In WandaVision, creator and lead writer Jac Schaeffer firmly established herself as a maestro of the miniseries, demonstrating a meta-layered understanding of television in a way that both relished in and critiqued the form. In Agatha All Along, the writer/director proves herself a master puppetmaster, playing with the audience’s assumptions, and gleefully usurping them. The sixth and most recent episode, ‘Familiar by Thy Side’ was like a victory lap for how well this has been achieved in the series, following the rug-pull in the final seconds of the preceding episode, ‘Darkest Hour / Wake Thy Power.’
From the beginning, this tale of Agatha Harkness—and her attempt to reclaim her monstrous glory before her ill-fated encounter with Wanda Maximoff—has been portrayed as Agatha’s manipulation of all those around her. From the people she forcefully recruits for her trip to the Witch’s Road, via the way she takes advantage of the nameless puppy-like teenager (known as Teen) who so desperately wants her approval, to the shocking moments of absolute evil she displays, it’s been a program about repeatedly upsetting our helpless desire to see the murderous witch redeemed. Until now.
It’s really enjoyable that the next sentence I’m writing is not: “Since it turns out it was the Teen manipulating Agatha all along!” Because it’s much more delightfully complicated than that. After this week’s episode—the longest so far, at 47 minutes after last week’s punchy 30—we discovered that everything we thought we knew so far has been viewed through two entirely different yet overlapping fogged lenses. Both Agatha and…Billy Maximoff begin to understand they’ve been successfully manipulating the other. And ho boy, had the show been manipulating us, misdirecting us into debating over whether Teen was Agatha’s son.
This played out at a measured pace that felt strikingly different to everything else the series has previously offered. It has been, if anything, manic in its pace.
The opening of episode six, with the Bar Mitzvah of a (not very convincingly) younger version of Teen—now suddenly named as William Kaplan—plays out like something from an entirely different show. We see this Westview resident’s arrival, his singing from the Torah, his proud family, and then lengthy sequences at the after-party during which William visits a hired psychic in her curtained booth. She, it turns out, is Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone), who when reading his palm is suddenly taken aback by not only realizing he has a split life line, but a sudden vision of a tarot card, the Tower. The witch is deeply unnerved, awkwardly tries to smooth the situation over, and then creates a sigil which she hides in his coat. A sigil that causes her to immediately forget him.
The after-party is called off when a warning comes in that something is happening to the dome over the town of Westview, which is of course the final events of WandaVision, and distracted by the light show, the family car veers off the road and brutally crashes into a tree. The parents are injured, but William is killed, his father rushing to a passing police car to try to get help. By the time he returns with a cop (who is, seemingly by no coincidence, yet another of the witches—Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn)), William appears to have miraculously come back to life, albeit with no memory.
We then jump ahead a couple of years, and here jump ahead of a lot of calm and enjoyable plot about the Teen and his boyfriend, to the point where not-William begins to get some idea who he might actually be: one of the two (fictional?) sons of Wanda, created as part of her sitcom idyll spell. We later learn that in the moment of his “dying” as the spell is broken, he took advantage of this suddenly dead body and involuntarily leapt into it. He is Billy Maximoff, he wants to know what happened, and he believes that Agatha is the one person who can tell him. Although, she’s under the influence of Wanda’s spell still, currently thinking she’s a True Detective-style cop.
So in this barrage of events, we have to entirely rewrite our understanding of the opening episode. That sequence in which Agatha is talking to Aubrey Plaza’s Rio Vidal (although now I’m pretty sure she wasn’t), when she hears a break-in upstairs, the chase sequence, the interrogation, staring at the one-way glass which we now know was a painting… We knew it wasn’t real at the time, because we knew she wasn’t Jodie Foster solving a grizzly crime, but we didn’t have the means of translating it.
This then becomes even more exciting when we realize that Billy was never desperate to become a familiar, and wasn’t—as surely everyone had come to completely believe—trying to work out if Agatha was his mother. He always knew she wasn’t. Oh, and we were second-guessing the show, wondering if Agatha was thinking he was her son, while it turns out she pretty much figured out who he was from the start. Rio’s previous declaration of “He’s not yours, you know,” was the cruelest bluff of all.
We’re also now cast into a mad confusion of questions over just how much Rio has ever really been there. She certainly wasn’t in the interrogation, and almost definitely wasn’t in Agatha’s house during Billy’s break-in, and it seems very probable that she wasn’t participating in the epic fight between the two of them after Billy was kidnapped. Why? Because remember when she slices her hand on the knife as they fight over it? Why exactly was it suddenly healed soon after, given Agatha didn’t have any of her magic? Not ever being cut in the first place seems far more likely, in hindsight. My guess is she doesn’t really show up until the witches summon her on the Road. (It would also explain why Billy takes the credit for breaking her spell in the second episode, when we’d watched Rio do it.)
To learn, right at the end of the sixth episode, that not only was Billy always intending to find his missing brother, Tommy, but that Agatha was always suspicious of who he might be, is so delightful. It’s us who were in the dark, and both of them who were messing with us, as well as each other. All our moments of thinking we’d gleaned some insight—even if we claim to have guessed he might be Wanda’s kid—leave us spinning.
Oh, and how marvelous was it that Billy spent episode five with that blue headband on his head, that would become a Wanda-like blue crown by the end?
And we haven’t even touched on the excellent parking lot scene with Ralph “Mr Bonerifici” Bohner (Evan Peters), who played the meta-meta role of Quicksilver/Piertro Maximoff in WandaVision, following on from having played the roll in the non-canon X-Men movies, but not the MCU.
It’s rather splendid to now wonder if even all of this could be bluffs, and that it’s almost inevitable that there might be more twists and turns to come over the final three episodes, the last two hitting on Halloween. I am very much here for being wrong all over again.