Agatha All Along episode 6 explained: Billy's origin

Agatha All Along episode 6, Familiar by Thy Side, gives us a heartbreaking origin story for Billy Maximoff and William Kaplan. It confirms that Lilia Calderu placed the sigil that hid Billy from every witch, Wanda included. The Disney+ series Agatha All Along (2024) stars Kathryn Hahn, Joe Locke and Aubrey Plaza. Evan Peters returns as the season's mystery cameo in a completely unhinged scene. With VisionQuest now here and many people revisiting the show two years later, this is my full breakdown of the episode.

What the title Familiar by Thy Side means for Billy and 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 title comes from the second verse of the Ballad of the Witches' Road: "Primal night giveth 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, Sharon and Alice. But showrunner Jac Schaeffer identified Agatha as the spirit witch of this coven, so Agatha is now the spirit as our guide. I'm wondering if the one be gone could refer to William Kaplan being gone or to Tommy being missing.

William Kaplan's bar mitzvah and the Leviticus passage

We open on William Kaplan preparing for his bar mitzvah. He tightens a blue necktie. Blue is the color associated with Wiccan, but blue and white are also the colors associated with Judaism. In the Young Avengers comics, Billy Kaplan's moniker is Wiccan, but he does not practice Wicca the way real world Wiccans do. He was raised with a Reform Jewish upbringing by parents Jeff and Rebecca Kaplan.

The doors of the cabinet holding the Torah scrolls form a tree with a light behind it. I assume that's religious ornamentation, but in the context of Billy's future it reflects the trees of the Witches' Road, as do the tree centerpieces at the reception. The programs celebrate the magic mitzvah of William Kaplan, and his bedroom has Houdini posters. I assume William had an interest in sleight of hand magic as a hobby, which foreshadows Wiccan's abilities and might even have led to them.

Joe Locke, with an incredible singing voice, recites a traditional sung blessing. Billy then reads Leviticus 10:1 and 10:2, the story of Nadab and Abihu, sons of Aaron, who were burned to death by the Lord for lighting incense with a strange fire. They made three errors: lighting the incense was a priestly duty, it was meant to be done by one person and not two, and they used a foreign fire. Some see the passage as a warning against cutting corners or improper procedure, and 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 there's also a connection to 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. I'm not going to pretend to be a Torah scholar, though.

Lilia's tarot reading: The Tower and the Wheel of Fortune

The reception is again lit blue. I have to wonder if the Witches' Road could be a creation of Billy Maximoff, and whether some of that design influence came from part of William Kaplan who might still be living on with him. I really don't want William Kaplan to be dead, despite the fact that he probably is based on this episode. One of the party tents offers astral mapmaking, and following an astral map is sort of what Wanda was doing in the WandaVision post credits scene. It's a little odd at a bar mitzvah, but William is Reform, not Orthodox, and palm readings can be booked for themed parties like this.

Inside, he meets Lilia, who asks whether they're looking behind or ahead, another clue that her consciousness is toggling through time. Behind William is a tapestry of The Tower with a blue crown on top, clearly a reference to Wiccan's crown. Upright, The Tower represents sudden change, upheaval, chaos, revelation and awakening. Reversed, as Lilia later exclaims, it means averting disaster, delaying the inevitable and resisting change. So I think for William this means sudden violent change is coming, but Lilia wants to give him a way to resist it.

When William sits down, the tapestry behind him shows the Wheel of Fortune: change, cycles, fate, luck and unexpected events. Inverted, it means bad luck, lack of control, unwelcome changes and delays. The big question of the episode is whether Billy's soul claiming William's vessel at that precise moment was random luck, or willed by fate or by someone running the Kaplans off the road. All the tarot cards in the series carry the sigil in the corner, and I think we can now infer that is Lilia's personal signature.

In Lilia's crystal ball, William appears in his future goth teen clothes, the form Billy Maximoff takes. The reflection is upside down, with The Tower and the Wheel of Fortune inverted too. Lilia reads his palm and says his lifeline is broken in two, describing it as a new you. Clearly William is destined to have two souls in his body.

The Tower reversed and Lilia remembering her future

When Lilia says the tower reversed, listen closely: there is a chime and then a little hiccup interruption. Lilia says she remembered something. So I think her exclamation refers to some flash from the future of her upcoming trial, which trailers show will involve tarot cards, and it seems that trial will involve Lilia physically inverting The Tower to defeat the Salem Seven. Joe Locke has said episode 7 is the best of the season, and I think it is going to be this season's version of Lost's The Constant, with Lilia as the Desmond figure.

