‘Agatha All Along’ Episode Six Recap: “Familiar by Thy Side”

As predicted, the sixth episode of Agatha All Along, titled Familiar by Thy Side, is a flashback! This time, it focuses on William Kaplan (Joe Locke) before he became the pesky Teen who broke into Agatha Harkness’ (Kathryn Hahn) house to obtain information on the Witches’ Road. In fact, Billy, as he’s now dubbed, is not Wanda Maximoff’s (Elizabeth Olsen) son at all. We first meet him at his Bar Mitzvah with his parents, Jeff (Paul Adelstein) and Rebecca (Maria Dizzia), who celebrate his coming-of-age before they have to evacuate the room in the wake of the battle between Wanda and Agatha at the end of WandaVision. 

Director Gandja Monteiro imbues these scenes with the most striking natural light and handheld camerawork Marvel has seen since Chloé Zhao’s Eternals. The 1.66:1 aspect ratio adds a more personal, intimate exploration of William’s transformation from a humble, mild-mannered Jewish teenager to the superhero we know as Wiccan. As the Kaplan family escapes and gets to safety, the Hex begins to shrink, but this causes their car to crash, killing William instantly. 

During the Bar Mitzvah celebrations, William met Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone) inside a tent, where she read about his future. It’s revealed that it was her, not Agatha, who cast the sigil to protect him, so he forgets his future identity once Billy Maximoff’s soul enters William’s body and resurrects him. He immediately does not know who he is and begins to research what happened to understand better the life he is now living inside William Kaplan’s body. It’s an interesting conceit, with Locke delivering his best work in the show. 

To be honest, he always was the coven’s weakest link, with LuPone, Ali Ahn, Sasheer Zamata, Aubrey Plaza, and Debra Jo Rupp having a far better sense of chemistry and comedic timing than him. But he’s rock-solid in this episode and represents Billy’s dissociation with tangible feelings and humanity, ultimately making us root for discovering his true identity. Monteiro and writer Jason Rostovsky also develop his relationship with his boyfriend, Eddie (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), which was briefly alluded to in the show’s episode. We even get a few kisses, to boot. And you know what? Good for him! They’re madly in love with each other, and he even accompanies William/Billy to meet someone who survived Wanda’s mind control to obtain answers about who he is. 

That person is none other than Ralph Bohner (Evan Peters), who makes his grand return in a funnier extended cameo than the entirety of Deadpool & Wolverine. Many people understate how genuinely great of an actor Evan Peters is. While his arc was gimped in WandaVision in the most anticlimactic, unimpressive way possible, we get a bit of closure on what happened to him as he swiftly left the climax with little to no answers on his whereabouts. 

In that conversation, Bohner reveals to William that both Billy and Tommy disappeared, while Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) has been pronounced dead (seemingly after the events of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), and S.W.O.R.D has reassembled Vision (Paul Bettany). There’s a legitimate fear in his eyes when he mentions what Agatha made him do when he adopted the identity of Pietro Maximoff, but he quickly recovers with the show’s funniest one-liner so far. 

It’s there that Billy ultimately finds out who he is and visits Agatha in her house, ignoring Ralph’s warnings. We then get a brand-new point of view of episode one’s chase, a Rashomon-like reversal of what we saw in Agatha’s mind and what is now reality. It’s fun to see how Agatha has a child’s gun to pretend she’s a police officer while Billy brings him back to reality. ButI cannot understand, for the life of me, how the sigil operates within the episode. If his name was hushed from Agatha and the rest of the coven, how could he say his name to her without any issues? 

It seems convenient that the sigil was only a fabric of Agatha’s mind when it acted as a pivotal point to hide not only Billy’s identity from her but everyone else! The ending scene in 2.39:1 isn’t a great way to end the episode, a tease that sets up a partnership between the two so they can reach the end of the road. We know how this story will wrap up after episode five’s handholded clue of Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) is revealed as Death. This will likely be a significant plot point next week, leading to its two-episode Halloween-themed finale. Things will likely heat up, and I look forward to seeing what the show now has in store after the obligatory flashback episode gave us most of our pressing answers. 

The sixth episode of Agatha All Along is now available to stream on Disney+.