Along may have made some mistakes. Randall's got a funny screen name and a funny trench coat and a funny hat, and he wants to meet all clandestine in a parking garage. It's very cartoony and very much seems like it's played for laughs. To be fair, he has been stuck in a television show life playing different versions of the same person across genres and eras, so maybe that's just another pond ripple, but to me, it seemed like after they pointed out how traumatizing the experience would be, they made light of it by treating his character as ridiculous instead of being empathetic through the lens.
Teen and Eddie manage to show off that Gen Z "rizz" and actually treat him like a human being and with kindness even if they are a little freaked out, but it still really blows a hole in something that should've been said about Wandavision originally. As sympathetic as she may be, Wanda was still the villain, ruining an entire town's lives to serve her purposes, however noble she thought they were.
But it's not all Wanda. Agatha stole his house, made him pretend to be her husband, and used him like a puppet. During this incredibly valid list of horrible things that were done to him, Eddie mentions that he was a bad influence on Wanda and Vision's kids, and Teen finally gets some information that will help him figure out who he is, as Eddie reveals, to Teen's surprise, that they did have kids -- twin boys. One was a "speedster" and the other could read minds. Tommy and Billy. Suddenly, we know who he is, and so does he.
Back at home, he pieces it all together, while listening to Linda Wu's version of The Witches' Road and contemplating the sigil. When all signs point to Agatha, he does what any of us from the Plissken faction on would do, and Googles her. And there she is, in the background of tragedies and great moments in history alike. When he finally gets to the brujapedia part of the internet, he gets the really juicy bits - Agatha was the only known survivor of The Road.
And off we go, away from Westview, to find Agatha. With GPS and some mild Google skills, it's a short trip. He's got his spellbook, he's got someone on his side, and he's going to get answers. Upon arrival, we find out this is Agatha when she's playing true crime detective, and the familiar scene from before plays out again, only this time with it making a whole lot more sense. After the insanely amusing antics of detective Harkness, Teen releases the spell, and Agatha comes to, realizing nothing she was doing is real.
She throws him in the basement for awhile, and after some more ridiculousness that Hahn plays pitch perfect, they get to the point. Teen, aka William, aka Billy, wants to get to the Witches' Road. He says it's because he wants power. Agatha asks who he is, and though he says William Kaplan at first, he then relents, and reveals his true identity. He is Billy Maximoff.
Time to head back to the future. Agatha crawls out of the sucking mud and almost immediately she's back on her bullshit. Back at the scene of the crime, Billy's crushed the sigil and stood contemplating his powers. When the two meet, Agatha and Teen clear the air. He doesn't need power, and it doesn't interest him, but what he does want is to find his family. Meanwhile, Agatha's delighted at the prospect of someone so powerful and in what he's done, which only serves to disgust Teen more.
Agatha is pure Agatha here - making light of her coven's deaths, Teen's trauma, and basically everyone else's suffering because all she's interested in is herself and the power that she can get if she makes it through the trials and to the end of the Road. There's plenty of horrible, irredeemable characters in shows, especially of late, but the line between love to hate and just pure hatred is a fine one. Kathryn Hahn manages to ride the knife's edge between completely unlikeable and sympathetic and add a comic flair that could only come from her.
This time though, she's trying to convince Teen to overlook what she is and help her get what she wants. Teen/Billy knows that he's insanely powerful on his own, and tries to shake her off by saying he doesn't need her, and that's where Agatha gets her hooks in, pointing out that he doesn't know how to control his power, and that given that he killed the rest of the coven, he's just like her. She beckons him down the road with "Last one there is a nice person" and off they go. This road's had plenty of twists and turns but perhaps nothing quite like this. See you next time.
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