In the seventh episode of WandaVision, the real villain of Westview revealed her hidden name: Agatha Harkness. After pretending to be Wanda Maximoff’s “nosy neighbor” named Agnes for the majority of the season, Harkness finally showed her true colors, in all their purple glory. It was the defining twist of the series, adding a new perspective on the show’s grieving protagonist while introducing the wicked witch who had been manipulating her all along.

More than three years later, the sixth episode of Agatha All Along has revealed the hidden name of another pivotal character: Billy Maximoff. Well, really both of his names: Billy Maximoff and Billy Kaplan. And while the big reveal in the WandaVision spinoff was less a twist than an inevitability, Billy’s backstory recontextualizes the events of Agatha All Along and raises the stakes of the series as it enters the final third of its nine-episode run.

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With just about any Marvel project, hiding plot or character details from the audience is no easy feat. What with set leaks, script leaks, or actors with loose lips, spoilers can come from all corners of the internet. The studio goes to extreme lengths to maintain secrecy, to the point that actors might not even know what show they’re working on until they’re seated for their first table read. But there’s only so much you can keep from the audience when all the source material is readily available in comic book stores, with explainers and Wikipedia entries a few clicks away. The fan theories aren’t always right, but often they are.

WandaVision creator Jac Schaeffer was well aware of these challenges when she returned to make the spinoff to her Emmy-winning series. Just as many Marvel fans suspected Agnes’s true identity in WandaVision before it was unveiled, theories surrounding Joe Locke’s mysterious “Teen” character pointed to Billy before Agatha All Along’s first episode premiered. But for Schaeffer, the storytelling behind the reveal is the paramount priority. 

“It’s about how we peel back the layers,” Schaeffer told Entertainment Weekly. “It’s our job to make the reveals exciting and satisfying. Now when I see the theories, I still get a little nervous, but I have the experience of WandaVision, a voice in my head that’s like, ‘Well, no one knows the how.’”

To Schaeffer and Co.’s credit, the reveal was indeed satisfying. While Billy’s name was mentioned for the first time in this week’s Episode 6, the real reveal of his character came at the conclusion of last week’s installment. Episode 5 ended with Agatha telling Teen, “You’re so much like your mother,” just before Teen used his powers for the first time and a crown—which looked awfully similar to the one worn by the Scarlet Witch—formed on his head. In addition, the credits were accompanied by a very purposeful (and just a little on-the-nose) needle drop: “You Should See Me in a Crown” by Billie Eilish. 

The sixth episode, “Familiar by Thy Side,” goes back—like, all the way back—to the events of WandaVision, long before Teen met Agatha and started a coven with the infamous witch. It begins on the day of Billy Kaplan’s bar mitzvah. The celebration is going smoothly until reports about the Westview Anomaly force everyone to return to their homes—which, for Billy and his loving parents, means Eastview. As the Kaplans drive past the chaos in Westview, Billy’s mom (understandably) gets distracted by the massive hex around the town as it begins to shrink, and she crashes the car into a tree along the road. Just as Wanda is releasing Westview’s residents from their captivity, letting go of the magic that was keeping her husband, Vision, and her two sons, Billy and Tommy, alive in the process, Billy Kaplan is dying from the impact of the crash. Moments after his heart stops beating, it suddenly starts again, and he utters a single name: Tommy.

Granted a second chance at life, Billy wakes up with the ability to read others’ minds, and he has no recollection of his life before the accident. It takes three years—and a surprise appearance from Ralph Bohner (Evan Peters, who’s having a lot of fun reprising his WandaVision role)—for him to understand the nature of his uncanny predicament. At a secretive meeting held in a parking garage, Ralph tells Billy and Billy’s boyfriend everything about the actual events in Westview, which are otherwise known to the public as an “Avengers training exercise.” From Wanda’s sitcom fantasies to Agatha lowering the property value of his home, Ralph spares no details, and he eventually shares what he knows about the mind-reading Billy Maximoff and his speedster brother Tommy. And so Billy goes to Westview to track down Agatha and learn more, bringing the story back to where Agatha All Along started in the season premiere.

