Talamasca: The Secret Order: Upping the Stakes
Who can Guy Anatole trust? If you’ve been watching Talamasca: The Secret Order, or if you’re broadly familiar with the tropes of the spy show, you know the obvious answer here is no one. The intrigue of the genre comes from the awareness (both yours and the protagonist’s) that a spy can ultimately only ever trust themself. Their targets want to eliminate them or recruit them; other spies can turn heel on them in the blink of an eye; even their handlers won’t hesitate to have them eliminated if they become a risk to the agency. To be a genre television spy requires a particular sense of morality and truth, coupled with a self-preservation instinct that means never letting your guard down.
Apparently, none of this was in Guy’s year-in-a-week intensive Talamasca training, since this guy is an absolute dopey beagle in terms of instantly trusting sketchy characters. Last week, he continued to follow Kevis to a second, then a third, location despite having seen the giant creepy tome peeking out of her backpack. This week, after a dead drop that he notices right in the middle of yelling (a direct quote) “SEXY SEX” at passersby at the day job he apparently still has, he finds himself disturbed and betrayed by some revelations that range from “easily guessable” to “I think he was already supposed to know about this.”
On the former end of the spectrum, it turns out the woman who made out with Kevis at the club last week before warning Guy about him being in a ton of trouble is, in fact, Olive, his handler. On the latter end: Kevis was a witch. This elicits a positively Robinsonian “a what?” from Guy, who has known that witches exist for multiple episodes now. Kevis, explains Helen, was gifted in “seduction and extraction.” Guy, learning this, is beyond betrayed, which you can tell because he says it a lot, and also from just how heavily and moistly Nicholas Denton breathes in this scene.
The biggest revelation of all, though, is that the huge tome in Kevis’ backpack might have been the 752, a backup copy of the Talamasca’s now-burned central library. The 752, the dialogue makes clear, will be our stakes for the remainder of the season. If the book (and, although Helen describes multiple other things the 752 could be, everyone just assumes it is a book) falls into the wrong hands, it could affect the fate of the entire world. Archie was chasing it, and it led him to Kevis, and now they’re both dead. This is a Big Dangerous Thing.
It’s for precisely that reason — its bigness and danger — that I’m not sold on the 752 as a hook here. Helen’s vagueness about what someone unscrupulous could do with the 752 is annoying, but it’s also necessary, given how thin the show’s worldbuilding has been so far. We know that vampires and witches exist, but we don’t know what they want, broadly speaking, or why the Talamasca is interested in watching them, so nebulous assertions that access to the Talamasca’s files could “change everything” wind up giving us very little idea of what might actually, materially, change about the world should another party get access to the 752.
More importantly, I find that massive stakes like this are tough to pull off in the best of cases and are even harder to make impactful when they’re not matched with strong interpersonal stakes, and it would be a real stretch to call the will-Guy-find-his-mother conflict “strong.” Maybe the next few episodes will give us a clearer sense of what the world has to lose if the 752 is put to improper use; for now, though, it feels like the laziest drag-and-drop MacGuffin you could imagine.
Another thing about the 752: it is, ostensibly, not the book that Kevis had in her backpack. That is, if you believe her coven, a group of women in bright thrifted clothes who live on a houseboat beneath an elevated train line. The witches don’t easily cotton to Guy when he shows up at their candlelight memorial for Kevis, but one of them, Doris, recognizes Guy as a Talamasca agent and pulls him off to the side. She explains that Kevis was their coven’s spy and that the leather book was her “scrapbook,” not any kind of mystical tome. Guy seems pretty credulous here, especially after Doris tells him, finally, about the fate of poor Soledad.
Guy, incensed, trails Helen to a country house outside London, where she’s walking around and Remembering her own sad childhood as a Talamasca test subject and possibly one member of a pair of twins. When Guy confronts her, Helen hits him with her own sad childhood story, but he’s unmoved; he demands the truth about Soledad. Helen explains that the London mother house is compromised by a vampire named Jasper and (after some prodding) that Guy’s mother is a fugitive from the Talamasca who’s connected in some nebulous way to the 752. Nicholas Denton, for reasons only known to him and his God, does not deliver his most dramatic reaction to this information, instead saving that freakout (slamming his fists on a balcony and screaming “JESUS CHRIST!” really loud) for when Helen confirms that “Helen” is not her real name. With profound resignation, I am putting both Helen and Helen’s possible twin sister on “secretly Guy’s mom” watch, and Guy himself on “big cry” watch.
