‘Agatha All Along’ Episode 6 Recap: Teen’s Backstory Is Told And His Mission Is Revealed
SPOILER ALERT: This piece contains spoilers for Episode 6 of Agatha All Along.
After the epic ending of Agatha All Along Episode 5 that revealed Teen’s true identity set to Billie Eilish’s “You Should See Me in a Crown,” Episode 6, titled “Familiar By Thy Side,” of the Marvel television series dove deeper into Teen’s past to make connections to how he got where he is today.
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Teen was considered a Familiar, or amateur witch, until his blue powers crackled to life out of his anger at the death of Alice (Ali Ahn) in Episode 5 after Agatha siphoned off her powers in the trial testing Agatha.
The opening scene of Episode 6 shows Teen getting ready for synagogue donning a blue yarmulke, where he performs the rights for his bar mitzvah, or thirteenth birthday party that marks a boy’s transition into manhood. His parents (Paul Adelstein and Maria Dizzia) follow him down an aisle before he reads the Torah and chants.
He goes to get a palm reading from none other than Lilia Calderu in a tent at the party afterward. She predicted a “long journey” ahead of him, one of “transformation and…” The lights flicker in the tent as Lilia reveals, “Your lifeline is broken in two” after she sees the goth version of teen in her crystal ball.
Lilia said “The tower of reversed” before Billy brought her back to palm reading. “I just remembered something I think,” she said. Teen didn’t stay to get his palm reading finished. Lilia called him a “good egg” and told him to enjoy the “now” which is the only thing that’s certain. After Teen left, she sketched the mark that matches the sigil onto a block of wood and placed it in his suit coat pocket, which he left behind.
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She exits the tent and gives the coat to a woman who looks like Agatha from the side profile, who is at the party for some reason, and she says she can’t remember which kid left it in her tent. Then, Billy’s father took the stage to say they heard “something was happening with the anomaly in Westview.” Phone alerts told people to go home, and the party was effectively dismantled. The Agatha-like figure might just have been Rebecca Kaplan, because she has Billy’s jacket as they flee the bar mitzvah.
As police raced toward the scene, Wanda’s voice could be heard over the radio airwaves. Billy pulls the wood block out of his coat pocket, looks at it and his parents get distracted by the hex shrinking. Billy calls them to attention as they veer away from a large pickup truck and swerve off the road into a tree. Billy is unconscious in the back seat, his parents alive still. His face is covered in blood.
He lies unconscious, and then the soul of Billy Maximoff seems to enter his body as he calls out “Tommy!” The cop that approaches the scene is Alice. Next, Billy is in an ambulance headed to the hospital with his parents, not remembering what happened.
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His hospital bracelet reads Kaplan, William. His dad calls him “Buddy” and he waits for Billy to point out that he doesn’t normally do that. It seems like Billy can read their minds because he hears their voices as they share a look. He tells them not to fight, but his dad says they aren’t.
His amnesia is supposed to subside soon. Armed with bouquets and get-well balloons, the parents walk him back into their house, and while he looks at photos on the wall, it seems he feels out of place. Then the dog Greg catches Billy by surprise and barks at him like he is a different person.
Billy yells at his parents to stop worrying because he can hear their thoughts again as they voice concerns about him in their inner monologues. “Maybe I just need to see my room,” he says to his mom, but she doesn’t say that out loud. He volunteers to go up alone.
Billy’s bedroom contains posters of Harry Houdini, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and more. He stares at a photo of him with his parents in what looks like Hawaii. Then he looks in the mirror and says “My name is William Kaplan,” three times as if trying to convince himself.
Three years later, he sits in a car with a young man who looks to be his boyfriend (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), who grabs the sigil puzzle block and asks him what it is. The boy asks if Billy has solved it, but he says it’s impossible. Billy hears the guy thinking of saying “I love you” to him. He hints that something happens to him when he is around people who have intense feelings. He says he died the night of the car accident, and that he was different when he came back.
“I’m not William Kaplan, at least not entirely,” he tells him. He still doesn’t remember anything from before the accident. He wants him to know this and the true him because “I love you, too.”
“If you’re not William Kaplan, who are you?” Teen’s boyfriend asks. Teen takes the guy up to his room to look at photos, a dossier he compiled. The boyfriend says he thought the hex was some “Avengers training exercise gone wrong.” Jennifer Kale’s ad comes up as he looks for a video and shows the boyf the runes in the red haze of the hex, calling it a spell, witchcraft. Billy found a guy who used to live there who he was going to meet the next day.
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The guy — @bohnerific69 — a creepy guy in a trenchcoat hiding in the shadows — suggested a low level of a parking garage, and he removed something from a security camera. Teen goes to confront the person, who is Ralph Bohner (Evan Peters), aka Wanda’s false brother Pietro from the hex. He tells him to call him Randall. He remembers Wanda’s hex, and when Billy says Wanda Maximoff, Ralph reacts angrily.
Billy hears his thoughts, worrying that he’s going to ask about Agatha Harkness. He then sprays witch repellent on them. “Mr. Bohnorific, I just want to talk!” He told them it would cost extra.
“Agatha hijacked my life,” he says, wielding an object that looks to maybe also ward off witches. “She called me her husband, but I was her puppet. She stole my house, completely ruined the market value. She made me do horrible things. I kept a woman hostage. I was a terrible influence on Wanda and Vision’s kids, and I poisoned a dog.”
