Looking back at my Agatha All Along Darkest Hour theories about Billy Maximoff

Darkest Hour / Wake Thy Power, the fifth episode of Agatha All Along (2024), starring Kathryn Hahn, Joe Locke and Aubrey Plaza, ended with Teen revealing himself as Billy Maximoff, the son of the Scarlet Witch. I thought it was a fitting title, because the episode sees him having a sleeping power awoken within him as the coven enters its darkest hour. My main theory at the time was that Wanda's will, not Billy's, drove that ending.

Because that ending was what everyone wanted to discuss, I started there and then went back to the beginning. Below are the theories, Easter eggs and guesses I had about the episode, in that order.

Why I guessed the next Witches' Road trial would belong to Lilia

After Alice Wu-Gulliver's death at the hands of a power hungry Agatha Harkness, the coven emerged onto the fourth area of the Witches' Road, themed around the color yellow. That made me believe the next trial would center on Lilia. For the most part, the color of each area seemed to correspond with the color each witch is most associated with.

Episode 4 was themed red, after Alice's hair and the red generational curse demon. This fifth episode's area was purple, for Agatha, who typically wears purple and wields an absorptive purple magic. Lilia almost always wears yellow and appears to wield yellow magic, so I would have bet on the next episode being focused on her.

That was only a wild guess. The first trial was themed blue, and it seemed to have been built for Jennifer Kale, whose color is pink, so the pattern was not perfect.

Teen's power awakens and confirms he is Billy Maximoff

Teen was angry at Agatha for draining the life out of Alice, his new friend, for whom he had just made a flying broomstick. In his rage he asked Agatha whether being a witch meant killing people to serve her own agenda, then rejected the idea: not for him. Agatha only laughed, whispered "are you sure" and told him he was so much like his mother. That strongly implied she had worked out who he was.

The ending did not leave us waiting. Teen began moving his fingers to summon the blue magic energy within his body, in the same unique way Wanda used to. He used those movements to possess the minds of Lilia and Jennifer, making them throw Agatha to the side of the road, much as Wanda was proficient at controlling the minds of those she came into contact with. The road swallowed Agatha faster than Goose the Flerken swallowed the Tesseract, and Teen then tossed Lilia and Jennifer in after her, seemingly releasing them from his control so they could panic about sinking.

The biggest confirmation was the crown that appeared on his head. It seemed purposely designed after the Scarlet Witch's crown, with an M shape at its center as a symbol for the Maximoff family. Instead of being scarlet, it was modeled on the silver grooved front of comic book Wiccan's blue headband. "I think it's safe to say that teen is teen no more," and the episode established Billy Maximoff's return to the MCU, which I found exciting.

My theory that Wanda's sigil caused Billy's change of heart

The question was why it happened at all. Billy had walked out of that house furious with Agatha over Alice, so the sudden, illogical change of heart that led him to try to drown Agatha, Jennifer and Lilia in magic dirt needed explaining. I believed this was not really Billy's will at all, but the will of Wanda Maximoff acting in his place, likely an effect of the sigil placed on him in the past.

That sigil covered Teen's mouth with a huge letter M whenever he tried to reveal his name or background to the witches, and the M could stand for Maximoff. I didn't know exactly how, but I suspected that after the events of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Wanda figured out a way to make Billy a real flesh and blood boy, Pinocchio style. She might have assembled him from scratch, or used the blue space shattering magic she absorbed from America Chavez to take a variant of Billy from somewhere in the multiverse, move him to timeline 616 and place a protection spell on him that kept his identity safe from other witches.

That would have made sense to me, because Agatha was the only other witch Wanda had ever met. If that witch was strong enough to threaten her family, then in Wanda's eyes every other witch was a potential threat to her child. My theory was that Agatha's callous demeanor after killing Alice made Billy fear her darkness for the first time, which activated the sigil and let Wanda, or a piece of her, briefly possess his body to eliminate the witches around her son. "But that's all just a guess of course."

