Photo: Marvel
Potential spoilers for Agatha All Along.
Fall has invited a slightly cooler temperature, pumpkin spice, and a brand-new witchy show to pore over. Following in the pop-culture-preoccupied footsteps of its forerunner WandaVision, Agatha All Along serves up a pastiche of horror movies and prestige television and invites theories aplenty. Most pressing: the identity of Joe Locke’s “Teen,” an eager fanboy with the juice to break Agatha from her Westview daze. Three episodes in and “Teen” is still “Teen,” with the big reveal so far being he has a sigil, a redaction spell that hides his identity from all magic folks. (You know Kevin Feige wishes he could use one on Tom Holland during MCU press.) But Agatha All Along has sown some seeds about the real identity of “Teen,” so we’re unpacking them as well as our theories below.
Billy Kaplan/Maximoff
The most talked-about theory is that “Teen” is Wanda Maximoff’s son Billy, whom she gave birth to as one-half of a set of twins in WandaVision. At the end of WandaVision, Wanda releases Westview from her reality-warping abilities, which includes letting go of Vision, Billy, and Tommy because they can only be alive while Westview is under her spell. We last saw Billy (played by Julian Hilliard) in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, where, in one multiverse at least, Billy seems very much real and not just a figment of Wanda’s Westview fantasy. Complicated, yes, but in the end, Wanda decides not to pull him and Tommy from that multiverse, meaning there’s still no Billy or Tommy in the main MCU timeline.
Thanks to comics history, there’s precedent for their return. In the Vision and the Scarlet Witch comics, Wanda and Vision’s twins, Thomas and William, are revealed to have been fragments of Mephisto, Marvel’s version of the devil, and Agatha erases Wanda’s memory to prevent capital-T trauma stemming from the disappearance of her children. It’s all comic gobbledygook weirdness with some misogyny tied in, but the twins reappear in Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung’s Young Avengers comics as Billy Kaplan (Wiccan) and Tommy Shepherd (Speed), whom we learn in 2010’s The Children’s Crusade are Wanda’s kids reincarnated.
And so we come to Locke’s “Teen.” What’s the evidence in favor of Billy here? Aside from the fact that Agatha All Along feels the need to hide his identity in the first place, this kid’s magic is strong enough to break Agatha from Wanda’s spell. Then there’s the existence of Teen’s protective “boyf” (his actual name hasn’t been revealed yet); in Young Avengers, Billy has a boyfriend called Teddy (a.k.a. a Kree/Skrull hero named Hulkling), and since the MCU hasn’t committed to many queer characters, this feels notable indeed. Finally and most telling, Marvel’s marketing has included two key bits: One is a poster of Joe Locke wearing an outfit suspiciously close to Billy’s in WandaVision (and reminiscent of Wiccan); another is a 15-second teaser of Agatha showing Teen seemingly wielding blue magic just like Billy. It makes a lot of sense for Agatha to introduce Billy, seeing as the MCU is trying to put together its own young superteam right now. If this theory is true, the most interesting part will be how Agatha reveals it.
Nicholas Scratch
Wanda looms over this show, sure, but it’s Agatha’s name in the title. Having “Teen” be her son Nicholas could be a fascinating wrinkle for our evil witch — or a red herring. This is Nicholas’s first mention in the MCU, but you may remember Señor Scratchy, Agatha’s bunny in WandaVision, who was presumably named after her son; he even cuddles with Agatha and Teen in the first two episodes of Agatha. Episode three, however, is almost too heavy-handed with the Scratch information, as Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata) tells “Teen” that Agatha traded her son for the Book of the Damned and wouldn’t “recognize her own son if he showed up at her doorstep.” (Like c’mon.) Kale goes on to say “no one knows what happened to him,” theorizing that he could be dead, a demon, or hey, an agent of Mephisto. In the comics, Scratch seeks revenge on his mother, Agatha, even sending the Salem’s Seven after her — the same creepy seven haunting Agatha in the television series. Scratch does eventually serve as an agent of Mephisto, so the pieces line up neatly. In fact, a little too neatly. Which reminds me of …
Theory 3: We Get Ralph Bohner’d, Again.
Look, I’m not saying it will happen, but when Evan Peters (who played Quicksilver in the 20th Century Fox X-Men movies) showed up in WandaVision as an in-show and in-universe recast of Aaron Taylor Johnson’s Pietro, the MCU’s version of Quicksilver (yes, it’s the same character), all kinds of theories about the possibility of X-Men entering the MCU as a post-Fox/Disney merger project exploded across the internet. In the end all that theorizing was moot, and Peters was just a guy named Ralph Bohner. I doubt the mystery of “Teen” will result in another dick-joke reveal, but I’m still gonna cover my bases.
Related
Agatha All Along Series-Premiere Recap: The Witch Is BackWhich Witches Are Bringing the Most to Agatha All Along’s Coven?How Jac Schaeffer Made WandaVision Inside the Marvel Machine
