Agatha All Along Episode 6: Joe Locke Gives Wiccan's Origin Its Soul

Agatha All Along's sixth episode, Billy's origin story, is largely an info dump for those who don't read the comics and don't know Wiccan's backstory. What gives it its soul, in the story and emotionally, is Joe Locke, and I think he pulls it all together beautifully. Not everyone in the fandom agrees, and the two fundamental changes Jac Schaeffer made to Wiccan's history are a big reason why.

Joe Locke's Billy has split the Agatha All Along fandom

It came to my attention over the past week or so that the coven of fans for this show isn't on the same page, spellbook wise. As I tweeted, the toxicity seems to be coming from inside the fandom. I thought we were all behind this show, yet some of you want it to be all about Agatha and Rio, and some of you don't like the way Wiccan is developing. When I tweeted how wonderful Joe Locke was, I got some spirited responses.

I'll give some of you your due. Many people want authenticity in casting, and Joe Locke is not Jewish, but he is gay. And for as faithful overall as Jac Schaeffer is to the comics, there are two fundamental changes here. That's true.

Change one: in the MCU, Billy Kaplan is an empty vessel for Billy Maximoff

In the comics, Billy Kaplan is Billy Kaplan. He's the reincarnation of Wanda's son, but from birth, so he fully forms his identity as Billy Kaplan. He doesn't feel stuck in someone else's body or someone else's family. That's his body, his life and his family. He finds himself drawn to the Scarlet Witch without knowing why, and starts out simply as a fan.

Here it's different. Billy Kaplan is, as Agatha puts it, an empty vessel that Billy Maximoff takes refuge in after spotting another Billy nearby so he can survive. He doesn't remember Billy Kaplan's past, and he doesn't even remember his own past as Billy Maximoff. He only knows this isn't his body. It's a big change, particularly for those who love Billy Kaplan. Clearly this is Billy Maximoff.

I loved the moment when he has to reintroduce himself to Agatha, because at first he doesn't realize she couldn't hear him. She asks who he is, he says Billy Kaplan, and she says "come again." I think in that moment he thinks she sees through the lie, although many of you would argue it's not a lie, and that's why he answers Billy Maximoff. It's a powerful moment, unless you're a huge Billy Kaplan fan, in which case your reaction to Jac is far less polite.

Change two: Billy goes looking for Tommy, not Wanda

In the comics, Billy is drawn to the Scarlet Witch right away as a fan. As a Young Avenger, he comes across Tommy without knowing it's Tommy; they only notice how much they look alike. Later the two discover who they are together, which leads them to look for their mother. Billy Kaplan still feels that his mother is, I believe, Rebecca Kaplan, but Wanda is, I guess, the mother of his soul. It's complex, but in the comics he goes looking for Wanda with his brother, and that's the famous Children's Crusade storyline.

They find her under the influence of Doom, which is why it was rumored at the time that the Avengers: Doomsday movie would involve Wanda, or some version of Wanda, with Robert Downey Jr. As I tweeted, that would be a bad idea in the MCU. Tony killed Wanda's parents, inadvertently, but he did, and then locked her up against her will in Civil War. I feel it's pretty bad for him to be romantically involved with her in any capacity. I wouldn't do it, Marvel. I also tweeted the question of whether the MCU can handle Wanda if Jac Schaeffer isn't protecting her, although I'm sure some of you are asking who's protecting Billy Kaplan.

Here in the MCU, Billy doesn't want to look for his mother. I guess he believes the word on the street that she's dead. He wrote his priority in his notebook: the reason he's on the road is that he wants to find his brother again. I'm sure that upset some Wanda fans. I thought it was touching, but some of you did not agree.

Wiccan purists are being sticklers, but Jac Schaeffer is expanding her mythology

I can understand why some hardcore Wiccan fans might have a problem with these changes, but I have to say you're being real sticklers for some of these specifics. That's usually the headache DC has to deal with. In the past, MCU fans have been pretty forgiving of changes, because the elements are there, which is the case here. It doesn't seem to be going over the same way this time.

Jac Schaeffer is adjusting Wiccan's history to match what she's building in the MCU, but as she does, she further expands her own mythology, and I think in very interesting ways. Remember how Agatha said a coven is always drawn to each other? Sure enough, the other witches were already drawn to Billy.

Lilia knew him when he was Billy Kaplan. She was hired to read palms at his bar mitzvah, and she sees that his lifeline is broken in two: two lives, two souls for one body. She even tells him to enjoy the now, because she knows he doesn't have long left, and in the reflection she sees who he'll become, Billy Maximoff. It's Lilia who placed the sigil on him, and as soon as she puts it in his pocket she forgets it, because that's what happens even to the witch who places a sigil. Why did she feel she needed to hide him? Did she know who he'd soon be? Those questions need to be answered.