Billy's suppressed powers and the Moon Knight comparison

The sigil also appeared to suppress Billy's natural ability to manipulate his inner magical energy, likely because it caused him to forget that he had the power to levitate, create shields, shoot energy blasts and use mind control from birth. Seen that way, Billy seeking out Agatha to gain powers looked like his subconscious mind trying to get him to reclaim what he had lost, despite his memory loss.

I saw the sigil as a similar kind of dark magic to the tattoo Arthur Harrow was given by the god Ammit in Moon Knight. That tattoo connected Harrow with Ammit and let him draw on her power when he needed it. The sigil appeared to form a similar connection between Wiccan and the Scarlet Witch, but again, that was only a guess.

The Salem Seven in Agatha All Along versus the comics

Going back to the start, after the opening title the Salem Seven transformed from their fox, raven and snake forms into more humanoid ones. Even in human form they still moved like the animals they represent: one jerked its head around like a raven, another slid through the dirt like a snake. They whispered Agatha Harkness, find her, find them, over and over, so they were clearly committed to finding her.

Sensing them, Lilia woke and told the group they had to leave immediately. She explained that the MCU's Salem Seven are the children of the witches Agatha killed in Salem in 1693. That differs greatly from the comics, where all the members were the mutant children of Agatha's son Nicholas Scratch. Scratch and the Salem Seven lived in the hidden witch haven of New Salem, Colorado, and fought the Fantastic Four in their first appearance in Fantastic Four #186 in 1977.

Only four of the comic book members had animal powers: one had the appearance and powers of a lion, one had the legs of a gazelle, one was a fish merman who could manipulate water, and one was a giant snake woman with snake arms. From what we had seen at that point, the snake woman seemed to be the only original member with any animal representation in the MCU version.

Brooms, the blood moon and Werewolf by Night

To escape, Billy suggested grabbing tree roots to ride as broomsticks. Every witch except Rio rejected the idea at first, because of how regular society had carelessly adopted brooms into Halloween celebrations and because of the sexist assumptions people make about women and brooms. With no time to argue, the witches paired up, gifted each other brooms after a quick ceremony and took off as the Salem Seven caught up. They flew across a giant red blood moon, evoking the 1982 classic E.T. as well as a poster for Hocus Pocus 2 from 2022.

This was not the first MCU blood moon. We saw blood moon imagery in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness when Strange arrives at Sinister Strange's ruined Sanctum Sanctorum. Werewolf by Night had a blood moon of sorts in the Bloodstone, a red magic stone that appears to mimic a full moon, which is why it could transform Jack Russell into a werewolf.

The view didn't last. The road increased the gravity on the witches so they had to continue on foot, after dodging a bee themed member of the Salem Seven. While falling, every witch screamed except Rio, who enjoyed every minute, likely because she assumed some of them might die and give her the bodies she craves. Everyone reached the next house unscathed.

The 1980s outfits and Billy's Wiccan look

Inside the third trial, the outfits jumped from the 1970s to the 1980s. Just as WandaVision progressed through decades of television, this show appeared to be moving through eras of fashion, which I found fun.

To me the most interesting outfit was Teen's, because it reminded me of comic book Wiccan. He wore a blue headband and a shirt with red sleeves, evoking Wiccan's blue headband and red cape, a look young Billy wore in the WandaVision Halloween episode as a nod to his comic roots. Lilia, Jennifer, Alice and Agatha kept their yellow, pink, red and purple schemes. Agatha's purple jersey had the number three on it, possibly the road's way of symbolically replacing her triple goddess brooch for this trial.

A trial about the dead, and purple in the MCU

Rio realized the trial was themed after Agatha, with the blood moon the biggest hint, since the blood moon is when the veil between the living and the dead is apparently at its thinnest. That told the witches the trial was about communicating with deceased spirits.

Purple realms of the dead aren't new to the MCU: the ancestral plane in the Black Panther films appears to be themed purple. Purple in the MCU tends to be associated with darkness and family, as when Peter Quill grabs the Power Stone in the first Guardians of the Galaxy and sees his mother in a vision, or when Kamala's purple powers let her connect with the spirits of her family in Ms. Marvel. We also learned more about Lilia when she confessed that talking to the dead was always a con, and that she mainly reads minds on top of reading the future flow of time.

