Looking back at my theory on Teen's true identity in Agatha All Along

Five episodes into Agatha All Along, I asked a question: what if Teen wasn't Wiccan? I did personally think he was Wiccan, but I saw that as just the first layer of everything Wiccan is as a character.

There's so much that goes into Wiccan and so much that goes into magic, so there were a lot of things he could be. With four more episodes to go at that point, there was room for juicy details beyond the Wiccan reveal everybody had been waiting for, and it had been kind of confirmed by the writers of the show that there was more to Wiccan than meets the eye. The finale aired on October 30, 2024, and settled those questions. This is what I was thinking before it did.

Wiccan wasn't evil, he just couldn't control his reality warping powers

I wanted to start with what you need to know about Wiccan in the comics, because I kept seeing rumors that he was evil, that he knew about all of this all along, and that it wasn't Agatha all along but Wiccan all along. He's not evil. A lot of the themes in episode 5 were about him not being able to control his powers, and that's one thing that happens with Wiccan. His literal power is reality warping, and he can't control it because he's a kid.

One of the things that gets him into trouble in Young Avengers in 2013 is that his power links itself to his desires, his daydreams and his wishes. He is literally a kid, so he's hopeful for so much in his life, and that ends up manifesting through his powers and going poorly. He stops being a hero for a while because things don't go well when he tries to use his powers. That's also what happens to Wanda in the MCU.

Did Teen's powers kill Sharon? My theory on the coven

People were saying Wiccan wished for the worst for everybody because he didn't like them, and that he wanted Sharon dead so he could be in the coven. Maybe he wanted a place in that coven. But given the way his powers work in the comics, if he wanted a place to open up in that coven, it could have ended up that Sharon died. Was it his master plan? No. In my view, "he's a kid and he was hopeful that he could be a part of this found family."

I firmly believed that when his power actually manifested, he desired revenge against Agatha, and revenge against the witches who turned on Agatha, for all of this to happen. He didn't mean to do it. His powers manifested and he couldn't control them, and that's a fundamental character trait of Wiccan.

Wiccan as the Demiurge who could rewrite magic itself

Once I got off my high horse about him not being evil, the bigger question was what Wiccan could become. In the comics he is known as the Demiurge, a being who can essentially warp reality so much that he'll eventually rewrite magic as a whole. When the characters actually try to figure that out in the comics, it's a really rough time for him.

Loki tries to borrow his magic to cast a spell that will reverse a spell that went wrong. Wiccan wanted so much to help Teddy get his dead mother back that he brought the wrong one back, an evil alien called Mother who controls their parents, brings dead parents back and makes them evil. To reverse it, they have to cast a spell that essentially rewrites reality so that Mother never came to that universe. The weight on Wiccan's shoulders in that moment is enormous: get it right, because if he can't handle the spell, everyone is going to die. "It's a lot of pressure for a kid."

How Billy and Tommy Maximoff returned in the comics

Technically, this is not Tommy Maximoff and that is not Billy Maximoff. In the comics, in a storyline kind of similar to WandaVision, the twins are made by the Scarlet Witch as a figment of her imagination, and at one point they are parts of Mephisto's soul. In WandaVision they were partially Vision, and we didn't know how they became somewhat sentient.

In the comics, Wanda's boys disappear when her illusion is shattered, and their souls end up transforming the bodies of a Billy and a Tommy somewhere nearby. The kids who inhabited those bodies no longer exist in them, and they become Tommy and Billy Maximoff, figuring things out as they go. Tommy still has his super speed, causes a lot of trouble, gets put in jail, and is experimented on to become a super weapon because he can run so fast it changes the atoms around him.

Billy kind of grows up normal, but he worries that his life is so normal because his reality warping powers made it that way. Why does he have such a Prince Charming of a boyfriend? Why are his parents so understanding of him, and of his boyfriend living with them when they're just teenagers? It's almost too good to be true, and it puts doubt in his head that reality is the way he wants it rather than the way it is.

Agatha All Along was going the way Billy wanted

That leads into what was happening in Agatha All Along, where a lot of things were going the way he wanted. He was finding all the clues and setting up all the trials pretty much perfectly. I said at the time, "I don't think this is something that is actually like what he wants to do is inherently evil." I thought it was just going that way because that's what he wanted.

Maybe he wanted to get injured during Alice's trial because he wanted to be part of the coven so badly. His own powers might have decided that the way to feel accepted was to also carry the burdens of the coven, which he firmly believed was part of being in it. That's part of his character in the comics, and a Demiurge reveal would be something different from simply learning that Joe Locke was playing Teen who was really Wiccan.

A longer stretch: Wanda's evil variant and other dark possibilities

I also floated a slight, or long, stretch involving Wanda's evil variant from the comics. She was introduced in 1994, she comes from a dimension where necromancy rules, and she had recently been introduced in the comics again as well. Usually the comics reflect what's happening in the MCU these days, so with her coming back with a design that looks like Wanda in Multiverse of Madness, I thought there could be something there. She looks so good, too.

She has the power of necromancy, she's built from a bunch of souls, and she can steal people's powers and life forces, which sounds a lot like Agatha. In the 1994 version Wanda banished her, the way Wanda had done to Agatha. So maybe there was something there, a bit like Wiccan himself, who in layman's terms is a soul possessing a possibly dead kid, if he was the one who died in Westview in the car crash. That was still a floating theory, and I hadn't been proven wrong yet.

Because Marvel Comics reflect the MCU, I treated anything that had come out magically in the comics in the last year as fair game. It could have been a dark variant of the Billy Maximoff we knew. It would be nice to see that kind of character even if it wasn't Wiccan. It could have been Rio, for all we knew.

My bottom line: Wiccan was still Wiccan, and probably the Demiurge

What I thought Wiccan would end up being was still Wiccan. I did think Joe Locke was playing Billy Kaplan, who is Billy Maximoff, who is Wiccan. He's a different boy possessed by the soul of Billy Maximoff, and that's very important whether in the comics or the show. They were never supposed to continue the Billy Maximoff as we knew him.

So was he evil? No. Was he probably the Demiurge? Yes. Was he going to be probably the savior of magic? Yes. I thought he was a kid who hoped so hard that it ended up happening, which is very important to Billy Kaplan. The world of Marvel magic is weird and winding and sometimes does a complete 180, but it's fundamental that Billy can't handle his own powers because of his Demiurge prophecy. We were waiting for him to be like Scott Pilgrim at the end of the film, waiting for the mess to happen before we figured out what he is.

I was very excited to see where he went. I thought we were going to see the rewriting of magic as we know it in Marvel, because it had been set up to a degree without reaching its full potential. The Marvel magic world is densely made with a lot of rules, and I hoped to see them come into play, especially with Doctor Doom being set up.

Did you think Teen killed Sharon, or that he had been the mastermind of all this?