William says the place is "very early Argento." He could be referencing Dario Argento's Suspiria, one of the last films to use the Technicolor dye process and the first in his trilogy about three witches. But I think it's referring to 1975's Deep Red, which features a psychic medium 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 speaking with a Sicilian divination witch.

Lilia tells him to enjoy the now, because 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 this also implies the past isn't trustworthy for her, since our memories alter our past to get us through the present. It's also a clue that Billy soon won't remember any of William's past.

Lilia placed the sigil, which explains Multiverse of Madness

As if in a trance, Lilia draws the sigil on what the Disney+ audio description calls a small wooden rune. So it is confirmed that Lilia placed the sigil on William Kaplan's body, and it stayed there after Billy's soul took over. This explains why, after the WandaVision post credits scene and throughout Multiverse of Madness, Wanda couldn't find a version of Billy in the 616 universe and had to go into the multiverse. Her son was concealed by a sigil spell preventing any witch from knowing his identity. You could say everything bad in Multiverse of Madness is Lilia's fault.

Why did she do it? Presumably to protect the young man, or the soul who would soon possess this body, from witches like Agatha. Or maybe she knew the Scarlet Witch's destined future and wanted to send her down that path because of the danger she posed to the multiverse. Either way, the trance on Patti LuPone's face suggests a future version of Lilia is reaching back to cause this. She drops the tile in William's coat pocket, and the moment the sigil takes effect she has no idea whose coat it is. Patti LuPone is such a good actress.

The car crash, the Dodge Ram and Billy's first word: Tommy

Cops inform Jeff Kaplan 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 dinner plate exchange from the first episode of WandaVision. WandaVision episode 4 established that the hex's cosmic microwave background radiation can rebroadcast old reruns, and as the hex collapses it makes sense that highlights would beam out, going in reverse back to the 1961 era.

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. In America we drive on the right, so there's no reason she would have had to swerve if that truck had been where it belonged. Was the driver distracted by the hex? Or was it some force of fate, maybe even Rio behind the wheel? That would explain why Rio has been so focused on how this kid is still alive.

The car slams into the tree right at William's door. As I predicted, this was the near death reported in the end credits headline under Joe Locke's name, and maybe the car accident Agnes mentioned in episode 1. We hear William's heartbeat stop, then silence, then a healthy heartbeat and the word Tommy. With simple sound effects, zero visual effects and a great performance from Joe Locke, we understand that William died and that Billy Maximoff's soul, coming to its end as the hex collapsed, reincarnated in the empty body. I think it's so sweet that the boys said good night to each other after Wanda left them in WandaVision episode 9.

A simpler Wiccan origin than the comics

In the comics, Billy is revealed as the reincarnated soul of one of Wanda's twins, who were pieces of Mephisto's soul puppeted by Master Pandemonium. The way the MCU is structured, I prefer this version; it makes more sense from here forward. This is the Billy played by Julian Hilliard in WandaVision, not the corporeal Billy from the 838 universe in Multiverse of Madness.

I do think William's interest in magic primed his body to be a suitable, cosmically fated vessel. It means Billy is a 10 year old in a 13 year old's body, but he was always the product of a warped sitcom reality where he jumped from baby to age 10 in one episode. And Billy was Wanda's grief manifested, which WandaVision defined as love persevering. That magic has now been forced into an awkward vessel, which must at first feel like a nightmare or even hell to Billy after everything he went through in the hex.

The Eastview cop who finds him is Alice, who episode 2 established used to be a cop. She doesn't remember him later because of how powerful the sigil is; it gives everyone a kind of face blindness for this kid. At the hospital, Billy hears his parents' thoughts, the telepathy we saw in WandaVision, and responds, "Please don't fight," something he would say after the feuding between his parents in WandaVision episode 5. At home, Greg the dog barks at him; I think Greg knows. Jeff and Rebecca can't hide their anxiety on the inside, an interesting way to display generational trauma. Billy is forced to hear it all and feel like a murderer of the son they had before.

William's bedroom and the design of the Witches' Road

William's room is packed with clues: Houdini posters, an Italian engraving of the Land of Cockaigne, a mythical world of indulgence, and posters for Disney's Alice in Wonderland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with the same artwork as the closing credits, The Black Cauldron, which ends with resurrecting the main character's dead friend, and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. A poster for Assateague Island, split between Maryland and Virginia, may echo William and Billy split in two, though maybe I'm reading into that. There are also Wizard of Oz figurines and books and a toy castle.

