We all knew it was coming: the Lore Dump episode. WandaVision broke its format after just four episodes. At least Agatha all the time had the decency to wait until the sixth entry.

“Familiar By Thy Side” begins with a flashback to a celebration three years ago – William Kaplan’s (Joe Locke) bar mitzvah. William’s Bar Mitzvah is themed around magic; the posters that decorate his childhood room (Harry Houdini, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, The black cauldronAnd Bedknobs and broomsticksetc.) indicate an early fascination with the topic. To round out the topic, his parents rented a palm reader. Apparently we’re getting a double whammy with this episode: it’s both a slow-moving detour into William’s background and a “Woah, the seemingly disparate characters are actually all connected, how about that!” reveal. The palm reader is, of course, Lilia Calderu, and when she sees William’s broken lifeline, she puts a seal on him.

The episode goes to great lengths to explain, over-explain, and re-explain exactly what’s going on: how William Kaplan died on the way home from his party in a car accident that coincided perfectly with the collapse of the Westview anomaly . How Billy Maximoff’s ghost(?) hijacked William’s body, leaving him with amnesia, a mysterious ability to read minds, and the nagging feeling that, despite his parents’ insistence, he is not who they think he is. How he can’t remember anything before the accident, not from the life of William Kaplan or Billy Maximoff, but he fakes it and pretends he’s getting better so William’s parents won’t worry so much. How this all relates to Agatha Harkness. However, “Familiar By Thy Side” doesn’t bother to explain why Lilia gave William the seal in the first place. Did she see what would happen to him in a few hours? Was she preemptively trying to hide Billy Maximoff’s continued existence from Wanda? Who knows! I think we’ll have to save some of the big reveals for the final three episodes.

It seems strange to me that this is the longest episode yet; At 49 minutes, it is a full 17 minutes longer than episode five. But it doesn’t use that time effectively. There’s an interesting story here that might have been worth pausing the series for if it had been told properly. An adolescent boy, trapped in a foreign body, tries to figure out who he is and convince everyone around him that he is no different at all. Puberty with a pinch of mystery and a pinch of dysphoria.

In fact, I’d like to see a whole episode that lets us sit with the weight of Billy’s reality in the intervening years as he struggles to find himself, cover his tracks, and navigate the world as William, so that we, when we come back to them in the main story, the knowledge of what he’s been through hits us hard, forcing us to re-contextualize everything we’ve seen so far. Instead, we get an extended cameo from Ralph Bohner (Evan Peters), who recounts the events of ” WandaVision for William.

Agatha all the time offers frustratingly little insight into William finally learning who he really is. When William finds out that Wanda had twins – Billy, who could read minds, and Tommy, who was super fast – he simply abandons his incredibly supportive friend Eddie (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) and sets out to find Agatha. Then we get a seven minute summary of Agathais the first episode from William’s perspective – which, while fun, isn’t different enough to warrant revisiting – before we end up back on “The Road” where we left off at the end of the fifth episode.

Agatha comes crawling out of the mud – you wouldn’t really have believed it dead You’re dead, right? – and has a brief conversation with Billy about who he is and how long she has known him (literally the whole time). Billy confirms what he’s actually looking for on the street. It is not power; It’s his brother Tommy. He claims he can sense Tommy somewhere out there, but he just can’t find him. But I would believe Billy a lot more if Familiar By Thy Side actually delved into his feelings instead of just explaining what happened to him and relying on unnecessary cameos to make up for the overly long running time to fill in the episode.

Crazy observations

• • In addition to Lilia, in this episode we also see how Teen is connected to all the other circle members. Alice was the first police officer to respond to the car accident, he watched Jen’s skin care videos on YouTube and purposely sought out Agatha.
• • If you’ve seen the Funko Pop spoilers (and believe they’re real), it seems like William will meet Rio in this episode too.
• • Eddie = Teddy Altman = Hulkling = Young Avengers??
• But wait – Eddie signs his text message to William with a black heart emoji. Eddie = Kid Blackheart??? (I assure you, this is a joke.)
• • Greg is an excellent dog name.
• • Agnes was right – the car accident in Eastview was related to the body, just not in the way she thought.
• • Billy can’t use his powers at the end of the episode because Agatha stole them when he threw her into the mud, right?
• • “Any witch with a beating heart can hear you now.” Oh no. She’s coming back, isn’t she? Why can’t we have a Marvel thing whose purpose isn’t just to tie into the mega-MCU narrative at the expense of its own storytelling?
• As Billy walks down the street at the end of the episode, he pulls up the hood of his dark sweatshirt and, combined with his bare feet and skinny jeans, makes a figure that looks very similar to the body in the forest from episode one. Notable: When the librarian asked Agatha, “Who is the victim?” Is she dead?” Agatha replied, “Why do you assume it is a woman?”