Summary
Talamasca: The Secret Order tries to split the difference between its espionage vibe and silly monster shenanigans in “The Puzzle Palace”. The effect is predictably mixed.
When Talamasca: The Secret Order started, it was quite enjoyably serious. Then, in just the previous episode, it got quite enjoyably silly. In Episode 5, “The Puzzle Palace”, it tries to split the difference and ends up feeling a little weird, which is concerning since it’s the penultimate outing of a first season that is looking increasingly unlikely to end satisfactorily. Season 2 is probably on the cards – Mayfair Witches has had two thus far, with a third on the way, and it’s nowhere near as engaging – but that doesn’t quite absolve this freshman effort of its responsibilities.
But I’m speculating. It might turn out okay! That does seem unlikely, though. Guy’s latest foray into the vampiric inner circle that is now controlling the Talamasca’s London Mother House immediately takes a turn at the top of “The Puzzle Palace”. That performative alliance with Jasper? Forget it. He saw right through Guy’s bumbling, as we suspected he would. Now he wants to know who was helping him inside the Westcroft Hotel, which, as we know, was Doris. Jasper’s by far the most fun character in this show, and his pantomime villainy is great stuff, but Guy needs to be freed from his clutches for the sake of keeping the plot moving, so Doris breaks him out by setting Jasper alight from head to toe.
Vampires aren’t that easy to kill, obviously. But the firestarter routine leaves Jasper smouldering under some natty makeup for most of the episode, which is one of those fun B-tier flourishes that the previous episode really indulged in. There’s another stretch of this kind of thing later, which we’ll get to. But most of the drama involves Guy, Doris, and Helen, with the first two turning to the latter for help getting out of the country, since that’s perceived to be the only way of escaping Jasper’s inevitable retribution. Helen isn’t inclined to help, at least not initially, but maybe that’s easier than having to be more open than necessary about Guy’s mother, let alone her own tortured, secretive past, snippets of which are still being teased in flashbacks.
As a result of all this, Guy and Doris spend a fair amount of time in a Talamasca safehouse, where Guy can’t help continuing to talk openly about his mother, and Doris mostly just listens. Nobody trusts Doris, though, least of all me. She’s a witch, to start with, and her claims of finding the rest of her coven untrustworthy don’t ring especially true. But then there’s the small matter of what she’s still hiding from Guy – Keves’s “journal”, aka the giant missing tome that may or may not be the 752. I still find that hard to believe, since I still find the idea of centuries of accumulated arcane knowledge literally taking the form of a giant book to be pretty funny, but you never know.
Speaking of things I’m not buying – the entire police subplot feels shaky to me. When Guy has a literal vampire on his tail, not to mention his bloodthirsty revenants, I find it really hard to believe that the idea of him potentially getting arrested is to be taken seriously. Okay, the cops have a picture of him, and of Helen, and there’s a shoeprint, but whatever. I largely think this stuff just exists to facilitate the late reveal about Olive. In Talamasca: The Secret Order Episode 5, the drive Soledad left behind is finally decrypted, and it contains a file on Olive, codenamed “Chrysalis”.
So, unsurprisingly, Olive doesn’t seem to be who she claims. This is virtually confirmed by the fact that she plays witness to Chester and the other revenants hacking their way through a train that Guy and Doris are supposed to be escaping on, seemingly without a care in the world. She’s reporting to someone else, I guess, which means her mission is as-yet unknown. As are her allegiances. But this train sequence is good fun, and a nice reminder that this show is so much better when it’s focusing on barbecued Jasper drinking ancient vampire blood instead of Guy moaning about his mother. Hopefully, the finale has more of the former, among a few concrete answers about what on Earth is going on.
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