- The first season of Anne Rice's Talamasca: The Secret Order on AMC ended with multiple cliff-hangers.
- The truth about what, or who the 752 is gets revealed.
- What a fledgling army could mean for The Vampire Lestat.
Did you keep track of every lie, backstab, and grand plan at the end of Talamasca: The Secret Order Season 1? Let's break down that action and vampire-packed finale.
The first season followed a telepath named Guy Anatole, played by Nicholas Denton, as he reluctantly works with a secret organization tasked with observing the supernatural in hopes that he'll find out what happened to his mother. OFC, nothing is as simple as it seems. At the beginning of the finale, Guy and Doris are taken in by local London law enforcement investigating the murder of Keves—the witch who hooked up with Guy when he first arrived in London—and a man named Archie, as well as the houseboat fire that destroyed Keves's coven. (The vampire Jasper did the latter in the penultimate episode.)
Detective Ridge says that Helen, Elizabeth McGovern's character, is a suspect due to DNA found at both scenes. Helen doesn't really give murderer, and has been on her own side-quest to find her long-lost sister. But since she has Guy and Doris' passports, they need to find her ASAP if they want to get out of London regardless of potentially shady motives. They escape police custody with help from Olive, who's secretly working with Jasper. As the two of them escape her and her shady motives, some major secrets are revealed.
So what actually is the deal with "the 752" we keep hearing about?
Guy has become convinced that something called "the 752," allegedly a legendary book containing the whereabouts of all vampires and other Talamasca secrets, is not only in possession of his new ally Doris, by way of Keves, but also the key to finding his mother. However, the "book" that Keves was carrying that Guy thought was the 752 was actually just a scrapbook of memories that Keves made with Doris, her adopted mother/sister/BFF.
Turns out, the term "752" refers to Doris herself, a former asset with a photographic memory the Talamasca trained in Amsterdam to be their human library, hard drive, cloud... pick your metaphor. They separated her from her family at a young age and went to extreme lengths to keep her in their employ. Just about every murder and manipulation this season has been about drawing Doris out and returning her to Talamasca control.
Doris is a WHAT and related to WHO?
We also learned in this episode that Doris is the twin sister that Helen has been trying to find and a vampire. Surprise! She may have lived with a coven of witches on a canal houseboat, but she wasn't one of them. In 1985, as we see in the flashback that opens the episode, Talamasca boss Houseman blackmailed a vampire named Alexander and forced him to turn Doris against his own will. Alexander made her weak, too, so that she's eternal but not more powerful than a Talamasca agent. She doesn't have any of the gifts that we've seen other vampires in this universe have, like flight or telepathy or the ability to freeze time. She'd been dealt a really shitty vampire hand, TBH!
Doris also, inadvertently, framed her sister for murder. The DNA was hers. To recap: Archie killed Keves. Doris killed Archie. Jasper killed the coven and Welles, his Talamasca assistant. Olive is a mole. Houseman sucks. Guy and Helen? As innocent as it gets.
After all that, where is Guy's mother?
On a ferryboat to an unknown location, Doris reveals that she might know where to find Guy's mother. A Talamasca agent on the ferry watches them. But Houseman doesn't want them captured straight away, he says, as they can lead him to Guy's mother too. Nobody has free will on this dang show!
Helen, who slickly helped Guy and Doris escape and reunited with her sister for one tearful silent moment, gets arrested by Detective Ridge shortly thereafter. She's likely going to jail. However, I get the sense that she might end up recruiting Ridge for the Talamasca in a potential Season 2 instead. It felt like the start of a beautiful friendship.
What does the Talamasca want Jasper to do, exactly?
At the very end of the episode, a muzzled vampire Jasper gets "escorted" to the same basement laboratory where Doris was turned into a vampire by Alexander. He meets with the now older Houseman, who scolds him for creating an army of half-bred vampires. Houseman then presents Jasper with a room full of unconscious bodies and expects him to turn all of them. So... he basically wants do the thing he was already doing, just cleaner and under Talamasca control. He doesn't give him any instructions about making them weak, like Doris, or any sense of what the game plan is here. In theory, Jasper could make strong vampires and this plan could totally backfire... right?
Another loose end is Olive, who's unmoored loyalty-wise at the end of the season. She might be teaming up with poor Checkers, now a vampire half-breed. She might return to Jasper and Houseman's grand mystery scheme. Or she might double cross the double-crossers and end up back on Guy, Doris, and Helen's side. We'll just have to wait and see!
How does this affect the next season of Interview with the Vampire?
It's bad enough that one vampire wrote an exposé disguised as a fictional memoir and another is trauma-dumping touring as a rockstar. Now we've got a guy building an army of fledglings? In Interview with the Vampire Season 1, Daniel Molloy asks Louis de Pointe du Lac if the current conditions (global pandemic, political instability everywhere) are ripe for his species to take over the world. His vamp pal affirms that fear and argues that, were he and Daniel to publish a book, it could serve as a warning to the human population about "The Great Conversion" to come.
Flash forward three-ish years, to when Talamasca: The Secret Order takes place, and the very secret organization that helped Molloy write and publish said book are facilitating a medium-great conversion of their own? Fas-cin-at-ing! While I don't necessarily think an MCU-level crossover event is in the cards for shows like this, it's definitely something we'll want to keep in mind when The Vampire Lestat, a.k.a. Interview with the Vampire Season 3, premieres in 2026.
