Agatha All Along: was Teen a possessed Billy Kaplan?

Early in Agatha All Along (2024), starring Kathryn Hahn and Joe Locke, the show's biggest mystery was the true identity, or identities, of Locke's character, Teen. My theory was that he was Billy Kaplan, the future MCU Wiccan of the Young Avengers or perhaps the Champions, but also that he was carrying a dark passenger: the spirit of Agatha's son, Nicholas Scratch.

The series finale, which aired October 30, 2024, settled the question. What follows is the case I made at the time, built on details hidden throughout the early episodes and clues in Joe Locke's costume. I believed it explained how and why Marvel Studios was introducing Wiccan with an alternate origin story, and how it did or didn't connect to Mephisto.

Why Teen's name was hidden from Agatha in the first episodes

The first two episodes introduced Teen as a goth teenager whom Agatha finds in her home while she's still trapped within Wanda Maximoff's spell. He's breaking in, masked, apparently to steal her brooch. That brooch is one she snatched from her mother, Evanora Harkness, in Salem in 1693. It depicts the triple goddess of maiden, mother and crone, it's made of cowrie shell, and it contains a lock of dark hair.

We hadn't yet learned what Teen was doing in or around Agatha's house in reality. Inside the illusion he was in Agnes's bedroom, and as the illusion faded, it was credited to Teen chanting a spell in Latin to free Agatha. So he could have been in her house to work that spell, and maybe he needed the brooch, or the hair inside it, to execute it properly.

But when Agatha asks Teen who he is in episode two, his answer is blocked. I took that to mean there must be some kind of charm, tied to a mysterious symbol, that prevents Agatha from hearing him name or identify himself. That concealment was what suggested to me an additional curse on top of whoever he really was.

The clues that Joe Locke's Teen was Billy Kaplan

Later in episode two, Teen has a boyfriend named Eddie, played by Miles Gutierrez-Riley. When Teen starts to explain his backstory, the audio fades out, but before it does, we hear him say he was born and raised in Eastview. Eastview, truly the Eagleton to Westview's Pawnee.

Joe Locke said in an interview that he improvised most of that scene. He explained that it was the last scene he and Kathryn Hahn shot together, and that "everyone had been so busy they hadn't written what I was supposed to be saying." He ended up talking about his granddad and his family history, and in one take he said something to make Hahn laugh, and was told the camera could still see his mouth.

Still, I said we could confirm that the character was named Billy, and probably Billy Kaplan. Closed captioning from a preseason promo named him Billy. Casting reports indicated a Rebecca Kaplan and a Jeff Kaplan would appear, and in the Young Avengers comics that introduced Billy Kaplan as Wiccan, he was born to a Rebecca and a Jeff Kaplan. In episode two, Billy also mentions that his mother went to see Lorna Wu, the rock star mother of Alice, on her last tour right before she died.

Wiccan's complicated comic backstory and Mephisto

In the comics, Billy Kaplan is the Young Avenger Wiccan who, along with Tommy Shepherd, was established as sort of a son of Wanda Maximoff reborn in a warped reality, but originally a piece of Mephisto's soul. That makes no sense on its own, because Wiccan has a very complicated backstory.

He was first established as one of the twins in the 1980s West Coast Avengers storyline, twins Agatha Harkness looked after. We found out they were being puppeted by Master Pandemonium, a figure who served Mephisto. Mephisto later revealed that when Reed Richards defeated him, his essence splintered into pieces, and the Scarlet Witch used two of those pieces to manifest the two children. Tenuous, yes, but that's how they became pieces of Mephisto's soul.

The twins returned in Avengers Disassembled and then the Children's Crusade, as a result of Wanda's reality warping, and then came the reality that introduced the Young Avengers, Billy Kaplan and Tommy Shepherd. Billy enters a relationship with Teddy Altman, also known as Hulkling, who isn't a Hulk but a Kree and Skrull hybrid with shapeshifting abilities who looks like a big green guy. With Gutierrez-Riley playing a character named Eddie, I thought Eddie could be a hint at Teddy.