After the accident, the first on the scene was Alice, the protection witch, when she was still on the police force. Billy is drawn to Jennifer Kale's skin care videos, and he even listens to Lorna Wu's Ballad of the Witches' Road in his room. Perhaps he wasn't drawn to Agatha, and none of the other witches were, because she was hidden in Wanda's spell. I think that explains it.

Agatha's claim that she suspected Teen right away doesn't convince me

I hope the Lilia answers are more satisfying than the answer to when Agatha knew Teen was Billy Maximoff, because I don't buy her answer at all. She says she suspected it right away, and that doesn't mesh at all with her behavior. Maybe she's covering, because she thought he was maybe Nicholas Scratch. She was acting very strongly on that wish, that educated wish, to borrow a great line from Deadpool & Wolverine. She wanted that to be true, and she really thought maybe it was.

So I think that line is covering. I don't think she knew it was him until the very end of the previous episode. Usually I can see that a line is motivated by certain emotions and I get it. Here I didn't like that line, and I wasn't satisfied with that response.

"Any witch with a beating heart can hear you" made me think of Wanda

With the sigil destroyed, Billy tells Agatha she can finally hear him, and she says "any witch with a beating heart can hear you." I think we all thought the same thing: Wanda. I don't think she's truly dead. She might be near death, and I think she's lost the will to live, but I thought that if she maybe heard this, she might get back up and get back in the game.

Apparently she died at the end of Multiverse of Madness, and that film established that it's against the rules to inhabit a dead body. Agatha even says here that it's against the rules. But I looked it up, and that seemed to be more about dead variants, and Doctor Strange clearly inhabited a corpse. Billy Kaplan Maximoff, maybe that's what we should call him, is very much still alive. These two things are clearly not the same.

I loved, and I see many of you did as well, when Agatha tells Billy not to feel guilty about who he is: a witch using his talents, taking over an empty vessel and becoming someone new. In many ways it's obviously a metaphor for many things, and I think it probably speaks to many people, because it means he fought to survive, which she says witches have always done. It was also a great moment when she tried to count how many people she'd killed and settled on "my fair share." Kathryn Hahn continues to deliver. As Billy steps forward as this kinder person, Agatha retreats back into the villain space, and it gives the show balance.

The weaker stretches: Billy's magic arrives too quickly

I love that this episode was on the longer side, but let's be honest, it was wildly uneven, and many of those extra minutes weren't put to good use. There isn't much of the less good. After the switch, Billy's origin story felt a little rushed, particularly when he was piecing together who he was. When did he develop an interest in magic? When did he get that spell book? He must have been practicing, since he casts a release spell, yet only in this short flashback did he find out he was connected to the Scarlet Witch.

He did figure out that what happened in Westview was a spell, not an Avengers training exercise gone wrong. But it would have been nice to see his interest and experience with magic first blossom and then grow. It was already there. For some reason Billy Kaplan liked magic too, with Houdini posters in his room, which I thought was an interesting, confusing choice. The other posters were nicely chosen: powerful magic, animating the dead in The Black Cauldron, a strange world in Alice in Wonderland, and Oz, following a road to get a wish at the end.

We also didn't need to see Billy's half of Agatha's police detective illusion. It wasn't that funny, Bohner family reunion shirt aside. I know many of you got a kick out of him saying he didn't want to be thrown back in the closet, but it wasn't worth the lost time. It didn't add anything new to the story or further develop the characters.

I don't think Eddie is Teddy, though one line gives me pause

Just as Billy isn't Nicholas, I don't think Eddie is Teddy, even though their names rhyme. He's a great actor, and I like him even more after seeing him in Smile 2, where he's charming. But big buff Teddy fans will riot if he's Teddy. Then again, Eddie calls Billy his black heart, which is what Rio says she is for Agatha, so maybe he is.

In the comics he's Hulkling, and Bruce Banner isn't very big until he's powered up, so he could be smaller. Hulkling, aka Teddy, is half shapeshifting Skrull and half Kree, so that could be him. Still, I really don't think fans are going to like this, and I would advise Jac Schaeffer not to do it. They're going to have a hard time selling the Wiccan changes as it is.

The switch from Maximoff to Kaplan is the episode's high point

There's more good than bad, thankfully. The actual switch, when Maximoff became Kaplan, was very touching, largely thanks again to Joe Locke's performance. Hearing Billy Kaplan's heartbeat slow to a stop was amazing, and doing it with audio was very touching. The voices were hard to hear, so I turned on the captions, which I usually find distracting because my mind reads the line faster than the actor can perform it, and it ruins the moment for me. That's how I could see it was Billy and Tommy being tucked in at the end of WandaVision, when Wanda thought she was putting them to sleep forever.

Almost immediately Billy wakes up in this new body, and it's a beautiful moment. The first thing he says is "Tommy." Maybe that should have given it away a little. He didn't say mom, though to be fair she didn't spend much time with them, and she had Agatha looking after them instead. They weren't even that close in WandaVision, by the way.