“Familiar by Thy Side” is effectively the origin story of the hero who will come to be known as Wiccan. It’s about as strange and confusing a backstory as the comics version, though it’s told in a much quicker and cleaner way. Billy and Tommy Maximoff’s comic book origins are notoriously convoluted, due in large part to the decades that passed between the characters’ births (and subsequent deaths) in Vision and the Scarlet Witch in the 1980s and their reincarnations as Billy Kaplan and Tommy Shepherd in Young Avengers in the mid-2000s. The Maximoff boys—created by writer Steve Englehart and artist Richard Howell in 1986—were originally born through Wanda’s magic, just as they were when WandaVision adapted them for TV. It wasn’t until writer Allan Heinberg and artist Jim Cheung repurposed the comics characters for Kaplan and Shepherd’s origins, almost 20 years later, that they became fully realized superheroes.

The fact that Agatha All Along is even going for this whole soul-transferal story is something of a surprise, as it would have been simpler to just alter the lore rather than strive for comic book accuracy. But despite the winding path that it took to fully realize this origin, from actor Julian Hilliard playing young Billy Maximoff in WandaVision and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness to Locke becoming Billy Kaplan in Agatha All Along, it’s a narrative choice that fits into the magical corner of the MCU that Schaeffer has created.

Thanks to the foundation laid in WandaVision, Agatha All Along is able to simplify Billy’s origins to some extent. In the comics, the Maximoff twins are connected to the infamous Mephisto (who’s basically just the devil). They exist only when Wanda is thinking of them, and they eventually get absorbed into another demon’s body to produce terrifying demon-baby arms. It’s a lot. Many years later, Billy Kaplan’s powers manifest after he gets bullied in school, but he discovers his relation to Wanda and Tommy only after teaming up with the Young Avengers and doing some serious soul-searching. It’s difficult to fully explain this sequence of events without really getting into it, as often is the case when you expand the comic book timeline across decades of stories told by creators who regularly retcon Marvel’s history.

In Episode 6, Agatha summarizes what Billy Maximoff has achieved in simple enough terms, with everything now rooted in witchcraft. “You survived, like witches have been doing for centuries,” Agatha tells Billy. “You saw an opportunity, an empty vessel, and you moved in.”

As Billy himself says in this episode, the real Billy Kaplan died in the car crash, and “Teen” has been trying to figure out who he really is ever since. Until this week, his real name had been hidden—censored on-screen any time he tried to speak it—and his motives for wanting to travel the perilous Witches’ Road were unclear. The same sigil that was shielding his name was revealed to be the work of Lilia, who after reading his fortune at his bar mitzvah placed the sigil on Billy to protect him from any witches who might come looking for him in the future. While there’s still more to be revealed whenever Lilia finds her way out of the mud pit, the timing of the sigil placement also retroactively explains why Wanda couldn’t locate Billy’s soul in this universe in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. (It doesn’t make that movie any less of a mess, nor does it account for the whereabouts of Tommy’s soul, but Agatha All Along might continue to fill some of the film’s narrative gaps as the season proceeds.)

Before the big reveal, Billy acted as if he was little more than a fan of witches, eager to learn from the legendary Agatha Harkness and gain power for himself in the process. With his secret out in the open, Agatha asks him the all-important question directly: “What does Billy Maximoff want at the end of the Road?”

Agatha goes down the list of options herself, eliminating the possibility of Billy searching for Wanda or Vision before landing on the correct answer: finding Tommy.

“He’s out there somewhere,” Billy tells Agatha. “I can sense him. I just … can’t find him.”

With three episodes left in the season, Agatha All Along has made Billy’s quest as important as Agatha’s, as the duo begrudgingly travels the remainder of the Road together, with the rest of the coven either dead or missing. After being little more than a passenger to start their journey, Billy is in the driver’s seat as much as Agatha is. And although the show’s connections to the Scarlet Witch always existed, for obvious reasons, there’s now an even stronger tie to the narrative thread that started in WandaVision and continued in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. In the 2022 film, Wanda broke bad as she let the Darkhold lead her down a villainous path to reunite with Billy and Tommy, even if it meant sacrificing others’ lives in the process. With Wanda dead, Billy is finally back in the flesh, albeit the flesh of some poor kid who died on the same day he became a man. 

Now, Billy is picking up right where his mother left off, searching for his brother through the use of magic and pushing aside anyone who stands in his way. While Teen’s identity has been the biggest reveal of the season thus far, there’s still plenty of time for it to be topped. If Agatha All Along continues to follow the recipe that Schaeffer whipped up in the magical world of WandaVision, the series might have another trick or two up its sleeve before Billy and Agatha reach the end of the Witches’ Road.

Daniel Chin

Daniel writes about TV, film, and scattered topics in sports that usually involve the New York Knicks. He often covers the never-ending cycle of superhero content and other areas of nerd culture and fandom. He is based in Brooklyn.