Costume clues: the pentagram, the eyes and Wiccan's stars

A promo showed Joe Locke's character on a platform with a glowing blue pentagram at his feet that seems to emanate from his glowing hands. That lines up with comic art showing Wiccan in a similar configuration.

Locke said in several interviews that the show's costume designer, who also worked on WandaVision, stitched a ton of clues into every character's costume, including his. I met the designer at an event and he confirmed it. Teen's gray sweater has a pentagram on the side of the chest and several eye shapes. His jeans have a long patch with stars running down the side of the leg, which look a lot like the stars down the side of the suit Wiccan often wears in the comics. I also noted that Julian Hilliard's Billy Maximoff, in WandaVision and Multiverse of Madness, dressed as Wiccan in the WandaVision Halloween episode.

Based on all of this, I'd seen enough: Teen was Billy Kaplan, and I thought Marvel Studios saw a future for Joe Locke as its Wiccan. Locke had said in many interviews that he looked forward to working with people like Iman Vellani's Kamala Khan, and that Kevin Feige was on set for the first scene he shot for the show to keep an eye on it.

Joe Locke hinted Teen had several layers

None of that explained the spell hiding his identity from Agatha and the other witches. I thought the answer had to be an extra layer to the Billy Kaplan character, one Marvel Studios was using to establish a retconned, more straightforward backstory for Wiccan.

Locke told several outlets that Teen had several layers that would be revealed as the season went on, and that his acting approach in the first few episodes would be very different from later ones. He told the Total Film podcast with GamesRadar that he auditioned seven, eight or nine times over a six month period, and each time he got further, they revealed more about the character. To audition early on, he had to know enough to play an authentic, excited goth teen interested in witchcraft. By audition number seven, he learned a whole new layer. He essentially had to go down his own Witches' Road of trials to reach the core of the character.

Nicholas Scratch, Agatha's son, and the Darkhold

My earlier version of this theory tied together the Darkhold, Teen, Wiccan and Agatha's son Nicholas Scratch, and I'll admit that was probably confusing. So I simplified it: think of Billy Kaplan and Nicholas Scratch as two identities sharing one body.

Nicholas Scratch was Agatha's son a long time ago. In episode one, within the spell, Agnes looks into an empty child's bedroom belonging to a Nicholas Scratch, with a lot of rabbit imagery. In the comics, Agatha has a son named Nicholas Scratch who leads a group called the Salem Seven out of New Salem, Colorado, and the show has a different group of Salem Seven that could be based on that. In episode two, Jennifer Kale confronts Agatha about her past, asking whether this is "another child sacrifice," and promo footage showed the Darkhold in a baby crib.

I thought these clues pointed to a backstory in which Agatha sacrificed her son Nicholas Scratch to attain the Darkhold. That could be the dark magic that so outraged the witches of the Salem coven and her mother, who put her on trial and tried to drain her power.

Señor Scratchy and the lock of hair in Agatha's brooch

It seemed to me that Agatha, through her own means or some other spell, had forgotten what she did, but that traces of Nicholas had scratched their marks into her subconscious enough for him to linger in her life in different forms. The rabbit Señor Scratchy was probably named after her son, intentionally or not. She talks about the rabbit like a proud stage mother, saying he played Baby Jesus in last year's Christmas pageant. Some part of Agatha sees her Scratchy baby as belonging in a crib, and if he's named after Nicholas, it's ironic that he was cast as the baby Jesus.

And yes, I thought it was Nicholas Scratch's hair in that brooch locket. Agatha has always kept it close. Throughout WandaVision, as Wanda's spell moved through the decades and warped reality, the brooch was one constant in her wardrobe. In episode one, Agatha keeps reaching for that spot, and it was the brooch that Agnes saw Teen going for. Only after she opens it and sees the lock of hair does she think to ask Teen who he is, as if she sees a connection between the hair and this figure whose identity is hidden behind the symbol.