It seems many of William's hobbies, adopted by Billy, could have inspired the design of 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, the sigil research and Ralph Bohner

Three years later, Billy is with his boyfriend Eddie. In the comics, Billy's boyfriend is Teddy Altman, also known as Hulkling. It remains to be seen if Eddie is that Teddy, but his sleeveless shirt matches Hulkling's comic look, and his aliens theory about Westview could connect to Teddy's extraterrestrial origin. Billy tells Eddie he died on the day of the accident, still remembers nothing from before, and lied about recovering so his parents wouldn't worry. Eddie accepts him anyway, and it's such a wonderful romance. In Billy's room, he didn't take down anything William had up; he only added to it, which feels like a respectful gesture to William's memory.

Billy's research includes a map of New Jersey with a star at Trenton and a note reading these six towns all link to the seventh town, and Lambertville circled. It may point to the question I've always asked: why Westview? Maybe there's some energy vortex in New Jersey. Eddie says the public was told the anomaly was an Avengers training exercise gone wrong; I assume the DODC covered it up.

They meet Ralph Bohner, Evan Peters' character from WandaVision, in a dark parking garage. This scene contradicts a deleted scene suggesting Ralph was Jimmy Woo's missing witness, since a man on the run wouldn't be worried about his house's property value. That's one of many deleted scenes in the MCU not being canon, and that's okay. Ralph is covered in superstitious tokens: animal bones on his bucket hat, which Lisa on Twitter said might be Sangoma healing, what appears to be an evil eye, what looks like a chicken foot inside his jacket, and a shirt punning on to be or not to be with bumblebees, which has to be a nod to WandaVision's Beekeeper. Evan Peters does an incredible job expressing the trauma of someone mind controlled twice. Ralph says he poisoned a dog, interesting since Agatha's song claimed she killed Sparky herself, and that Vision was reportedly used for parts.

Agatha on the Titanic, the Hindenburg and the real Jolene

Billy writes in the fates of Wanda, Vision, Tommy and Billy, one of many moments emphasizing that Wanda is dead. I think they don't want to set up expectations that Wanda could appear alive. A reverse image search reveals Agatha apparently survived the Titanic in 1912 and the Hindenburg explosion in 1937. I suppose the idea is that Agatha and Rio went on famous doomed voyages and snuck away alive.

My favorite detail is a 1972 surveillance photo of Dolly Parton slapping Agatha, with a headline 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, where and when Dolly recorded Jolene, and lists succubus powers. 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: to find Tommy, he must walk the road with Agatha. I love the kinship with the Wu family; Alice pulled him from the wreck, and her mother's voice now tells him how to find his brother.

The black heart and episode 1 from Billy's side

Eddie texts Billy, You're my black heart. In episode 2, Lilia drew a black heart in place of a final coven name, which we assumed meant Rio. Now I think that black heart might represent Billy, because Agatha needs him and his connection to Wanda, whereas Rio is an antagonistic presence along for the ride.

Replaying episode 1 from Billy's view, we see Agatha in Ralph's family reunion shirt, but the curtains cover where Rio would sit. If Rio were only in Agatha's mind, I think the shot would show an empty couch. The curtains are concealing something, so if Rio is Death, the show is waiting to reveal death's true form. The chase becomes a clumsy tumble off the roof, Billy stops to ask if she's okay, and Kathryn Hahn and Joe Locke seem on the verge of breaking during the interrogation. Billy must have started releasing Agatha from Wanda's spell, but Agatha then went somewhere we still haven't seen with Rio. There's still more to this timeline we do not know.

Billy Maximoff as the ship of Theseus

Back on the road, I think losing Alice caused Billy to have a Wanda style outburst of grief, a show of force to let everyone know how powerful he is. Agatha tells him he saw "an empty vessel, and you moved in." It's impossible for me not to compare this to the ship of Theseus. Vision concluded that memory forms identity. Billy has no memories of William's past, nor did he seem to have memories of Wanda, Vision and Tommy, since he needed Ralph to fill that in for him. But he has a cosmic link to Wanda, whose magic created his soul, and I think she is the Theseus of this metaphor. With every wave he crashes through, he further solidifies his right to exist. Billy and Agatha are finally honest about using each other to get down the road, and I don't think Billy qualifies as Agatha's endlessly loyal familiar anymore.