In a television landscape filled with mediocre "Surf Draculas," Talamasca: The Secret Order boldly stands out for its innovation in the form of a "streaming show that teases its audience with intriguing twists until the final few minutes of its inaugural season." The recent "The 752," the penultimate episode of Talamasca's debut season, doesn't deliver on the show's initial premise—Guy as a competent spy and vague hints about the Talamasca organization. Instead, it unveils a secondary premise that's more captivating than the show's initial gimmicks, making the entire experience feel even more frustratingly ill-conceived in retrospect.
Doris, the enigmatic cipher we've been led to believe is mysterious and secretive, finally acts in "The 752"! After fleeing the safe house, getting picked up for a police interrogation, and almost being kidnapped by Olive in her blonde MI5 agent wig, Doris unleashes her fangs, tearing a hired goon's throat out before turning to Guy with a puppy-eyed look, blood dripping from the corners of her lips.
Doris is revealed to be a secret vampire, a Talamasca test subject whose exceptional memory as a child led to her being taken from her family and given the Talamasca library to memorize. She was then turned into a vampire to ensure she'd remain a living archive forever. She is, in fact, the living 752—a revelation that Guy struggles to grasp, looking like he's about to cry from the mental exertion. (Never change, Guy.)
While this may be a testament to the general lack of consideration behind Talamasca's characters rather than the strength of Doris' writing specifically, her backstory and the motivations and inner life it suggests indicate that she is by far the most interesting character on the show! Sure, it feels like they're borrowing from Interview with a Vampire's angsty reluctant vampire character, but Doris is more akin to Let the Right One In's Eli or Angel (a version of Angel who doesn't date high schoolers) than Louis de Pont du Lac. She lives apart from other vampires, skulking in shadows, using her meager powers only to protect herself and those she cares about.
Juicy! It's a stock vampire trope, but one we haven't seen in this world before. Céline Buckens does an excellent job giving Doris nuance and a sense of implicit internality that I haven't come to expect from this show's performances. We even get some decent physical humor from her when she flops ragdoll-like in the trunk of the car Guy stole as she halfheartedly explains that she has to hide from the sunlight. She is the first character on Talamasca I've had any desire to see more of, and I genuinely cannot figure out why Guy "Being The Audience Proxy Means You Don't Have To Have A 'Personality' Or Whatever" Anatole is our protagonist instead of her.
However, alas, just as Talamasca began to tantalize with its subtle engagement, we're reminded that Guy remains and will always be our heroic centerpiece. He plumbs the depths of Doris's revelations, revealing his own insecurities and much-discussed trust issues, yelling things like, "You didn't tell me what you... are!" and "Would you just tell me the truth?!" every forty-five seconds or so, as she tearfully unravels her story. When we discover, in a twist straight out of Orphan (2009), that Doris, thanks to vampire age-freezing, is Helen's identical twin sister, it feels more like a setup for more unearned goopy moments between Guy and Helen than for any new emotional depth to Helen's character.
Talamasca may never deign to grant Guy a single intriguing character trait, but it nonetheless sees him as its central focus, and I struggle to envision an interesting path forward for Talamasca as long as this remains true. Speaking of paths forward: while Talamasca hasn't been renewed for a second season yet, the operating logic behind the way "The 752" ends seems to be that the more cliffhangers they pack in there, the more likely it is that they'll get picked up for continuation. Of the show's original questions — what is the Talamasca?, what does the Talamasca want?, where is Guy's mom? — not a single one gets answered here. Instead, the only big mystery that gets solved in this episode is the nature of the 752, which, I'll note, was a problem introduced in episode three of this six-episode season.
Helen ends the season getting arrested by the police for a double homicide that she didn't commit; Guy and Doris are on a boat headed... somewhere; Jasper's getting beat up by hired goons, rolled up in a rug, trucked out to Amsterdam, and coerced into helping the Talamasca turn a ton of people into vampires for reasons I cannot figure out. I've made this half-joke over and over in these recaps, likely to the boredom of many of my readers (sorry, guys!), but sincerely, this density of seemingly random cliffhangers is absolute latter-season Vampire Diaries logic. It's a method of storytelling that prioritizes moments that could make your very stupidest viewer go "oh shit!" rather than anything that could build theme, character, or even an intriguing, cohesive plot. It's void of even the brain-dead excess of earlier episodes; it's so, so empty.
It also, paradoxically, gives me no actual idea of what Talamasca's second season would look like. We have hooks to pick back up, sure, but the show thus far has convinced me of neither its ability to competently answer the questions it asks nor its interest in even attempting to answer them. Rack my brain as I might, I can think of only two good reasons to stick with Talamasca should it get renewed: first, to see if they let Doris become the show's co-protagonist, as this episode kind of hints they might; second, and perhaps the show's most pressing question: to see if the network, with the increased budget that a renewal might offer, finally forces Nicholas Denton to see an accent coach. Only time will tell.