The Ouija board, Point Reyes and the king theory

From a pile of 1980s board games, including Pente and a Sweet Valley High game, a Ouija board flew out toward the coven, implying they had to use it. Behind Billy as he picked it up was a poster of the Point Reyes Lighthouse in California. Reyes means kings in Spanish, and episode 3 had a bottle of red wine bearing the Spanish word for queen. If that wine represented Wanda, then Reyes appearing in an episode where the queen's son awakens his power would fit, with Billy symbolically the king. That was just me, though.

Once they had the board, their color coded G Shock watches began counting down from 30 minutes. I loved that the board seems pulled directly from The Exorcist. I did wonder about Ouija: Origin of Evil, but that board has a slightly different design. The planchette carried the name William Fuld, a nod to the man who marketed and manufactured the boards from 1890.

Was Rio Vidal the cosmic entity Death?

After Teen read the instructions and Agatha faked a reading, the board started giving real messages. Asked who was there with them, it answered death, and Rio laughed maniacally. That quite possibly hinted that Rio Vidal could have been playing the cosmic entity Death all along, especially as this presence then said its only desire was to punish Agatha, something Rio expressed near the end of the second episode.

A sudden wind sent the board flying, with flickering lights, until Jennifer resolved to punish Agatha, and Lilia and Alice seemed ready to go along if it meant surviving. I found this suspicious, like the gust in the previous episode that launched Billy through the studio booth glass. I thought both were caused by Rio using what I called her green witch airbending powers.

Green energy in the MCU is typically associated with gravity manipulation. Ying Li of Ta Lo manipulated gravity with green gravity stones when she fought Wenwu in Shang-Chi, and Yon-Rogg used green gravity gauntlets in Captain Marvel. My view was that Rio was trying to scare the witches into believing killing Agatha was the only way forward, even suggesting they slit her throat with one of her knives. I believed those knives could be Rio's own form of Necroswords, like the ones Hela used in Thor: Ragnarok.

Agatha's possession and The Exorcist

When Jennifer went for rope, Agatha vanished as the lights went out. Trying to goad her out, Jennifer declared they were sisters in the craft, which could reference the 1996 film The Craft and its 2020 follow up The Craft: Legacy, which included sleepovers, much as these witches were dressed for one.

Teen found a flashlight near shelves of 1980s games such as Aggravation, Stay Alive and Parcheesi, and located Agatha hanging from the ceiling after she drooled on him like a Xenomorph from Alien. She looked as horrifying as Regan in the 1973 classic The Exorcist, and later did a spider walk just like Regan.

Rio demanded to know where Agatha was, and the ghost of Agatha's mother, Evanora Harkness, appeared like the spirits of the 1982 film Poltergeist. She demanded the witches leave Agatha with her, punishing her by denying her the power she sought. Rio, so eager to kill Agatha before, grew angry and almost seemed to stick up for her, possibly because of emotionally abusive details of her upbringing Agatha might have shared when they were dating.

Evanora, Thanos and Alice's sacrifice

We got a glimpse of how rough that childhood must have been when we heard that Agatha's mother believed she was born evil and should have ended her life at birth. That is reminiscent of what Thanos's mother believed in the comics, with the difference that she did try to stab him at birth, sensing he would devote his existence to Death, much as Agatha might have done with the cosmic entity Death in her own way.

Feeling compassion, Alice, a protection witch, freed Agatha using orange magic, the same kind proper sorcerers use in the MCU. But Agatha's first taste of raw cosmic energy in three years caused her to greedily drain the woman who saved her. I had a feeling this was the event Lilia tried to warn Alice about in the previous episode, when she told Alice "don't" and stopped, likely about to say don't save Agatha.

Billy returned to the Ouija board for help and accidentally contacted Agatha's long lost son, Nicholas Scratch, heard begging his mother to stop. Both were too late. Alice had died physically, but all her energy now lived within Agatha, so there was a chance that if Agatha had a change of heart by the season's end, she could return Alice's energy and bring her back to life. Until then, it seemed Alice's time on the show had come to an end, but only time would tell.