WandaVision theory: what happened to Billy and Tommy?

It was Agatha all along, according to episode seven of WandaVision. The reveal that Agnes was the witch Agatha Harkness answered one question but left me with more: what was all the stuff in her dungeon, what was the cicada about, and what did she do with the twins? My theory at the time was that Billy and Tommy had been pulled back into the Darkhold, and that the boys were pieces of Mephisto's soul.

WandaVision (2021), the Disney+ series starring Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany and Kathryn Hahn, had not yet reached its ending when I worked through these clues. Like many basements covered in tarps, bugs and bones, Agatha's looked to me like an active crime scene. We were Clarice Starling in Buffalo Bill's murder dungeon, and I was going to have to start shooting in the dark until I hit something and saved the children. To find the kids, I broke the scene down from the outside in.

Agatha's house, the Bewitched connection and the Wundagore Everbloom theory

Agatha's home exterior is the same house on the Warner Bros. lot used for the witch Samantha's home in Bewitched. Covering her yard are violet flowers with vines that radiate a purple glow, visible if you have photon powers, snaking down to her basement.

Gardening is clearly important to Agatha, since her roses bloom under penalty of death. I speculated that this could be the Wundagore Everbloom, a plant that grows in Agatha's yard in the comics. Upon consumption, it allows a person to see a vision of what life could be, provided they sob in grief. I believed Agatha killed Sparky because he was digging it up, and maybe she had been using this plant to drug Wanda.

Inside Agatha Harkness's basement: Baphomet imagery and the Darkhold

The basement is decorated in a way I could only describe as satanic. There are animal remains on display, demonic faces carved into the pillars, hexagonal engravings containing metallic runes and a horned animal head on the wall. Whether it's a goat, a ram or a yak, a curved horn animal head like this is often associated with Baphomet, a famous symbol of the occult.

Wanda also notices a glowing book, which most of us believed to be the Darkhold. That's Marvel's ancient evil spellbook, originally drafted by Chthon, the demon who cursed Wanda with her sorcery in the comics. It's here that Agnes reveals herself as Agatha Harkness, a devious meddler behind everything wrong in Westview. That includes the technical glitches we had seen up to that point, since she was sitting in the director's chair.

Where were Billy and Tommy? The cannibal and cicada theories

Missing from the room were Billy and Tommy. The dungeon exists outside the Hex, because the aspect ratio shifts to that of the outside world as Wanda enters it. These boys were manifestations of the Hex, with no corporeal counterpart outside it.

Agatha is a witch, self-admitted, warts and all. So did she eat Billy and Tommy? She did confess to cannibalism earlier: "I promise I won't bite. I actually did bite a kid once." Maybe she ate them, but I doubted it was in the Hansel and Gretel way. The kids don't have real bodies. They're essentially magic molded into human form, so the illusory magic that created them could get consumed back into its source.

Many fans pointed to the cicada Wanda spots upstairs and the similar flying insects visible in the basement, asking whether Agatha turned the boys into bugs. Maybe. But the symbolism of the cicada, a being dormant for a long lifetime, didn't match how the twins functioned. They spent a matter of hours in the womb, hatched overnight and grew up far too fast. Still, I thought the cicada remained an important clue.

Agatha's helpers: Pietro, Dennis the mailman and Señor Scratchy

The reason the cicada mattered, in my view, is that Agatha might be behind everything, but she isn't working alone. She roped Pietro into this, and Dennis the mailman seemed to be another asset. He now works for a delivery service with a rabbit logo, carrying something fragile in the direction of Agatha's house.

Dennis himself can't be Señor Scratchy, because he appeared in the same episode two scene in which Agatha handed that rabbit to Wanda. But they did have an interesting exchange in which Dennis says he's just a messenger, which in hindsight looked like Agatha thinking she could use him.

The name Señor Scratchy could be a nod to Old Scratch, a nickname for the devil, or to Nicholas Scratch, Agatha Harkness's son. I believed it was the latter: that Evan Peters' Pietro was Nicholas Scratch, transfigured from the rabbit into a form Wanda would see as her brother. Since Agatha can break the fourth wall and see us, I thought she recast Pietro as Evan Peters from the Fox X-Men movies just to mess with the nerds in the audience. It's the way Deadpool, another fourth wall breaker, brought in Evan Peters for a cameo in Deadpool 2, even though that made zero sense with that movie's timeline.

How the Westview children connect to the cicadas

Agatha was sitting right outside the window during Wanda and Vision's argument in episode five, when Vision asks why there are no other children in Westview. So Agatha probably populated Westview with kids in response to Vision calling this out.

Where did she get them? Pietro told Wanda those kids were probably asleep in their beds: "What, I assume they were all just sleeping peacefully in their beds." That parallels the way cicadas rest dormant for years and then suddenly hatch and swarm everywhere. When the drone kids are led Pied Piper style back into town, Dennis is then seen carrying fragile cargo back to Agatha. Perhaps those boxes contained the kids, reverted to cicadas once more.

Even if you didn't buy that, it was clear to me that Agatha glitched the drones near the town's edge to make Vision question reality. That way he would escape, allowing her to move in on Billy and Tommy, something Vision had blocked her from doing earlier.

Why Agatha needed Wanda's grief

Wanda's grief is a key component of Agatha's spell. Pietro stated it as his MO: come to town unexpectedly, create tension with the brother-in-law, stir up trouble with the kids and ultimately give Wanda grief. That's why I believed Agatha made Wanda see Pietro as a corpse, even though this Pietro isn't the brother who died, and why she made Wanda see Vision as a corpse. She was trying to keep that grief flowing.

The grief stream flows into episode seven too. The opening titles mixed in a creepy kidnapper message, "I know what you are doing, Wanda," and Wanda's milk carton carries a missing child photo of a kid who looks a lot like her son Billy, who goes missing by the end of the episode. It was all to trap Wanda in paralytic grief, and that's how Agnes pries the kids from her. In Agnes's home, Billy, a telepath, hears Agnes and the rabbit as quiet because he can't read their thoughts.

Ralph, Mephisto and the twins returning to the Darkhold

Right after that, Agnes brings up her offscreen husband Ralph again. I thought Ralph was our mystery cameo, maybe Jimmy Woo's missing person. Agnes is a witch with New England plates and an anniversary of June 2, when the Salem witch trials began. So who would any witch have as her husband? The devil, Mephisto.

As in the comics this is based on, my theory was that the boys are pieces of Mephisto's soul and were being consumed back into their source, the Darkhold. That's why I thought the book was giving off a fiery glow, and why Agatha redirects Wanda right as she begins to inspect it. The good news, based on Agatha's suddenly frazzled hair, was that it looked like the boys put up a fight before being converted back into hellfire and sucked into a spellbook.

The multiverse and the scar witchcraft would leave

I expected we probably weren't done with the twins. The episode reminded us that Wanda is a nexus being, capable of splitting reality into a multiverse, and I thought the series would probably end in a House of M style event in which Wanda flees into the multiverse with the two kids.

Either way, I was sure this witchcraft would leave a scar on that reality, because Mr. Dell in Spider-Man: Far From Home, set months after this, is obsessed with witchcraft. Being a man of science, his answer to what's behind the strange events is witches.