Agatha All Along Episode 6 Breakdown: Lilia's Sigil, Billy's Origin and Ralph Bohner's Return

Agatha All Along episode 6, Familiar by Thy Side, brings back Evan Peters as Ralph Bohner, the mystery cameo of the series, in an unhinged scene inside a heartbreaking Billy Maximoff and William Kaplan origin story. One could say it is really a bonus episode of WandaVision, filled with clues, Easter eggs, MCU connections and links to real-world history.

It is also the episode that finally reveals the origin of the sigil, and that answer reaches all the way back into Multiverse of Madness.

The episode title points to Billy's lost brother Tommy

The familiar of the coven is normally Billy, the teen at Agatha's side the whole time. Now we learn that the familiar face he longs to have back at his side is his brother Tommy. The lyric comes from the second verse of the Ballad of the Witches' Road: "Primal night give us sight, familiar by thy side. If one be gone, we carry on, spirit as our guide."

In past episodes I assumed this part of the song referred to the losses along the road, like Sharon and Alice. But Agatha, whom showrunner Jac Schaeffer identified as the spirit witch of this coven, is now really the spirit as our guide. I'm wondering if "one be gone" could refer to William Kaplan being gone, or just Tommy being missing, with Agatha as Billy's less than ideal spirit guide.

William Kaplan's bar mitzvah hides a warning about strange fire

We open on William preparing for his bar mitzvah. He tightens a blue necktie, which is the color associated with Wiccan but also, along with white, a color associated with Judaism. In the Young Avengers comics, Billy Kaplan's moniker is Wiccan, but he doesn't practice Wicca the way real-world Wiccans do. He was raised in a Reform Jewish household by Jeff and Rebecca Kaplan.

The cabinet doors holding the Torah scrolls form a tree lit from behind. I assume in this context it's religious ornamentation, but in light of Billy's future it reflects the trees of the Witches' Road, as do the table decorations at the reception. The programs read "celebrate the magic mitzvah of William Kaplan," and later we see Houdini posters in William's bedroom, so I assume he had an interest in sleight of hand as a hobby, which foreshadows Wiccan's abilities and might even lead to them.

Joe Locke, with an incredible singing voice, recites a traditional blessing, and Billy reads Leviticus 10:1 and 10:2, about an offering of strange fire. This is the story of Nadab and Abihu, sons of Aaron, who were burned to death by the Lord. They made three errors: lighting the incense was a priestly duty, it was supposed to be done by one person rather than two, and they used a foreign fire. Some see it as a warning against cutting corners, and sadly Aaron was told not to mourn his sons.

There's probably some connection to Billy following the proper method of everything on the Witches' Road. Maybe also to the idea of two boys, Billy and Tommy, being sacrificed, or even to Jeff and Rebecca not being able to fully mourn their son because they don't know he's dead. But I'm not going to pretend to be a Torah scholar, so you can draw your own connection there.

Lilia Calderu's tarot reading predicts a broken lifeline

The reception lighting is blue again, with those tree centerpieces and hanging charms. We have to wonder if the Witches' Road could be a creation of Billy Maximoff, and whether some design influence came from a part of William Kaplan still living on with him. I really don't want William to be dead, despite the fact that he probably is based on this episode. The magic party theme includes tents for palm readings and astral map making, which is sort of what Wanda was doing in the WandaVision post-credit scene. It's a little odd at a bar mitzvah, but he's Reform, not Orthodox, and sometimes palm readings are just something you can book for themed parties like this.

Inside, he meets Lilia, who asks, "Are we looking behind us, or ahead?" That's another clue that her consciousness is toggling through time. Behind William is a tapestry of the Tower card topped with a blue crown, clearly a reference to Wiccan. Upright, the Tower represents sudden change, upheaval, revelation and awakening. When Lilia later exclaims "The tower reversed," the reversed meaning is averting disaster, delaying the inevitable, resisting change. I think for William, sudden violent change is coming, but Lilia wants to give him a way to resist it.

Behind him on the right is the Wheel of Fortune, representing cycles, fate and unexpected turns you don't control. Inverted, it means bad luck and unwelcome changes. The big question here is whether Billy's soul claiming William's body at that precise moment was random timing, or willed by fate. All the tarot cards in the series carry the sigil in the corner, and now I can confirm that it's Lilia's personal signature.

In Lilia's crystal ball, William appears upside down in his future goth clothes, with both cards inverted behind him. She reads his palm and says his lifeline is broken in two, describing it as "a new you." Clearly he's destined to have two souls in his body. After "the tower reversed," there's a chime followed by a little hiccup, and Lilia says she remembered something. So I think Lilia, unstuck from time, is remembering something from her own future.

The Dario Argento reference and Lilia's advice

William says the place is "very early Argento." We brought up Dario Argento's 1977 film Suspiria back in episode 4, one of the last films to use the Technicolor dye process and the first in a trilogy about three witches. But I think he's actually referring to 1975's Deep Red, which features a psychic medium, like Lilia, who is overwhelmed by the murderous thoughts of someone in her audience and is later murdered. It's also fun that William references a Sicilian filmmaker while talking to a Sicilian divination witch.

