“Agatha All Along” Season 1, Episode 6 Review

(*This article contains major spoilers. Read at your own discretion.*)

The sixth episode of the “Wandavision” spinoff, “Agatha All Along,” aired on Wednesday, October 16th. The episode, titled “Familiar By Thy Side,” unveiled Joe Locke’s Teen’s complicated past and featured a surprising cameo.

This week’s episode follows the absolute chaos of last week’s one. Last week, Agatha killed Ali Ahn’s Alice, and Teen drowned fellow witches, Agatha, Lilia and Jen in a pile of mud with his superpowers as electric blue magic sparked from his hands.

While Teen’s identity wasn’t truly a surprise, the way it was revealed was definitely one with Billie Eilish’s “You Should See Me in a Crown” blasting as Wanda’s iconic crown formed on his head.

Episode six begins with Teen, who goes by William Kaplan here, celebrating his bar mitzvah. Patti LuPone’s Lilia Calderu is there reading fortunes. Her magical abilities cause her to declare that William’s “lifeline is broken in two.” After being startled for a moment, it seems that Lilia decides to keep William safe by placing a sigil on him to prevent witches from hearing or remembering his name.

Things then take a turn for the worse when the guests are alerted to an emergency regarding the anomaly in Westview, aka Wanda. As William and his parents drive home, the audience can see the giant red magical bubble encapsulating Westview.

When William’s parents, Rebecca and Jeff, get distracted by the shrinking of the red force field, Rebecca accidentally crashes the car. While both Rebecca and Jeff are unharmed, William is unconscious and unresponsive.

Jeff rushes to find help in the form of police officer Alice Wu-Gulliver and William wakes up, calling out for Tommy, his missing brother. When Wanda’s Westview abruptly came to an end, Billy Maximoff’s soul used William Kaplan as a vessel. It is unclear if any part of William Kaplan’s soul remains.

When Teen returns to his house after the incident, he finds that he has the magical ability to read minds. Later, William/Billy and his wonderful supportive boyfriend, Eddie played by Miles Gutierrez-Riley, meet with Ralph Bohner, Sparky’s murderer, to uncover what truly happened in Westview three years ago.

Ralph, played by Evan Peters, was the fake Quicksilver of Wanda’s controlled Westview. However, Ralph revealed that he was under the extreme watch of Wanda and Agatha. In fact, it was so terrible that as soon as the spell was broken, Ralph fled out of Westview and let Agatha continue living in and destroying his house.

Ralph reveals that Wanda had two missing twins, Tommy and Billy, the latter one of which had mind-reading powers. William is fully convinced that he is Billy, Wanda’s son.

Once their meeting with the paranoid Ralph concludes, William/Billy returns home to find out where his brother is. With Lorna Wu’s ballad playing in the background, it seems that the universe is telling William to travel on the Witches’ Road, and William doesn’t hesitate for a second.

The first thing he needs for the spell is a personal item, which he decides to find by breaking into Agatha’s house, which is actually Ralph’s home. There’s a hilarious nod to Ralph as Agatha interrogates Billy/William wearing a Bohner Family Reunion shirt.

In this recollection of the introduction, the audience is able to see just how much of an unreliable narrator Agatha is. Agatha’s memory of meeting Teen and how she actually met Teen are two starkly different versions.

In fact, the show goes as far as to make the audience believe that Agatha is beyond unreliable. She is truly delusional.

The scene flashes back to the Witches’ Road where Agatha manages to crawl out of the quicksand mud Teen threw her into. She hints that Jen and Lilia were unlucky and died trapped in the mud, but both Teen and she seem to throw these two possibly significant deaths to the side.

The episode ends with Agatha revealing she has known Teen’s true identity for a while. She instructs Billy to never be sorry for doing what he had to in order to survive. Billy reveals that he decided to head down the Witches’ Road in order to find his brother, Tommy.

The Disney+ miniseries continues to reveal the coven’s mysterious backstories; however, some pieces of the puzzle are still missing. Hopefully with the last three episodes Agatha’s true past and Rio Vidal personality (and where she currently is) will be fully revealed.

As the miniseries has continually improved with each episode, the final three episodes are bound to be extraordinary.

Episode 7 of “Agatha All Along” will air on Disney on Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024, with an episode premiering weekly. The final two episodes will be released on October 30th, fitting for the spooky show.

Rating: 4/5

Sarah Taylor is a second-year majoring in telecommunications. To contact her, email smt6314@psu.edu.