Agatha All Along gets a little too familiar

We all knew it was coming: the lore dump episode. WandaVision broke its format just four episodes in. At least Agatha All Along had the decency to hold off until the sixth entry.

“Familiar By Thy Side” opens with a flashback to a celebration three years in the past—the bar mitzvah of William Kaplan (Joe Locke). William’s bar mitzvah is magick-themed; the posters that decorate his childhood bedroom (Harry Houdini, Alice In Wonderland, The Wizard Of Oz, The Black Cauldron, and Bedknobs And Broomsticks, among others) hint at an early fascination with the topic. To round out the theme, his parents have hired a palm reader. Apparently, we’re getting a two-for-one with this episode: it’s both a momentum-halting detour into William’s background and a “Woah, the seemingly disparate characters are actually all connected, how about that!” reveal. The palm reader is, of course, Lilia Calderu, and when she sees William’s broken lifeline, she puts a sigil on him.

The episode goes to great lengths to explain, over-explain, and explain again exactly what’s going on: how William Kaplan died in a car crash on the way home from his party, coinciding perfectly with the collapse of the Westview Anomaly. How Billy Maximoff’s spirit (?) hijacked William’s body, leaving him with amnesia, a mysterious ability to read minds, and the nagging feeling that, despite his parents’ insistence, he isn’t who they think he is. How he can’t remember anything before the accident, not from William Kaplan’s life or Billy Maximoff’s life, but he fakes it, pretending to get better so William’s parents won’t worry so much. How all of this ties back to Agatha Harkness. “Familiar By Thy Side” never bothers to explain, though, why Lilia put the sigil on William in the first place. Did she see what was going to happen to him in just a few hours’ time? Was she pre-emptively trying to hide Billy Maximoff’s continued existence from Wanda? Who knows! I guess we need to save some of the big reveals for the last three episodes.

It strikes me as odd that this is the longest episode yet; at 49 minutes, it’s a full 17 minutes longer than episode five. But it doesn’t use that time effectively. There is an interesting story here, one that could have been worth pausing the series for if it was told correctly. An adolescent boy trapped in a foreign body, trying to both discover who he is and convince everyone around him that he’s not different at all. Puberty with a dash of mystery and a side of dysphoria.

I’d actually love to see a whole episode that makes us sit with the weight of Billy’s reality in those intervening years, as he struggles to find himself and cover his tracks and navigate the world as William, so that when we do get back to the main story, the knowledge of what he’s been through hits us hard and forces us to recontextualize everything we’ve seen until now. But what we get instead is an extended cameo from Ralph Bohner (Evan Peters), who spends 10 minutes recapping the events of WandaVision for William.

Agatha All Along offers frustratingly little insight into how William feels about finally learning who he really is. Once William finds out that Wanda had twin children—Billy, who could read minds, and Tommy, who was super fast—he just ditches his incredibly supportive boyf, Eddie (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), and sets out to find Agatha. Then, we get a seven-minute recap of Agatha‘s first episode from William’s perspective—which is fun but not different enough to warrant revisiting in such depth—before we land back on the Road, where we left off at the end of episode five.

Agatha comes crawling out of the mud—you didn’t really think she was dead dead, did you?—and has a short conversation with Billy about who he is and how long she’s known (literally the entire time). Billy confirms what he’s actually looking for on the Road. It’s not power; it’s his brother, Tommy. He claims he can feel Tommy out there somewhere, he just can’t find him. But I’d believe Billy a hell of a lot more if “Familiar By Thy Side” actually dug into his emotions instead of simply explaining what happened to him and relying on unnecessary cameos to pad the episode’s too-long runtime.

Stray observations

• • In addition to Lilia, we see how Teen is connected to all the other coven members in this episode, too. Alice was the first responding police officer after the car crash, he used to watch Jen’s skincare videos on YouTube, and he sought Agatha out on purpose.
• • If you’ve seen the Funko Pop spoilers (and believe them to be real), it seems like William meets Rio in this episode, too.
• • Eddie = Teddy Altman = Hulkling = Young Avengers??
• But wait—Eddie signs his text to William with a black heart emoji. Eddie = Kid Blackheart??? (I assure you, this is a joke.)
• • Greg is an excellent dog name.
• • Agnes was right—the car crash in Eastview was connected to the dead body, just not in the way she thought it was.
• • Billy can’t use his powers at the end of the episode because Agatha stole them when he blasted her into the mud, right?
• • “Every witch with a beating heart can hear you now.” Oh no. She’s coming back, isn’t she? Why can’t we have one Marvel thing whose purpose isn’t just to tie into the mega-MCU narrative at the expense of its own storytelling?
• When Billy walks off down the Road at the end of the episode, he puts the hood of his dark sweatshirt up, cutting a figure that, when paired with his bare feet and skinny jeans, looks a lot like the body in the woods from episode one. Of note: when the librarian asked Agatha “Who’s the victim? Is she dead?” Agatha responded, “Why do you assume it’s a woman?”