In WandaVisionCreator and head writer Jac Schaeffer firmly established herself as the maestro of the miniseries, demonstrating a meta-layered understanding of television in a way that both enjoyed and critiqued the form. In Agatha all the timeThe writer/director proves to be a master puppeteer, playing with the audience’s assumptions and taking them over with relish. The sixth and most recent episode, “Familiar by Thy Side,” was like a victory lap for how well this has been done in the series after pandemonium broke out in the final seconds of the previous episode, “Darkest Hour/Wake Thy Power.”
From the beginning, this story of Agatha Harkness – and her attempt to reclaim her monstrous fame before her unfortunate encounter with Wanda Maximoff – has been portrayed as Agatha’s manipulation of everyone around her. From the people she forcibly recruits for her journey to Witch Road, to the way she exploits the nameless, puppy-like teenager (known as “Teen”) who so desperately wants her approval, to the shocking moments The absolute evil she displayed was a program that was always about destroying our helpless desire to see the murderous witch redeemed. Until now.
It’s really fun that the next sentence I write is like this not: “Since it turns out it was the teenager who was manipulating Agatha the whole time!” Because it’s much more enjoyably complicated. After this week’s episode – at 47 minutes, the longest yet, following last week’s impressive 30 minutes – we found that everything we thought we knew so far was being viewed through two completely different but overlapping, veiled lenses. Both Agatha and…Billy Maximoff begin to realize that they have successfully manipulated the other. And oh boy, would the show have manipulated us into debating whether Teen was Agatha’s son?
This unfolded at a measured pace that felt strikingly different than anything the series had to offer before. The pace was rather manic.
The beginning of the sixth episode with the bar mitzvah of a (not very convincing) younger version of Teen – who is now suddenly named William Kaplan – seems like something from a completely different series. We see the arrival of this Westview resident, his singing from the Torah, his proud family, and then long sequences at the after-party as William visits a hired psychic in her curtained cabin. It turns out to be Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone), who, while reading his palm, is suddenly taken aback when she not only realizes that her lifeline is split, but also suddenly sees a tarot card, the Tower, in front of her stands. The witch is deeply unnerved, clumsily tries to calm the situation, and then creates a seal that she hides in his cloak. A seal that makes her forget him immediately.
The after-party is canceled when a warning arrives that something is happening to the dome over the town of Westview, which of course is the final event WandaVisionDistracted by the light show, the family car veers off the road and crashes violently into a tree. The parents are injured, but William is killed, his father rushes to a passing police car to get help. When he returns with a police officer (who apparently is no coincidence, another witch – Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn)), William appears to have miraculously come back to life, albeit with no memory.
Then we jump forward a few years, and here we jump ahead to a lot of quiet and entertaining action about the teenager and his friend, to the point where Not-William starts to get an idea of who he might actually be: one of Wanda’s two (fictional?) sons, created as part of her sitcom idyll spell. We later learn that at the moment of his “dying”, when the spell was broken, he took advantage of this suddenly dead body and involuntarily jumped into it. He is Billy Maximoff, he wants to know what happened and he believes Agatha is the only person who can tell him. Although she is still under the influence of Wanda’s spell, she currently thinks she is one True detectiveCop style.
In this flurry of events, we must completely reframe our understanding of the opening episode. That sequence where Agatha is talking to Aubrey Plaza’s Rio Vidal (although I’m now pretty sure it wasn’t her) when she hears a break-in upstairs, the chase scene, the interrogation where she’s staring at the one-way window, the… We now know it was a painting… We knew then it wasn’t real because we knew she wasn’t Jodie Foster solving a scary crime, but we didn’t have the means of translating it.
This becomes even more exciting when we realize that Billy was never desperate to become a confidant and was not, as I’m sure everyone fully believed, trying to find out whether Agatha was his mother. He always knew it wasn’t her. Oh, and we reconsidered the show wondering if Agatha thought he was her son, even though it turns out she pretty much knew who he was from the start. Rio’s earlier declaration, “He’s not yours, you know,” was the cruelest bluff of all.
Plus, we’re now stuck in a maddening mess of questions about how much Rio was ever really there. She certainly wasn’t present at the interrogation, and almost certainly wasn’t in Agatha’s house when Billy broke in, and it’s very likely that she wasn’t involved in the epic battle between the two after Billy was kidnapped. Why? Because do you remember how she cuts her hand in a fight over the knife? Why exactly was it suddenly healed shortly after, considering Agatha had none of her magic? In retrospect, it seems far more likely that there will be no cuts at all. I suspect she doesn’t Really Appear until the witches call them to the streets. (This would also explain why Billy is blamed for breaking her spell in the second episode when we watched Rio do it.)
Learning right at the end of the sixth episode that not only did Billy always intend to find his missing brother Tommy, but that Agatha was always suspicious of who he might be is so gratifying. It is us who were in the dark, and both them who have messed with us as well as each other. All of our moments when we think we’ve come to some insight – even when we claim to have guessed that he might be Wanda’s child – leave us spinning.
Oh, and how wonderful was it that Billy spent the fifth episode with that blue headband on his head that would eventually become a Wanda-esque blue crown?
And we haven’t even mentioned the excellent parking lot scene with Ralph “Mr Bonerifici” Bohner (Evan Peters), who played the meta-meta role in “Quicksilver/Piertro Maximoff.” WandaVisionafter playing the role in non-canon X Men Movies, but not the MCU.
It’s quite nice to now wonder if this could all be bluffs and that it’s almost inevitable that there will be more twists in the final three episodes, the last two of which take place on Halloween. I’m very here because I was wrong again.
