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You couldn’t escape talking about WandaVision in 2021 without hearing the word “Mephisto” at some point. To not be entirely unfair to comic book fans, for as much as the series went on to try and skewer the Easter-egg-analytical side of its fandom as it unpacked Wanda Maximoff’s trauma, it was still inherently, albeit loosely, adapting storylines from the comics that certainly invited that kind of speculation. But now that its spiritual successor Agatha All Along is here and even more explicitly playing into the demonical and mystical side of Marvel, well, it’s only going to invite connecting those disparate dots even further.
Agatha All Along‘s two-episode premiere this week quickly whisks us from prestige-crime-drama homage to the titular witch preparing to form a team of lone-wolf witches to help her get her powers back. But along the way there’s three intriguing characters we meet that all could potentially connect to everyone’s least-favorite marriage killer in comics. They all have roots in Marvel’s source material, they all have those ties, but is Agatha really doing anything with them or just messing with us? Let’s break it down bit by bit.
Nicholas Scratch
© Marvel Studios
Agatha All Along‘s cop show riff Agnes of Westview climaxes in its tropey homages with “Agnes” returning to her home after a long day working on her new murder case to wrestle with a few of her own demons, by walking through her house to reveal an empty, but well-maintained child’s room. It wouldn’t be a woman-led prestige detective drama without a little trauma now, would it? The room is clearly meant to imply Agnes being haunted over a child that she tragically, nebulously lost, but the intrigue for comics fans of course is that school awards on the abandoned shelves reveal that Agnes’ son is named Nicholas Scratch.
In the comics, Scratch is indeed the son of Agatha Harkness, and an irregular villainous foil to the Fantastic Four. Born and raised by Agatha in New Salem, an isolationist society of magic users, Nicholas became embittered by his mother’s choice to leave the community and live among contemporary society, after she went to become the babysitter of Franklin Richards for Sue and Reed. Growing up and becoming New Salem’s leader, Scratch turned the town against his mother for her perceived betrayal of their secret commune, kidnapping both her and Franklin. But after the Fantastic Four intervened and rescued Agatha, Scratch found himself banished to the Dark Realm. Over the years Scratch occasionally resurfaced in the comics, first in attempts to escape his banishment, and then to battle back against the Fantastic Four and other Marvel heroes with the Salem’s Seven, a group of superhuman mutants that were all actually sired by Scratch and various women.
But what makes Scratch’s Agatha All Along mention intriguing is that one of Scratch’s last major storylines saw him defeated by Doctor Strange and the Fantastic Four in 2006’s 4, after an attempt to deceive them into summoning Shuma-Gorath. Banished again, this time straight to Hell, Scratch naturally began forging connections… starting with an alliance with, you guessed it, Mephisto himself.
Rio Vidal’s Black Heart
© Marvel Studios
Aubrey Plaza’s mysterious green witch, Rio Vidal, is arguably the biggest mystery of Agatha so far, if only because she’s actually one of the few main cast members who is, seemingly, a character created from whole cloth for the series rather than pulling directly from the comics.
Seemingly. In the second episode of the series, Rio is referred to in Lilia Calderu’s divination of Agatha’s potential coven members not by her name or title, but with a single emblem: a black heart. While this might just be a reference to something else about the nature of her character (or even a potential romantic past with Agatha; the show definitely gives the duo an exes vibe, before the whole “I want to mystically leap at you and stab you with my knife” deal, although that is also itself pretty Sapphic), in the comics there is a mystical character named Blackheart… who is none other than the son of Mephisto.
Introduced by Ann Nocenti and John Romita Jr. in 1989 as part of their Daredevil run, Blackheart was a demon crafted by Mephisto out of a manifestation of evil energies emanating from the town of Christ’s Crown, New York, notorious for its history of murders. However, just as quickly as Mephisto takes his child under his wings to learn the ways of devilry, Blackheart’s failures to tempt superheroes to evil’s side leads to him concluding that his father could never defeat good—and Mephisto exiling him to earth. Over the years Blackheart has been a foil to multiple Marvel heroes, including Ghost Rider, in his attempts to fight back against his father and his control over him and make a name for himself in Hell.
The Kaplan Connection
© Marvel Studios
Just whoever Joe Locke is really playing as Agatha’s young magical groupie “Teen” still remains up in the air at this point—given that we see in the premiere whenever he tries to talk to Agatha about his past or his actual name, she is magically barred from hearing it. But the long-running theory fans have had about the character is that Teen is in fact Billy Kaplan, aka the Young Avenger Wiccan, and of course, the re-incarnated version of Wanda and Vision’s twin son, William Maximoff.
In the comics it’s eventually revealed that Wanda created her children, William and Thomas, by inadvertently using her reality-warping chaos magics to pull two souls that were actually part of Mephisto’s essence, dissipated into multiple entities after being defeated by Franklin Richards, into the forms of her young boys. But when the boys were unmade by the demon and wiped from existence, the souls had been so radically altered by Wanda’s magics that Mephisto ultimately couldn’t use them either, defeating his plans to regain his true form again. The souls would ultimately be freed and reincarnated into two unrelated boys, Billy Kaplan and Tommy Shepherd, born to two different families and eventually reunited as members of the Young Avengers after they both manifested superpowers with eerily familiar connections to Wanda’s family, with Tommy manifesting superspeed akin to Wanda’s brother Pietro, and Billy an array of mystical abilities.
That theory is one that still makes sense with what we’ve seen of “Teen” so far. Like Billy, he’s openly queer, mentioning his worried boyfriend to Agatha as they begin their roadtrip to find a new coven, and like Billy, he has a keen interest in the arcane, even if he currently lacks the power to really wield it himself yet. There would be something very fun about the re-incarnated son of Wanda (who is, at least in the timeframe of Agatha, still very much dead after the events of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of madness) being the one who helps Agatha re-ascend to witchery, and gaining his own magical powers in the process. But given all the other Mephisto-adjacent tension mentioned above, it’s also just another intriguing layer to it all.
Is It Really Mephisto This Time?
The answer, as always with most MCU theories, is “maybe, but probably not.” It would be very funny if Agatha was the show that actually went into the Mysterio of it all after the mania fans brought to WandaVision with those theories, especially given that it is leaning much more into the supernatural underpinnings of magic in the MCU in comparison. But as noted above, all the connections we see laid out above are pretty loose at bet. The Nicholas Scratch reference could’ve been more about primarily the cop-show homage connection—and the trope of the lead detective haunted by a tragic past—rather than Scratch’s own tenuous link to Mephisto. Likewise, Rio could be entirely separate from the comics, or be revealed to have a completely different connection, and the Black Heart was more about referring to her character rather than anything directly from the comics. And even if “Teen” does end up actually being Billy at some point during the show, it’s not like the show has to dig into his comic book history with Mephisto, and find some other explanation as to how William came back into existence (especially given the extra layer of mystery as to why Agatha is being blocked from hearing anything about him).
Suffice to say, much like there was with WandaVision, it’s a bit early to definitively get Mephisto-pilled all over again. But it’s fun to speculate in that spirit either way with the MCU’s successor series.
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“}]] The WandaVision spinoff’s premiere laid down some fascinating connections to the comics that all share a loose connection to a character fans have theorized could be showing up *any minute now* since 2021. Read More