Summary
Talamasca: The Secret Order gets off to a surprisingly decent start in Episode 1, taking the inherently silly material seriously enough for us to buy in.
The smartest decision that Talamasca: The Secret Order makes is presenting itself as a straight-up spy thriller. The AMC series expands Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe, as seen in Interview with the Vampire and Mayfair Witches, but it feels distinct from both, even though it revolves around the enigmatic secret society that threads them together. There’s a silliness to the idea – a mysterious order tasked with tracking supernatural creatures like vampires, werewolves, and witches – that is mostly sidestepped in Episode 1, “We Watch. And We Are Always There”, thanks to its surprisingly serious approach to the premise.
“Serious” doesn’t mean boring, by the way. For a few reasons, but primarily this underlying vibe, I immediately connected with this show more than the other two. It’s good at presenting daft concepts with a straight face, and it makes them easier for the audience to buy into. Plus, the protagonist is a question-asking audience surrogate who has to have the minutiae of the world painstakingly explained to him. In short: Lots of supernatural things are afoot, and the Talamasca is basically Weird CIA.
The premiere’s opening finds someone, a woman named Soledad, breaking into the London Mother House – the nickname for local Talamasca HQs, like an FBI Field Office – and having a look-see at some archives and documents. She attempts to hand off the stolen materials at a dead drop but finds herself pursued by unknown forces. Cornered by a man we later learn is named Jasper, flanked by his weird zombie-looking hounds, Soledad decides that throwing herself under a train is a better fate than whatever these guys have in store for her. It’s quite a start.
We then shuffle over to the Talamasca’s New York safehouse, where the woman in charge, Helen, receives Soledad’s eyeball as a neatly-wrapped gift. This mostly presents a logistical issue, since Soledad needs to be replaced, and the agent required for whatever job she was doing – details are a little cagey in this regard – needs to have a very particular set of skills. Enter our protagonist, Guy Anatole.
Guy has plenty of skills, as it happens, including a few he doesn’t even understand. He’s a smart guy fresh out of law school on the cusp of being hired by a big, prestigious firm. But he can also hear other people’s thoughts. This allows him to both ace a job interview and also clue the audience in about his background. Came from nothing, dad abandoned him, mother was an addict who died when he was young. He grew up in the system. And he’s Helen’s prime candidate to replace Soledad, even though he doesn’t even know what the Talamasca is.
Or does he? Helen’s initial sales pitch is deliberately vague, framing Talamasca as a very well-funded non-profit with a particular penchant for historical academia. But that’s only because she can’t give away too much without getting a sense of Guy’s intentions. She leaves just enough clues for Guy to follow them on his own. They lead him back to his foster mother, Ruth, who, when pressed on the subject, inadvertently reveals that Talamasca has shaped Guy’s path through life by paying for his housing and his education, pulling strings to ensure he developed along the path they wanted. Guy immediately feels as if all of his accomplishments have been a lie. But when he follows Helen all the way to another, more frank meeting, she reassures him that he’d have ended up in the same place anyway. Talamasca just helped him along.
He’s less convinced by the supernatural stuff, though. But Helen has an answer for that, which also doubles as the best sequence in Episode 1 of Talamasca: The Secret Order. There’s a turncoat vampire named Burton living a life of luxury in the Dakota building, and he provides a helpful – again, for Guy and the audience – summary of vampire abilities in this universe. It isn’t just pointy teeth and manicures, after all, but mind-to-mind communication and teleporting, too. But Burton also pulls double-duty as a source of foreboding, since he fills Guy’s mind with advice to run and leave all this behind him. He also directs him to the next clue – a page in Daniel Molloy’s book that references Anna Leamas, Guy’s birth mother.
Molloy, by the way, is a character from Interview with the Vampire, now a vamp himself, and with no love lost for Talamasca. When Guy corners him at a book signing, he reveals that Talamasca wrote the page he’s referencing, having evidently slipped the name in there for a reason, and also hands him a recent photograph of his supposedly-dead birth mother. And she seems to be in London, which is precisely where Guy is heading next.
When Helen looks out of her apartment window, guess who’s waiting on the street below for a chat?
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