The Eastview car wreck and the near death in Westview headline

Hearing that Teen was born and raised in Eastview could connect to a loose thread from Agnes's case in episode one: a car wreck in Eastview about an hour before the time of death, with a bloodstain in the back seat and both front airbags deployed.

Fans online also pointed out that in the closing credits, behind Joe Locke's name, there's a headline about a near death in Westview. The other title imagery draws on real world history of witches and pop culture, but this one headline is set in the recent MCU past, dated December 14, 2023, a few weeks after the Westview incident. There were no near deaths in Westview during WandaVision that the media would have reported, beyond Tyler Hayward's bullets phasing through Monica Rambeau and Darcy arguably trying to commit manslaughter against Hayward.

So I thought the headline might refer to a car accident around Christmas 2023, where Billy Kaplan of Eastview, maybe near the Eastview and Westview border, nearly died. Then he was miraculously resurrected, maybe by his mother Rebecca singing her favorite Lorna Wu hit, the Ballad of the Witches' Road, and the spirit of Nicholas Scratch could have possessed him and restored his vitals.

The photo that appeared on Agnes's shelf

Episode one also has a framed black and white photo of a boy in Agnes's detective office beside a rabbit figurine. A fan on Twitter spotted that in an earlier shot, the photo isn't on the shelf, only a potted plant. When the scene cuts back, the photo and the rabbit are suddenly there, like a glitch in the Matrix.

To me, the truth of Agatha's past with Nicholas was clearly coming back to the surface. Wanda's spell had gone awry with the Darkhold's destruction and Wanda's defeat in Multiverse of Madness, but that was a few years before these events, so something more recent had happened. That more recent thing, I thought, was a precocious Billy Kaplan doing research and discovering a spell to break Agatha free.

The spell, the symbol and Teen's spellbook

A fan on Twitter translated Teen's Latin chant as "release this cursed woman" and "release this cursed woman by my spell." My theory was that when he freed Agatha, Nicholas Scratch's spirit latched onto Billy's soul and now co-occupied his body as a dark passenger. That might be why Billy seems so drawn to Señor Scratchy in episode two, and why a cloaking spell keeps Agatha from hearing anything about his identity.

The symbol was clearly significant: a fan account noticed it on the crew sweatshirt and on the corner of the tarot cards. I personally thought it was the signature on a contract with the devil, or with someone, that Agatha signed to sacrifice Nicholas in exchange for the Darkhold.

Joe Locke pointed out that part of his wardrobe is Teen's spellbook, strapped to his leg. He nearly hands it to Agatha in the car in episode two so she can write notes, but when she throws the pen out the window, he refuses. I thought Teen was trying to inscribe his own version of the Darkhold, a book his Nicholas Scratch possession was helping him write. And when Agnes sees Teen's dark fingertips in episode one, I thought she was really seeing her son's spirit and his link with the Darkhold.

How I thought Marvel would streamline Wiccan's origin

I didn't know what the season would establish about Nicholas. He could link to Mephisto or have nothing to do with him, and I was good either way. He could take physical form, appear as an actor in a flashback, or be seen only in photos. The first trailer had a shot of Locke with a black and white photo of a male figure behind him that I wondered might be Nicholas.

But I thought this link would be what left Billy with Wiccan's powers, and that to save Billy, Agatha would have to try to extract Nicholas from his body. Marvel Studios might be bypassing the Wanda, Billy Maximoff, Mephisto, Master Pandemonium, Avengers Disassembled and Children's Crusade backstory, and instead establishing the MCU Wiccan as a normal teen from Eastview, New Jersey, who looked too deeply into dark magic, Agatha, her son and the Darkhold, and gained witchcraft abilities by going too deep into the darkness.

So who was Teen? My answer was Billy Kaplan, with the spirit of Agatha's son Nicky Scratch possessing him as a vessel, and that possession was what made him such a mystery.