WandaVision MCU Explained: Who Is Agatha Harkness Really?

How Agatha Ties Together Two Of Wanda's Biggest Story Arcs

Of course, Agatha's connection to the Fantastic Four in the context of WandaVision is, for the time being, immaterial. The point though is that Agatha was far from the master manipulator presented in the series' seventh episode, and that she was actually an ancient and wise sorceress who used her abilities to help some of Marvel's most powerful and important heroes, which is how she came to find Wanda Maximoff.

Agatha and Wanda first crossed paths in The Avengers and later appeared in Vision and the Scarlet Witch, a key inspiration for WandaVision and the first comic to focus on the Avengers couple outside of the main series. It's the same series that introduced Wanda's twin sons, Tommy and Billy, and it's also the same one that brought Mephisto into the equation.

Needless to say, Vision and the Scarlet Witch has become a topic of key importance for fans desperate to unravel the mystery of Westview, especially in relation to Wanda's twins and their (initially) tragic fate, but how does Agatha factor into all of it?

In that series, Wanda unwittingly uses a fragment of Mephisto's soul to create her and Vision's two children, following an encounter with the Salem Seven, who had seemingly executed Harkness months earlier. Agatha soon returns though, and informs Wanda of Mephisto's involvement. Another villain, Master Pandemonium, briefly absorbs Tommy and Billy in a nightmarish sequence where he wears them like finger-puppets (big oof), only for Mephisto to emerge and claim the children, thus erasing them from reality.

Agatha, not wanting Wanda to have to deal with the trauma such an event would understandably cause, wipes her memory of her children, who were eventually reincarnated and reunited with their mother, but not for a further three decades, by which point Wanda had murdered Agatha for her initial deception during one of her more unstable periods.

But there's more too, and it's of just as much importance as Vision and the Scarlet Witch. Long before Wanda would eventually rediscover her children and Agatha's mind wipe (plus the unpleasantness involving her death), she and Harkness travelled to New England in a search for answers regarding Wanda's visions of a dark version of herself terrorising an alternate reality.

The events take place in Andy Lanning and Dan Abnett's Scarlet Witch comic, and it's the series that also reveals Wanda to be a Nexus Being - a figure of key importance in the Marvel multiverse. Specifically, Wanda discovers this by reading from the Necronomicon, before doing battle with Master Pandemonium and then her evil self she'd envisioned earlier in the run.

The throughline through both of these pivotal moments in Scarlet Witch's history is Agatha Harkness. She's there when Wanda loses her children to Mephisto, and she's also the mentor who helps the Avenger realise her place in the multiverse as a Nexus Being. Given the nods towards both the Nexus and the Necronomicon in episode seven, plus the focus on the multiverse in MCU phase four, it wouldn't be disingenuous to assume that Marvel are adapting both of these moments into WandaVision's conclusion (but with their own twist obviously).

It's also important to remember that Wanda and Agnes' relationship isn't wholly positive, and by making Harkness the villain of WandaVision, it could be argued that, in a way, Marvel are acknowledging how messed up it was for her to take away Wanda's choice to confront her own trauma by wiping her memory - good intentions or not.

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