Jasper, in contrast, is having a grand old time at his hideout. When Owen, the Talamasca’s London head, comes in to give him the news about Archie’s murder, he’s in the middle of once again listening to very loud butt rock, and his response to Owen mentioning that Talamasca HQ won’t tolerate much more of Jasper’s interference is a laugh and a little speech about power. He then goes on to drink some of his own blood, confirms that the 752 is in London, and (a bit later) takes a big bite out of a loudmouthed dissident in the organization before turning him into either a vampire or whatever the gurgly creatures were from the start of the season. He is, in other words, absolutely living it up.
All of which is to say: I think Guy could learn a whole lot from Jasper about how to handle living with uncertainty! Jasper may be nebulously evil, but he has a strong enough core of self-identity that he can live a happy, fulfilling life in the world of Halloween monster espionage without needing to trust other people the way Guy constantly and inexplicably does. I think Nicholas Denton could also learn quite a bit from William Fichtner’s scenery-chewing performance here, but that’s another matter.
And hey, guess what — Guy finishes the episode by, to some degree, taking my suggestion. He walks right up to the London mother house, rings the doorbell, yells at Owen until Jasper freezes time and comes downstairs, and then gives Jasper his whole sob story about how the Talamasca “think [he’s] their boy, but [he’s] not their fuckin’ boy.” He offers to make the Talamasca pay by finding the 752 and bringing it to Jasper. It’s fairly obvious that he’s double-agenting here by pretending to defect to Jasper (although, well, maybe I’ll eat my words on that next episode!), but it’s by far the most genuinely thrilling bit of spycraft Guy has to date pulled off on the show. While I’m unclear on the particulars of how he learned this (much like I’m not certain how his single week of training equipped him to successfully tail Helen undetected earlier this episode), I find it much easier to forgive his failings as a character when he isn’t acting dumb as a damn brick.
Jasper seemingly agrees with me that this is a very entertaining performance from Guy: throughout his monologue, he acts enthralled and plays along, only to refuse to let Guy leave the building, a menacing smile plastered on his face, as soon as he’s finished his spiel. Once again, we see Jasper’s greatest redeeming feature on a show that’s so often deathly serious: he does have a sense of fun.
Observations of the Order
• Helen, in explaining the 752: “It sounds far-fetched, I know. But forty years ago, no one could have imagined the Internet.” I’m not trying to be nitpicky, but this is really obviously untrue! The Internet had not only been imagined in 1985, but it already fully existed, albeit in embryonic form. I think it is possible to read this line three ways, all of which make sense to me: (a) Helen is not as smart as she makes herself out to be, (b) Helen assumes Guy is not very smart and is testing that, or (c) the writers of the episode suffer from the brain thing where the Sixties are and will always be forty years ago.
• I am realizing that this is the second time I’ve linked an I Think You Should Leave clip in one of these recaps! That’s because Guy is very much like an ITYSL protagonist put into a spy story: he’s constantly being brought to eight-year-old-boy-ish tears or moments of impotent rage by the consequences of his own stupid actions. AMC has a precedent for recasting main roles in Immortal Universe shows; if they want to make Talamasca must-see TV, I bet Tim Robinson’s agents would love to get a call.
• When Guy asks whether “the neighbors” mind the witches’ coven, Doris explains that “our neighbors are Romani” with a smirk, which feels like someone remembered to find-and-replace that one slur but didn’t bother changing the content of the line.
• I did not describe the scene where Olive impersonates an MI5 agent to get access to the autopsy photos of Archie (spoiler: a vampire drank a lot of his blood) because it was pretty boring. I will share with you, though, my favorite character in that scene: the security guard who gives a thousand-yard stare as he says “MI5? More like MI10!” after Olive leaves. I like that it seems like he longs for death!
• This episode’s Most CW Network-ish Line Award goes to Owen, Jasper’s lackey! Congratulations to Owen. His winning line: “You said that you wanted to know when Archie would be checking in? We just got word. He won’t be checking in. [very long pause] Evah.”