She tells him to "enjoy the now, baby. It's the only thing that's certain." For a witch jumping around in time, the present is the only place she can trust. I like how it implies that the past isn't trustworthy for her either, and she has a point, because our memories alter our pasts to get us through the present. It's also a clue that Billy will soon be unable to remember any of William's past.

Lilia placed the sigil on William, which explains Multiverse of Madness

As if in a trance, Lilia draws the sigil on what the Disney Plus audio description calls a small wooden rune. So it's confirmed: Lilia placed the sigil on William Kaplan, and it stayed on the body even after Billy's soul took over. That explains why Wanda, in the WandaVision post-credit scene and throughout Multiverse of Madness, couldn't find a version of her son Billy in the 616 universe and had to go into the multiverse. Her son was buried in a body concealed by a sigil spell. Really, you could say everything bad in Multiverse of Madness is Lilia's fault.

Why did she do it? Presumably to protect this young man, or the soul that would soon possess his body, from witches like Agatha. Or maybe she knew the destined future of the Scarlet Witch and wanted to push her to the end of that path because of how dangerous she was to the multiverse. Either way, the trance on Patti LuPone's face suggests a future version of Lilia is reaching back in time to cause this. She drops the tile into his coat pocket, and you can see the exact moment it takes effect, as she suddenly has no idea whose coat it is.

The car crash and the goodnight we never heard in WandaVision

Cops inform Jeff about the Westview anomaly, and at 5:02 p.m. everyone's phones ping with emergency alerts. On the drive home, the radio plays Wanda and Vision's lines from the first episode of WandaVision. We learned in WandaVision episode 4 that the hex's cosmic microwave background radiation could broadcast old reruns of the sitcom, so as the hex collapses, it makes sense that highlights of every era could beam out, going in reverse back to 1961.

As they pass a Welcome to Eastview sign, a Dodge Ram on the wrong side of the road forces Rebecca to swerve into a tree. Was the driver distracted by the hex, or was it some force of fate driving the Kaplans off the road? The car slams the back door where William sat, and with the red blood and blue tie he's now kind of in Wiccan colors. As I predicted, this was the near death in Westview reported in the headline in the credits, and maybe even the Eastview car accident Agnes mentioned in episode 1, though she linked that one to the Jane Doe believed to be Wanda, so I'm not sure.

William's heartbeat thumps to a stop, then after a silence we hear Billy and Tommy saying goodnight, and a healthy heartbeat returns, leading to a cry of "Tommy!" With simple sound effects and a great performance from Joe Locke, we understand that William died, that Billy from Westview was coming to his end as the hex collapsed, and that his soul reincarnated in the empty body. In WandaVision episode 9, we never heard this goodnight exchange, and I think it's so sweet these two boys said goodnight, perhaps knowing what was coming or maybe not.

A simpler Wiccan origin than the comics

In the comics, Billy Kaplan is revealed to be the reincarnated soul of one of Wanda's twins from House of M, and years before that, in the West Coast Avengers event, the twins were pieces of Mephisto's soul puppeted by Master Pandemonium and scattered across the multiverse. The way the MCU is structured, I prefer this. It makes a bit more sense. From here, the kid in this body is the character Julian Hilliard played in WandaVision, not the Multiverse of Madness version, who still exists in the 838 universe.

That would make Billy a 10-year-old in a 13-year-old's body, but he was the product of a rapidly progressing sitcom reality where he jumped from baby to age 10 in episode 5 alone. And he was Wanda's grief manifested, which WandaVision defined as love persevering. Through either the fate prophesied in the Darkhold temple or grief's nature to persevere, this piece of Wanda's magic has been forced into an awkward vessel, and after the stressful days of the hex, the nightmare continues for him.

Alice, the telepathy and the Kaplans' anxiety

The Eastview cop who finds him is Alice Wu-Gulliver, who we were told in episode two used to be a cop. Why doesn't she remember him later at the mall? The sigil gives everyone a kind of face blindness for this kid. Alice also seems to be wearing a necklace under her uniform that could be her amulet.

At the hospital, Billy hears his parents' thoughts, the telepathy Billy Maximoff used in WandaVision episode seven, when he told Agnes she was quiet on the inside. That could mean she meant less to him, or that she guarded her mind, kind of like Occlumency from Harry Potter. His "Please don't fight" echoes the feuding between his parents in WandaVision episode five. Back home, Greg the dog barks at him, and I think Greg knows Billy was a dog owner whose dog died. Jeff and Rebecca are wholesome on the outside but can't hide their anxiety storms inside. It's an interesting way to display generational trauma: Billy was created to express a woman's grief and is now forced to hear every anxiety of these new parents.

William's bedroom looks like a blueprint for the Witches' Road

The room has Houdini posters and a map of the land of Cockaigne, a mythical world of self-indulgence with lakes of meatballs and rivers of wine. The board game Hang On, Harvey reminds me of Harvey, the Mary Chase play and Jimmy Stewart film about an invisible rabbit, and Gina actually had a really interesting theory that Tommy's soul could have entered the body of Señor Scratchy, the rabbit. There are posters for Alice in Wonderland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz using the same artwork as the closing credits, and 1985's The Black Cauldron, which ends with three witches resurrecting a dead friend.

