REVIEW: Agatha All Along – Season 1, Episode 6, “Familiar By Thy Side”

Television Reviews

“Familiar By Thy Side” is exactly what the title implies: the episode that reveals all about Teen, the drip of a familiar who’s been following the coven along the Witches’ Road because he thinks Agatha is just the coolest. The answer is one of the two or three that have been widely speculated, but much like whatever lies at the end of the show, the road to getting there is a slog, centered on a character who, while more three-dimensional now, never comes alive or captures your attention. The result is one of the less embarrassing episodes of Agatha All Along, but still not a very interesting one.

As Agatha, Jennifer, and Lilia are sucked into the muddy ground surrounding the Witches’ Road, the narrative flashes back to Teen’s life before he found out about Agatha. Where did he come from? How did he get interested in witchcraft? Who put the sigil on him that prevents him from saying his real name? All will be answered if you can stay awake through the whole forty minutes.

Teen turns out to be William Kaplan, a Jewish kid who begins “Familiar By Thy Side” celebrating his Bar Mitzvah with his doting parents and supportive friends. He seems to have a good life, but a chance wandering into a psychic’s booth spells potential doom. The psychic, of course, turns out to be Lilia, who reads his palm and seems uncertain about his future. She’s vague, telling William everything is probably fine, but she ominously advises him to enjoy life in the present. Unbeknownst to William, she places the sigil on him and instantly forgets who William is due to its hex power. Obviously, something bad is going to happen to William, and it doesn’t take long to find out what that is; as William and the other partygoers flee amid warnings from the police about the “anomaly” at Westview – yep, this is happening during the end of WandaVision – William’s mother turns her attention from the road and crashes their car in the woods. (Insert joke about women drivers here.) Could this be what Lilia saw when reading William’s palm?

***SPOILERS***

Probably, or at least part of it. William appears to die in the crash, but he mysteriously awakens moments later and is taken to the hospital (with help from future coven member Alice, who is still a cop at this point). William heals from his wounds, but he can’t remember anything before the crash. He also appears to have mind-reading abilities, hearing his parents’ worried thoughts as they try to ease him back into his life. In the years following the accident, William investigates the Westview incident and deduces that whatever happened to him is connected to the town’s run-in with the Scarlet Witch. After seeking out one of the Westview survivors, William and his boyfriend Eddie (“Familiar By Thy Side” spends a good deal of time reminding us that William is gay, including his admonishing Eddie for showing off his muscular arms while they’re trying to work) meet Ralph Boehner in a parking lot… and I guess I have to give the show a few points for resisting the urge to make a “Deep Throat” joke.

Anyway, they discover that Wanda Maximoff had twin sons who disappeared after she removed her hex from Westview, one who had super speed and one who could read minds. William realizes that he is actually Billy Maximoff; William Kaplan died in the car accident, and Billy Maximoff entered his dead body to come alive again. Ralph also tells William that a witch named Agatha Harkness was involved with the Westview shenanigans, and she’s still there under Wanda’s spell, living in Ralph’s home. We then see the events of the series premiere of Agatha All Along from William’s perspective, which is even less interesting than it was the first time; we get the whole annoying, overacting Agatha interrogation again, only with Agatha in a t-shirt and sweats talking to William in her living room. We also learn that William broke into Agatha’s house to find something special to her so he could break the spell Wanda had put on her. And that leaves us in the present, where Agatha crawls out of the mud pit and puts two and two together. William is Wanda’s son, and he wants to use the Witches’ Road to find his brother Tommy.

Insofar as the story, I’m okay with pretty much all of this. William being one of Wanda’s sons is interesting, and it raises even more moral questions that I hope the show – or a future Marvel project – will explore. (Was William Kaplan gay, too? If not, is it kind of messed up that William Maximoff is using his body to be gay with Eddie? What are the ethical limitations of death and a repurposed body? Something tells me this will never be mentioned.) William almost feels like the protagonist now, with Agatha taking on the role of the temptress, trying to get William to be more concerned with power than his family history. I’d like them to play with this dynamic in the remaining episodes. But it also feels like William’s story didn’t need an entire episode devoted to it; a segment in a regular episode would have been fine. And I hate to say this because I know how it sounds, but if they weren’t so dead-set on emphasizing William’s homosexuality, this could have been cut down quite a bit. I’m not saying to make William straight – I know he’s gay in the comics – but if they want to make his relationship with Eddie so important, they should have tied it into the plot. Instead, it feels like it’s there just to be there, and it pads out the already slow episode. It’s the same with bringing back Ralph Bohner, played once again by Evan Peters. I like Evan Peters a lot as an actor, but he was a big disappointment in WandaVision because they were teasing him as a multiversal variant of Quicksilver, and he ended up being the dopey neighbor instead. (His name is even a reference to a character from Growing Pains, which could have been funny, but because of the Quicksilver fumble, it’s just rubbing salt in a wound.) His appearance here isn’t any better; he’s silly, not as funny as the writers seem to think he is, and the scene goes on too long and reveals information William could have gotten elsewhere quicker.

“Familiar By Thy Side” also gets too silly at times. It’s more serious than Agatha All Along has been, and that’s good, but the jokes still don’t land and feel like desperate attempts to keep the audience invested. William encountering each member of the coven (aside from Rio, who is absent once again) feels silly and forced because nothing comes of it. Lilia is understandable because one of the coven members had to be the one who gave William the sigil, and we saw Sharon Davis hit him outside of Agatha’s house in the first episode. But what was the point of Alice being the cop who finds his family’s crashed car on the road or William and Eddie watching Jennifer on an infomercial and geeking out about her? If William running into all of the witches tied into the plot, it would have been okay, but it doesn’t, so it feels cutesy and meaningless. It’s even worse when Agatha says that Lilia and Jennifer are dead. (How did Agatha survive when they died? No idea.) The characters are dropping left and right on this show, and they’re getting very unceremonious deaths. And since they’re not great characters to begin with, the impact is a bit muted. I don’t know where any of this is going – I assume William will find Tommy – but this was one of the better episodes, albeit still dull.

Let us know what you thought of “Familiar By Thy Side” in the comments!

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