I think the episode's plot holes can be solved

As the internet was quick to point out, there are some issues here, but I'm going to solve them. Why did Wanda tear apart the multiverse looking for her sons when at least one of them was only a few miles away? The sigil. He was hidden from all witches, even Wanda. Why would Lilia hide Wanda Maximoff's son from her, and did she know what she was doing? That's very clever, and I wish they had made it clearer. I guess they didn't want to pay Elizabeth Olsen, which is frustrating.

How does it not occur to Billy, once he realizes what happened to him, to look for other deaths in the vicinity at the same time as Billy Kaplan's, since Tommy most likely jumped into one of those bodies? Then again, Tommy isn't a witch. He's a speedster, and he probably can't jump to another body. So his soul is maybe running around out there somewhere, lost for three years. That's harsh.

I wondered whether Billy's next task would be to find a body for his brother. Or, since they're twins, maybe he'd find a way to copy himself and create a new body for his brother, which would let Joe Locke play both roles. I so hoped for that. What an acting challenge it would be. It would be extremely expensive, so I didn't know if Kevin Feige would be willing to pay for it, but it would have made me so happy.

Ralph Bohner's return points Billy to his telepathy and to Agatha

It was a nice touch to have Wanda's sitcom coming through on the radio, although it didn't seem to match the time period. Ralph Bohner got the Westview title card, and it seems they can switch who's on which card, since the one that usually goes to a member of the Salem Seven went to actors from this episode. I liked when he referred to Wanda's sons as the little speedster and his brother who reads minds, a great line delivered very nicely. Evan Peters, we love you.

Billy, who can read minds, realizes Ralph is talking about him. Now Billy has telepathy, and he seems like he should be heading over to Xavier's school, although in the comics he's a mutant. Wanda never showed that ability, but in WandaVision Billy had telepathy, and he could create and manipulate psychic energy along with telekinesis, just like mom, plus mental control, which he's been doing all along in Agatha. Telepathy is extremely helpful when you have to pretend to be somebody else for three years. He could also see the future in WandaVision, like Lilia, which I find very interesting, but he hasn't used that ability here.

He and his brother could also age up, so you'd think he'd be less shocked to find himself in a teenager's body. Maybe being in another body is what threw him. I'm surprised they didn't use that ability, but I think Wiccan fans would have been furious without the reincarnation bit. Ralph didn't give him much depth, but he let Billy realize he was the son of the Scarlet Witch with a brother, and he gave him a very important name: Agatha Harkness. That was a very effective internet search. Agatha as Jolene was a pretty funny gag, and a song gag too, since music is a big part of the show.

But Billy doesn't know what Agatha did to his mother. All he knows is that she survived the Witches' Road and that she's very old and very powerful, which takes something out of their interactions. I would love it if he recalled what went down with his babysitter, because Billy did fight back.

Billy loses his powers as Agatha returns to full villain mode

The last few minutes are the aftermath of episode five, where Agatha crawled out of that mud pit. What a fighter. We learn it was Billy's first time using those powers, and I can't believe he's lost them already. He can't control or summon them. That's frustrating, because I thought he was going to be fully powerful right away, but he's back to square one.

I liked when he told Agatha power doesn't interest him and she shot back "keep telling yourself that." Her walls might be back up, but it's so nice to see her in full villain mode, complete with an evil mustache made from her muddy hair. There are more killer lines, like calling the twins Wanda's "flesh and wires" and Vision "Robo Papa," and calling Tommy Toby by accident. They agree to finish the Witches' Road together, but the trust is gone.

Then comes the line from the trailer, where Agatha says last one there is a nice person, and Billy mutters "I'm not that nice." I think we all had the same reaction: keep telling yourself that, Billy, you're the nicest person we've ever met. But it led me to think maybe he doesn't want to be a nice person, and sees it as a liability. Maybe he'd want Agatha to train him, so he could get that edge and learn from a witch who's a witch unapologetically, something even Wanda never achieved. I liked that.

The episode felt like a Disney+ lull, but Joe Locke carries it

Questions were left hanging. We needed to find out why Lilia placed that sigil on Billy. And where is Rio? Why wasn't she drawn to Billy? If you know the spoiler about her, she should be aware of what happened, and if it's against the rules, why did she allow it? I was very curious to see what was going on there.

If you already know Wiccan's backstory, the episode was a bit of a lull, more checking boxes than telling the story. Disney+ shows keep doing this. It should have been a show about Wiccan, but instead it's a show about Agatha with Wiccan shoehorned in, and Agatha fans and Wiccan fans end up fighting about whose show it is. Some of you have also pointed out a formula: a big reveal in episode five, then a lull in episode six with some further explanation. The Acolyte did the same thing, and I don't know why they keep doing it, since it doesn't seem to totally work. Why let up on the gas pedal just when things were getting cool?

But how can anybody have a problem with Joe Locke? I hope people finally saw what so many of us who've seen him in Heartstopper love about this guy. I think he's so charming and charismatic, and he gave this episode its soul.