“Woof,” Billy’s boyfriend says.
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Billy asks about Wanda’s kids, twins named Billy and Tommy as revealed by Bohnerific. Billy reacts to Tommy — “the little speedster and his mind-reading brother,” described by Bohner. When he asks what happened, Bohner says Wanda’s dead, Vision’s being sold for parts and the twins just disappeared. Bohner thinks the twins got sucked up into the red bubble like everything else.
This is when Billy learns that Agatha’s still in Westview under a spell. Billy thinks she’s harmless. “You seriously don’t know what kind of crazy that lady eats for breakfast,” Bohner says. He takes cash or offers half-off tickets for a show he is putting on, wanting to fill seats.
Billy’s father names his boyfriend Eddie, and Billy goes to his room “to do homework” instead of watching a psychological thriller movie like his mom offers. He listens to Lorna Wu’s version of the Ballad of the Witches Road on a record as he jots down notes about Wanda, Vision, Tommy and Billy Maximoff. He doodled the sigil on a sticky note surrounded by numbers and letters — starting with a 2, W, N and M if looked at counterclockwise from the top left corner. He circles his note that Agatha Harkness is still in Westview. A search for Agatha Harkness yields a “Did you mean Agatha Harper?” He finds her photo from googling witches who survived the Salem Witch Trials.
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On a web page, she is described as the “only known survivor of “The Witches Road,” which he reads about in a book that says a witch may “discover what’s missing” at the end of the path. He looks at his note that Tommy Maximoff is missing, and everything clicks. He wants to look for his brother. The record twirling looks a lot like that in the trial of the fourth episode — Alice’s trial. As Lorna croons “I’ll see you at the end,” Billy drives to Westview. He looks up a release spell, which requires an important personal item as he sits by the ruins of Wanda’s old house. He stares up into Agatha’s house, realizing he needs to break in.
A text message from Eddie reads “You’re my ‘black heart emoji’,” echoing a potential Mephisto connection or some other easter egg as we’ve seen black hearts referenced a few times now in the show with Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) and Sharon Davis (Debra Jo Rupp). Billy crawls through the upstairs window of Agatha’s house and looks through her closet and wardrobe for something personal. He pulls out her broach with the maiden, mother and crone on it, knocking over a lamp which brought Agatha upstairs.
The scene where she chases him replays, and he checks to see if she’s okay and begs her not to call the police because he can’t have a criminal record. He says he’ll stop if she stops. Then he runs into the open front door of Sharon Davis’ white Mercedes instead of getting hit by it. She calls him a “hooligan”.
Back at her house, Agatha, still in detective mode, wears a Bohner Family Reunion T-shirt. She also has a pair of pliers in her pocket that she pretends is a gun. “I came here with an unorthodox spell to release you,” Teen tells her. “Can we maybe not with the physical violence?” as she hits him on the way to get him a glass of water. He plays along with her detective bit.
“I feel like you typecast me as the mouthy teen that didn’t kill the victim,” she said. This interrogation, which took place in her home, was what she envisioned as happening in the room at the police station, hence the painting on the wall between them. She completely made up Billy’s goth teen attitude. Then she puts the photos of flowers down on the table and he points them out to her as such. Then she looks at the painting, and he chants the release spell. Agatha duct tapes his wrists and mouth and throws him in the closet. Billy says that “power” is what I’m missing. He said the first time when she asked him who he was – “My name is William Kaplan.” And then she asks him to say again, he says “I’m Billy Maximoff.”
Back to the Witches’ Road, Agatha crawls out of the mud Billy previously sunk her into in Episode 5. The sludge is steaming and powerful. She wipes it from her face and finds Teen looking at the wooden sigil tile, crushing it in his hands, signifying that the spell is no longer needed. He no longer wears his blue crown.
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“That was quite a debut,” Agatha says. “Power is what I’m missing. Hardly.”
Billy asked her when she figured out his true identity. She says he and his mother have the very obvious tell. “I wasn’t sure sure until you *explosive magic imitation.* It’s nice to see you again, Billy.”
He says “Billy, William, you can hear me now” as Agatha looks to be tearing up. “Ah, Lilia and Jenn, what you did was … Life goes on.” She counts how many people she’s killed. “I’m not like you,” Billy says, to which she responds “Where have I heard that before?”
Agatha asks him how he came by the fresh body he’s wearing. “Don’t you dare feel guilty about your talent. You survived, like witches have been doing for centuries. You saw an empty vessel and moved in. So you broke the rules, that’s what kept you alive. That’s what makes you special, a witch.”
He acts like he doesn’t need her anymore on the road to finish the trials. “I don’t know if I ever did,” he says, but then he can’t cast his blue magic. Agatha laughs.
“What does Billy Maximoff want at the end of the road? Big magic is already in the bag,” Agatha says. “Is it find mama? No, she chose a town of strangers over her own flesh and blood. What about robo-papa? Who knows where he is and in how many pieces? Who’s left?” she speculates.
“You’re after Toby!” she says. “Tommy,” he corrects. “He’s out there, I can sense him.”
Billy tells Agatha he does not trust her, ever. And she says “Got it. Let’s go find the next trial. Last one there is a nice person.”
Billy says “I’m not that nice” before he follows her further down the road.
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