‘Talamasca: The Secret Order’ Episode 3 Recap – Into the Lion’s Den

I’ve got to be honest, I kind of see Guy’s point in Talamasca: The Secret Order. If your special skill set is extracting information out of people by being all charming, and everyone with a similar talent keeps getting killed, I wouldn’t be keen to start asking questions around the neighbourhood either. But this is the predicament that Guy finds himself in in Episode 3, fittingly titled “The Task At Hand”, and since he just can’t seem to help himself, he throws himself in headfirst. You know that they say – if you bed a witch, you might as well attend her coven’s creepy remembrance ceremony.

Okay, nobody says that. But you know what I mean. Guy is pretty trapped. He’s in a city he doesn’t know, working for an organization he can’t trust, in the hopes of finding a mother he thought was dead, who a vampire revealed might still be alive. What else is he supposed to do? He has barely washed the blood from his hands after finding Archie and Keves dead before he’s back at work handing out strip club flyers and desperately waiting for someone to stick something on the dead drop phone box.

It’s a summons from Helen, of course. Despite telling Guy they’d probably never meet again, she’s another one who can’t really help herself, and she needs to keep Guy on mission after his traumatic experience. Keves, it turns out, was a witch, and her special skill was seduction and extracting information, so even though Guy didn’t tell her anything, it must sting a bit that his dead fling was only using him for what was in his head rather than his trousers. Oh, and the pretty woman who joined in the three-way kiss and warned Guy that he was in big trouble? That’s Olive, his handler, who, for some reason, didn’t give him a heads-up that Keves was a witch. She wasn’t sure of her endgame, apparently. Likely story.

Finally, Helen decides to give Guy a bit more explanation for what he’s doing in London. In the cold open of Talamasca: The Secret Order Episode 3, we see a Talamasca Mother House in Amsterdam burn down, taking a hefty volume of books and artefacts with it. This occurred in 1972, and since then, most of the Talamasca have resigned themselves to the idea that the arcane knowledge was lost. But some true believers, like Helen, believe that all of that information was preserved in a single codex called the 752. And this is what Jasper, the vampire who has seized control of the London Mother House, is also after. Apparently.

I worry about Guy sometimes. After hearing this, he heads back to the scene of Keves’s murder, since he recalls having seen a big book in her bag and Archie imploring him to take it – an instruction that, in his horror, he ignored. But it seems ridiculous to me that a treasure trove of supernatural knowledge and secrets would be literally contained in a giant book. It’s hardly inconspicuous, is it?

Guy’s investigation also takes him to the memorial service that Keves’s coven is holding for her, where he meets Doris, another witch who happily admits that Keves was working under their instructions and that the Talamasca can’t be trusted. She also mentions Soledad, which is the first time Guy’s hearing the name. Doris is immediately suspicious, but does that make her automatically a bad guy? After all, everyone in this universe is suspicious, and nobody involved in the Talamasca seems to be especially straight-up either.

Doris has connections in the police, who are fancying Guy as a suspect in Keves and Archie’s murders because he’s not very good at his job and made his tailing of the latter really obvious, not to mention all his blundering around the crime scene, and Olive’s efforts to throw them off the scent only make the whole thing seem more suspicious to the investigating officer, Ridge. But Doris’s endgame is elusive for now. She either believes Guy killed Keves and wants her revenge, or she thinks that he can lead her to the 752. Either way, we see her snooping around after him at the end of “The Task At Hand”, so she’s up to something.

Guy’s obvious idiocy can sometimes chafe awkwardly against the show’s efforts to make him look competent. It does this by having him successfully tail Helen to a ramshackle old facility where she and her long-lost sister were once housed by the Talamasca – absolutely nothing about this organisation seems like it meets any sort of health and safety standards – and she’s all performatively shocked that he managed to find her. It’s hard to buy into Helen’s backstory, too, since pretty much everything that comes out of her mouth seems to be deliberate obfuscation. Then again, she does seem like the sort of person who’d get a job working for the organisation that experimented on her, even if it was just to file a complaint about it later.

Everything Helen says is very precisely engineered to incense Guy just enough to set him off on the next stage of his mission, which you can see in how she teases him with mention of his mother and some supposedly bad thing she did, right as he accuses her of using him to draw Anna out. She wants him to put his supposed talents to work, walking straight into the London Mother House and conning Jasper into thinking he’s on-side, which is a plan so fraught with potential problems given Guy’s performance thus far that it beggars belief. But he’s into it. Guy evidently feels pretty comfortable waltzing into hostile territory and just blagging it.

Predictably, Jasper seems way too smart for this. When Guy goes straight over Mr. Owens’ head and starts addressing the CCTV, he does respond to the provocation, freezing time so he and Guy can have a helpful expository chat. Turns out Owens is dying of cancer, and he’s tolerating Jasper’s deeply sinister shenanigans with the promise of eventually being healed, which is fair enough. But there’s no way that Jasper is really buying into Guy’s “I’m determined to take the Talamasca down for everything they did to me” routine. Guy tries to sway things by bringing up the 752, but he tips his hand. Jasper suggests they can probably help each other after all… but he also won’t let him leave, which isn’t how most partnerships start.

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