Agatha All Along: Is Teen Wiccan? Devilish Details Tease Scarlet Witch’s Son, Billy Maximoff

[Warning: This article contains spoilers for Agatha All Along episode 3.] When it comes to Teen’s true identity in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the devil is in the details. The WandaVision spinoff series has cast a name-redacting sigil spell over Joe Locke’s mysterious teen accompanying the witch Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) on her quest down the Witches’ Road to reclaim the magic powers taken from her by the Scarlet Witch Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), who seemingly died at Mount Wundagore after she was corrupted by the Darkhold — the Book of the Damned — in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

But there’s another name Agatha All Along isn’t afraid to say: Mephisto. Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata) name-drops the devilish demon in “Through Many Miles of Tricks and Trials” when the coven — Agatha, Teen, Jen, Alice (Ali Ahn), Lilia (Patti LuPone), and Mrs. Hart/Sharon (Debra Jo Rupp) — face their first trial on the Witches’ Road. 

“They say no one knows what happened to him,” Jennifer tells Teen of Agatha’s son, Nicholas, whom Agatha allegedly traded for the Darkhold. “They say he might be dead.Others say he might be a demon or an agent of Mephisto. But that’s what happens when you have Agatha Harkness as your mom, right?I doubt she’d even recognize her own son if he showed up at her doorstep.”

This suggests Teen is Agatha’s son, but that is likely a red herring. There are clues that “Teen” is William Kaplan, a.k.a. Billy Maximoff, a.k.a. one of Wanda’s twin sons who disappeared when the Scarlet Witch broke the Hex spell she cast over Westview, New Jersey, on the WandaVision series finale. Not coincidentally, Agatha, Wanda, and the twins are all directly connected to Mephisto in the comics.

Billy and Tommy: The Twin Sons of Wanda and Vision

For those unfamiliar with Billy’s comic book history, Wanda and Vision’s twin sons, Thomas and William, are born in the final issue of the 12-issue miniseries The Vision and the Scarlet Witch, which sees the newlyweds retire to the New Jersey suburbs to start a family after quitting the Avengers. 

In the comics, the centuries-old witch is Wanda’s mentor and governess after Agatha’s death at the hands of the Salem’s Seven coven and subsequent resurrection. Agatha is the first to realize the truth about Tommy and Billy in 1989’s Avengers West Coast #51: that the twins aren’t real, and they disappear when Wanda isn’t thinking about them.

The twins are kidnapped and taken to Hell by the demon hordes of Master Pandemonium, who was empowered by the Hell-lord when Mephisto took Martin Preston’s soul as he lay dying in a car wreck. As he sought to gather the five pieces of his stolen soul (which left a pentagram-shaped hole in his body), it was eventually revealed that the demon manipulated Martin: he was collecting pieces of Mephisto’s own soul, which was fragmented by Franklin Richards in 1984’s Fantastic Four #277. (Agatha also served as the nanny for the mutant son of Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Woman.) 

Agatha reveals that Wanda, desperate to have children, unconsciously used her reality-altering powers to create the twins out of two lost souls: two of the missing pieces of Mephisto. When Mephisto reabsorbed the twins’ souls that were transmogrified by Wanda’s chaos magic, they destroyed the demon and dispersed. 

While Thomas and William ceased to exist — and their memory wiped from Wanda’s mind by Agatha to spare her the grief of losing her children — they returned after a grief-stricken Scarlet Witch lost control of her powers and caused the Avengers to disband during the events of 2004’s Avengers Disassembled.

In 2006’s Young Avengers #11, spell-caster Wiccan (Billy Kaplan) and speedster Speed (Thomas Shepherd) realize they’re the Scarlet Witch’s twin sons. Wiccan deduces that when Mephisto was temporarily destroyed, their souls were set free — which then reincarnated, with Billy ending up with the Kaplans in New York and Tommy with the Shepherds in New Jersey. 

The teen superheroes eventually track down an amnesiac Scarlet Witch and trigger her memories. “My name is Wanda Maximoff. They call me the Scarlet Witch,” she says in 2011’s Avengers: The Children’s Crusade #6. “My husband, the Vision, and I had twin sons, Thomas and William… two lost souls I made flesh and blood using magic. Two lost souls I was forced to set free… and for that I blamed the Avengers.” 

After she expresses remorse for killing the Vision, Jack of Hearts, and the Scott Lang Ant-Man in Avengers #500, and for later uttering the three words that decimated Earth’s mutant population, Wiccan urges Wanda to use her powers to reveal the truth: Billy and Tommy are her sons.

Wiccan All Along?

There are clues throughout these first three episodes of Agatha All Along that Teen is Billy Kaplan / Billy Maximoff. First, the book that “Detective” Agnes O’Connor (Hahn) checks out during her Mare of Easttown-inspired fantasy in “Seekest Thou the Road” is “Dialogue And Rhetoric: Known History Of Learning & Debate” — which spells out “Darkhold” — by “Andrew Ugo,” an anagram of Wundagore. 

Every copy of the book was destroyed in a fire three years ago, which is how long Agatha/Agnes has been living in Westview. Detective O’Connor’s “Jane Doe” is Wanda, who was crushed to death when she brought down Darkhold Castle at Mount Wundagore to destroy every version of the Darkhold throughout the multiverse. Another detective reports that there was a car wreck in nearby Eastview “about an hour before time of death,” which seems to be a nod to Master Pandemonium’s origin story.

In “Circle Sewn with Fate Unlock Thy Hidden Gate,” Teen tells Agatha he was born and raised in Eastview; he has a boyfriend (suspected to be Teddy Altman, a.k.a. the Young Avenger Hulking, Wiccan’s boyfriend from the comics); and that he’s 16 years old. In “Through Many Miles of Tricks and Trials,” he connects with protection witch Alice — who also happens to be investigating the disappearance of her mother, “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” singer Lorna Wu, long ago lost to the Road — saying that “a lot happened to me at 13, too.”

This coincides with the events of WandaVision three years earlier, where Wanda and Vision’s (Paul Bettany) newborn twins rapidly aged into preteens (Julian Hilliard and Jett Klyne) before disappearing. Episode 3 name-drops Mephisto to establish a red herring for Teen as Agatha’s son, but this is the biggest hint yet that the sigil is hiding his identity as the Scarlet Witch’s son, Wiccan. 

“With these [Marvel] shows, so often there is something that is at once a jokeand a wink and a nod, and actually has something legitimate underneathit,” showrunner Jac Schaeffer said in a recent interview. “As we all know, Mephisto is a character who’svery wrapped into Agatha’s storyline. I mean, people have to watch, butwe’re always playing with the audience in that way.”

New episodes of Agatha All Along premiere Wednesdays on Disney+.