Agatha All Along’s latest MCU cameo is a callback (and probably not the Marvel villain fans hoped for)
[Ed. note: This post discusses spoilers for Agatha All Along episode 6, “Familiar by Thy Side.” Proceed down the road only if you want some witches’ spoilers.]
The show is called Agatha All Along, but Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) certainly isn’t the only Marvel star showing up. As of episode 6, “Familiar by Thy Side,” we now officially have Billy Maximoff, aka Wiccan (or, right now in the MCU, Wiccan-to-be) on board. Which pushes Agatha All Along toward Wanda Maximoff and WandaVision callbacks. So it makes sense that Agatha would bring back a lot of people’s (least) favorite part of WandaVision: Ralph Bohner.
Still, the reveal feels a little silly after fans were speculating from the show’s trailer that the mysterious parking-garage stranger was going to be Mephisto, Marvel Comics’ version of Satan. After “Familiar by Thy Side,” is Ralph Bohner who he says he is?
…Probably, yeah! Let’s look at the evidence.
Ralph Bohner has an MCU history already
Evan Peters first showed up in WandaVision as Pietro, Wanda’s long-dead brother. For fans, Peters’ appearance was a fun bit of stunt-casting: Pietro, aka Quicksilver, was played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the MCU, in Avengers: Age of Ultron. But Peters played Quicksilver in Fox’s X-Men universe, notably in an X-Men: Apocalypse scene where he cheekily saves all his fellow heroes. (It’s about the only thing worth remembering about that movie.) So when Peters appeared as Pietro in the MCU’s WandaVision right about the time the X-Men were getting cleared to join the MCU, it seemed like his version of Quicksilver might have a way into this franchise after all.
But then real life took over. Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) discovered “Pietro” was actually just another Westview citizen under Wanda’s spell (and more importantly, under Agatha’s secret control). His name was actually Ralph Bohner, and he was the actual occupant of the house Agnes (aka Agatha) was residing in, and the mysterious husband Agnes kept making sitcom jokes about. Fan dreams for a legitimized Fox-mutants-in-the-MCU scenario sank.
Agatha All Along brings Ralph back in a way that feels consistent with his character so far. When he appears in episode 6, he’s a kind of loopy MCU version of Deep Throat, a Westview resident still deeply haunted by his time under Wanda and Agatha’s control. Unfortunately, the only person who seems to believe the account of “Bohnerrific69” is Billy Maximoff. We even see that Agatha is wearing a “Bohner Family Reunion” shirt when she first meets Billy.
Ralph puts Billy on the trail of Agatha (an “ancient freakin’ witch who will eff your shit up”) and notes that she hijacked his life, stole his house (and “completely ruined the market value”), and made him do terrible things. It’s no surprise that Ralph is on the run.
OK, but… could Ralph actually be Mephisto?
There was some fan chatter after Agatha’s midseason trailer that maybe we were getting a glimpse of Mephisto, after we saw the back of a head wearing a bucket hat. But now we know that’s just Ralph rocking his incognito look.
So far, Agatha All Along hasn’t really presented any evidence that he could be Mephisto in disguise. It would be a nice narrative callback to WandaVision’s late reveal of Agatha as the “actual” villain, sure. But given the one scene we’ve gotten of him, he just seems to be a guy who lost it a bit after undergoing heavy mind control. What few details we get in his costuming appear to just be protection spells (a cross on his bucket hat, an evil-eye necklace, and apparently a few items sewn into the inside of his jacket). And although there have been references to the de facto devil of the Marvel Universe — earlier on, one of the witches talks about Agatha’s son as a rumored “agent of Mephisto” — Agatha creator Jac Schaeffer has been coy about whether that’s a nod or a tease for a future pop-up.
“With these shows, so often there is something that is at once a joke and a wink and a nod, and actually has something legitimate underneath it,” Schaeffer told Entertainment Weekly. “As we all know, Mephisto is a character who’s very wrapped into Agatha’s storyline. I mean, people have to watch, but we’re always playing with the audience in that way.”
So did Billy just have a brush with the devil? Could be! It seems unlikely, but as the saying goes, the greatest thing Mephisto ever did was convince the world he didn’t exist. We’ll see what future episodes bring.
