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With the debut of Marvel Television’s Agatha All Along a month away, one mystery remains tantalizingly unclear. Just who is Joe Locke playing on the show, anyway?

In the promotion for the spin-off from 2021’s WandaVision, Locke’s character has either been left entirely unnamed, or — as can be seen from the closed captioning for this latest trailer — the generic name “teen.” That’s an intentional choice, and not merely the side effect of the character being new to the series; note that that same captioning gives names for Lilia, Rio, and Jennifer, all three of whom are similarly new characters debuting in the show. For whatever reason, the identity of Joe Locke’s character is intentionally being kept under wraps.

There is, of course, no shortage of speculation about why this might be the case, much of which revolves around one obvious idea — whoever “teen” actually is, is some kind of spoiler — and one recurring guess as to who the character actually is.

Let’s just say what follows is a potential spoiler, based on speculation, to be on the safe side, shall we…?

What has happened was…

If the collective hive mind of the internet has any say in the matter, Joe Locke is very likely playing Billy Maximoff. If that name sounds slightly familiar, it might be because a Billy Maximoff has already appeared in the MCU… as one of Wanda’s not-entirely-real children in 2021’s WandaVision series. Billy and his brother Tommy were magic-ed into existence as part of the sitcom-esque reality Wanda created for herself and the town of Westview, New Jersey — but, as that reality broke down throughout the series, so did the existence of Billy and Tommy. By the end of WandaVision, both children were no more… kind of.

The following year’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness showed that, post-Westview, Wanda Maximoff had become overcome by grief and has started searching for the multiverse for her children, whom she believes exist elsewhere in reality. It turns out, she’s right — but the alternate reality kids don’t accept her as their mother, driving her to seemingly commit suicide.

Except… what if things weren’t that simple? This is, after all, a Marvel story — and a Marvel story about magic, for that matter.

Meanwhile, in Marvel comic canon…

The comic book history of Wanda’s kids isn’t entirely identical to the MCU version, but there’s enough overlap to make it worth summarizing here: like the MCU version, the comic book Billy and Tommy were magical constructs, although it wasn’t initially clear quite how true that was. In the 1985 miniseries The Vision and the Scarlet Witch, it simply seemed as if their conception was the result of magic, but four years later, a storyline in the Avengers West Coast comic book series revealed that their entire existence was magical, with their souls actually being fragments of the soul of the supervillain Master Pandemonium. As he reclaimed those fragments, the children ceased to exist.

…Except, as it happened, they didn’t. For reasons still unclear, the actual souls of Billy and Tommy — which, it turned out, were not Master Pandemonium’s in the first place — ended up becoming two other children elsewhere in the world, born to two families far apart from each other. Billy Kaplan was a seemingly normal kid whose favorite superhero was the Scarlet Witch, and who had an unusual aptitude with magic, who would go on to become a superhero in his own right as Wiccan, one of the Young Avengers.

Eventually, Billy and Tommy (who would grow up to have superspeed, like Wanda’s brother, Quicksilver) would discover their true parentage, and be reunited with Wanda.

So, about Agatha All Along…

Amongst those speculating who Joe Locke plays, the leading contention is that he’s playing a version of Billy that tracks with the Wiccan/Billy Kaplan comic book backstory in a number of ways. Firstly, that a magic-user version of Billy would fit into the coven Agatha is building in the series; secondly, that Agatha All Along is a spinoff of WandaVision, and so would obviously pick up narrative slack from that series; and thirdly, that Locke looks like the comic book Billy Kaplan. Curiously, it raises the possibility that Wanda Maximoff herself might be seen in the series, given that her last appearance was looking for Billy, but that might be why his name is being kept secret for now…

We’ll get some version of an answer to the question of just what’s behind Locke’s character and the secrecy surrounding him when Agatha All Along debuts on Disney+ September 18 with a two-episode premiere.

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