An Assateague Island poster shows an island split between Maryland and Virginia, kind of like William and Billy, though maybe I'm reading into that. There's Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Wizard of Oz figurines on the shelf, a toy castle and the Oz books. I think you can look through this room, now and three years later, and find pieces of everything we've seen on the Witches' Road. Billy repeats "I am William Kaplan" while reflected in two mirrors, showing the two identities he's grappling with.

Three years later, Eddie and the research wall

Billy is parked with his boyfriend Eddie, played by Miles Gutierrez-Riley. Billy reveals he died on the day of the accident, still doesn't remember anything before, and lied about recovering so his parents wouldn't worry. Eddie accepts him, and it's a wonderful romance. Billy's room now seems to keep everything William had and only add to it, which feels like a respectful gesture to William's memory, alongside a Carrie poster, The Craft, Saw, a Trans Lives Matter flag, and leaves that look like the Witches' Road.

His research includes an article about Westview's "orange dome," though that was a scarlet hex, and another dated February 15th, 2026, which I'm grateful the prop makers got right. There's a photo of the Titanic and a New Jersey map with Lambertville circled and a note reading "These six towns all link to the seventh town." It may point to my long-running question of why Westview, and some kind of energy vortex in New Jersey. Eddie reveals the public was told the anomaly was an Avengers training exercise gone wrong, which I assume was a cover-up. Billy also shows him Jennifer Kale's candle mask clip and zooms into the hex wall to find one of Wanda's runes.

Ralph Bohner's return contradicts a WandaVision deleted scene

They meet Ralph in a dark parking garage, a very Watergate scenario. Marvel faked us out with a Quicksilver tease in WandaVision, which was a big bummer, and there's an issue that his name should have changed outside the hex. A deleted scene in the WandaVision Steelbook release hinted Ralph was Jimmy Woo's missing witness, but this scene contradicts that, since a fugitive wouldn't be worried about his house's property value. That's okay; deleted scenes in the MCU aren't always canon.

Ralph wears animal bones crossed on his bucket hat, which Lisa on Twitter suggested might be Sangoma healing, plus what appears to be an evil eye, what looks like a chicken foot inside his jacket and what seems like a baby alligator skull figurine. My favorite is what seems to be a "to be or not to be" shirt with bumblebees, which has to be a nod to the beekeeper of WandaVision. Evan Peters does an incredible job expressing the trauma of someone who underwent two mind controls. He also confesses to poisoning a dog, even though Agatha owned up to killing Sparky in her song, and says Vision reportedly was used for parts, hinting at the secrecy around the White Vision project.

Billy's searches reveal Agatha at the Titanic and Dolly Parton's Jolene

Billy's sigil notes describe permanent and destructible sigils, the latter activated by fire or force, which is how he crushes his rune. A sheet of demon symbols includes the symbol for Paimon from Hereditary. His searches include Dreadit and a Victorian photo of Agatha, whose reverse image search reveals she apparently survived the Titanic in 1912 and the Hindenburg in 1937.

My favorite detail is a 1972 surveillance photo of Dolly Parton slapping Agatha, asking if this is the real Jolene. Dolly has never confirmed who Jolene is. Brujapedia lists Agatha's last known whereabouts as Nashville in 1973, which is where and when Dolly made Jolene, about a year after the slap. It also lists succubus powers, which would explain how she might have stolen Dolly's man, because no man in his right mind would leave Dolly. When Billy reads that Agatha is the only known survivor of the Witches' Road, Lorna Wu's chorus kicks in and he puts it together: he must go down the road to find Tommy. I love the implicit kinship with the Wu family.

The black heart and episode 1 replayed from Billy's side

Billy's spellbook shows the release spell, best during a waning moon, and a Latin expert on Twitter told us his phrase translates roughly to release her from the spell. Eddie texts "you're my black heart." In episode two, Lilia drew a black heart on the coven list, and we assumed it meant Rio. Now I think it might represent Billy, because Agatha needs his connection to Wanda.

Revisiting episode 1 from outside, Agatha wears the Bohner Family Reunion shirt, and curtains cover where Rio would sit. If Rio were only in Agatha's mind, I think the shot would show an empty couch, so the curtains are concealing something. The chase becomes a clumsy tumble, Billy stops to ask if she's okay, and Kathryn Hahn and Joe Locke look on the verge of breaking during the interrogation.

Billy as the ship of Theseus

Back on the road, Billy appears upside down, the Tower inverted again. I think losing Alice caused a Wanda style outburst of grief, a show of force revealing how powerful he is. Agatha calls him a vessel, and I can't help drawing the ship of Theseus comparison. Vision concluded memory forms identity, and Billy lacks William's memories, but he has a cosmic link to Wanda, who I think is the Theseus of this metaphor. With every new experience he solidifies his right to exist. I don't think Billy qualifies as Agatha's loyal familiar anymore, but rather a successor to the Scarlet Witch, unable to kill his partner, but a partner nonetheless.

Which hidden detail from Familiar by Thy Side stood out most to you?