Marvel is always thinking about the next thing. Just watch their most recent show, Agatha All Along. That one ended on a "tune in to see what happens next" kind of note, although we don't know if there are plans for another season. But maybe Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) and budding witch Billy (Joe Locke) will turn up in a new movie instead? Marvel has something simmering.
Honestly, having to be on constant lookout for how Marvel is setting up the next movie or TV show can make watching them a little exhausting. I liked that, generally speaking, Agatha All Along stood enough on its own that I wasn't thinking about that very often. And there wasn't a post-credits sequence, something Marvel has trained fans to expect. "I wrote a number of post-credit scenes, as I've done on every Marvel project I've ever worked on, because it's the thing that changes the most and goes the longest as a question mark until you're finally confronted with it," creator Jac Schaeffer told Entertainment Weekly. "Ultimately, it was a Marvel decision not to have a tag on this show."
Still, my antenna couldn't help but be pricked in the back half of the show during an episode dedicated to exploring Billy's past. In Marvel Comics, Billy becomes a superhero named Wiccan; we saw him don something like his superhero suit in the finale. In that flashback episode, we meet Billy's boyfriend Eddie, played by Miles Gutierrez-Riley. In the comics, Billy has a boyfriend named Teddy, who is actually a Skrull shapeshifter who adopts the superhero persona of Hulkling. Are they one and the same?
"There were early conversations ," Schaeffer said. " was originally called Teddy because we were looking at the artwork and thinking about that. That was a Marvel decision to not have him be Hulkling for the purposes of our show. Within our show, he is not Hulkling, but we pivoted to Eddie because he is named after a person that is important to the writers' room. It wasn't sort of teasing the fans, it was one of those lovely tributes to somebody who matters to us."
So no, Eddie is not Hulkling, although it sounds like he was going to be at one point. And even then there's ambiguity: notice that Schaeffer says he is not Hulkling "for the purposes of our show." What does that mean? Could Marvel repurpose the character and somehow give him powers in a later show or movie? In Agatha All Along, we learn that Billy is actually the son of Wanda Maximoff, who never existed in the first place but was brought into being by his mother's reality-warping powers, then took root in the body of the dying William Kaplan and grew up with his identity disassociated. So yeah, if they can sell on something that weird and complicated, I'd say that they're capable of anything.
We don't know when or whether any of the cast from Agatha All Along will be back, although considering how solid the response to the show has been, I'd bet on it happening sooner or later. And we'll repeat the whole mystery dance again.
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