‘Talamasca’ Bosses Break Down Finale Twists & Reveal Early Season 2 Details

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Anne Rice’s Talamasca: The Secret Order Season 1 Episode 6, “The 752.”]

She was a vampire all along?! And the 752 wasn’t even a book?! The first season of AMC’s original series based in their Immortal Universe just wrapped up with an hour of reveals, reunions, and newbie spy Guy Anatole (Nicholas Denton) on the run as a new layer of corruption was exposed within the supernatural CIA known as the Talamasca was revealed.

Along the way, we finally learned that the long-missing twin sister of ambiguously sympathetic agent Helen (Elizabeth McGovern) was actually Guy’s newfound ally-slash-love interest, Doris (Celine Buckens). Separated by the Talamasca as highly gifted young girls, Doris — whose real name was Emma — had been sent to Amsterdam Motherhouse, where she consumed the entire library of the organization’s history with her super-powered memory. Now an asset known as the 752 that would help their mission “to keep the peace between the mortal and immortal worlds,” a twentysomething Doris/Emma was then turned into a vampire in 1985, essentially to preserve her inner stockpile of info for eternity. This explains why Helen didn’t recognize her. Oh, and Helen’s real name is Fiona. So many aliases!

As for the giant leather binder Doris/Emma been carrying around that Guy was after? That was simply a scrapbook of her life with Kevis, the witch murdered in the season opener. After the Talamasca burnt her beloved Amsterdam Motherhouse to the ground, Doris cut ties with the group and went underground, only to eventually befriend and help raise an orphaned Kevis. Despite only having low-level vamp powers, she was the one who unalived Kevis’ killer, although the London authorities collared Helen in the finale for what they assume is a double homicide, due to their shared DNA left at the crime scene. Before she was hauled away by the very dubious cop Ridge (Bryony Hannah), Helen helped Guy and Doris make their escape from London, leading to a beautiful, bittersweet reunion between the two sisters complete with a single, heartbreaking tear of blood.

David Gennard/AMC

At the same time, London Motherhouse madman Jasper (William Fichtner) continued to hunt for the 752, unaware it was a person and clueless to the online theories that he’s hot for Guy. Having decimated the witch population living on the canal, the delightfully demented power-player began to unravel, ultimately winding up a target as well. By the hour’s end, his underground lair of Revenant vampires had been torched, Guy’s totally shady handler Olive (Maisie Richardson-Sellers) was in control of rabid sole-survivor Checkers (Will Brown), and a muzzled Jasper was delivered to a bearded baddie named Houseman (James Cosmo), a.k.a. the now-older Talamasca agent who ordered Doris’ immortal indoctrination. Turns out, the guy still gets off on making vamps make other vamps, only now, it seems that he has much bigger plans. Like, a lab full of bloodsuckers-to-be.

It was a lot of info, a lot of action, and a lot of loose ends. Thankfully, showrunners Mark Lafferty and John Lee Hancock are a bit more forthcoming with intel than any of these Talamasca folks, because we had so many questions and they had some answers.

First off, have you been following any of the social media on the show?

Mark Lafferty: I try to stay out. We get little drips and drabs. I am very consciously — I think John’s the same way. I feel like if I get sucked into that, I will get sucked into it.

It’s so funny, the theories they have about Doris… Everyone is obsessed with the Tale of the Body Thief, suspecting that somebody’s Jesse or Helen is Guy’s mom. Why is Doris there? What is she? 

John Lee Hancock: Well, that’s good!

When I was on set in Manchester last year, you explained to me that Doris was 752 and she had consumed the knowledge of the Amsterdam motherhouse, but nobody mentioned the vampire turn. Had that always been on the table or was that something that got written in as the show went on?

Lafferty: John, correct me if I’m wrong, I think because originally you had a young woman who is kind of in the same way that Paper Moon has a sort of father figure and a young girl, it was kind of like, this is a fun sort of surrogate father-daughter relationship. And it wasn’t about the 752 and it was not about a vampire. And in the writers’ room, we were trying to come up with, “What is the thing that we need to kick off a mystery? What can we do?” And we had that character that was sort of sitting there.

John had this thing in his pilot script about two twins that Helen is looking at. And we just started to mix and match and go, “Oh, what if this girl is Helen’s twin? And what if she’s hiding in plain sight and the only way she can hide in plain sight is if she didn’t age but Helen did?” And so, once a few things clicked in the room, we all just got very, very excited because it checked all the boxes we needed to create this mystery. In a lot of different writers’ rooms, you often find yourself with a problem that seems intractable and you’re trying to find a novel way out and then the things that are the solution to the problem are hiding there in plain sight. And that’s oftentimes how you can get a good, surprising, interesting twist.

David Gennard/AMC

I have to ask about the Greg Owens flashback to 1985, where the two guys with him are talking about coked-out rock stars…

Lafferty: I talked to John a lot about this and one of our other writers, Vinny Wilhelm, we were trying to come up with something for those guys to be doing. I had just watched this incredible documentary on Netflix called The Greatest Night in Pop all about the crafting of “We Are the World.” So, we wanted to set this moment in time, like, what would they be talking about? And we were maybe going to have them talking about perestroika and Gorbachev and stuff. And that just seemed kind of lame. And so I thought, well, how fun would it be for them to just be talking about coked up pop stars and how all the world is actually a terrible song? [Laughs]

Hancock: It’s also, in terms of flashbacks, one thing to just put a chyron on and go, “Oh, this is ’75, so they’re going to have funny hair and stuff, and they could talk about what they were doing at the pub last night or whatever.” But when you’ve got an event like that, a lot of people would remember it, so, it sets the time even without the chyron. To have them both really put you in that place, which is always the difficulty of flashback.

Lafferty: Yeah, and I think, too, that something John has talked about from the start is wanting to be able to see around the corners of this place. That if the Talamasca is a real institution, it has to have plumbing and plumbers and HR people and people who take care of your pension. And to me, it’s something that maybe it’s very, very small and maybe silly, but it gives you a window into these guys who have lives beyond this institution that are not always talking about vampires and things.

What can you tell us about Houseman? Where does he fall in the hierarchy of vampires, the Talamasca, the supernatural…

Lafferty: John, you want to start and then…

Hancock: I’ll give you a little lift off and you can go. He’s obviously a higher up in Talamasca, but not at the highest level in our mind. He is in charge of a specific division. And then I’ll hand off to Mark. [Laughs]

Lafferty: Yeah, I think one of the things, and this is maybe we will give you a little bit tease, is that you wouldn’t know from watching the end of Episode 106 that Houseman isn’t the head of the whole place. But what I would say is that look, this guy seems to be operating a little bit clandestinely. You don’t see a lot of other agents around him. What is happening with Jasper is happening in the basement. And I think it wouldn’t be a mistake to assume that there are other people who are well above Houseman and maybe people who wouldn’t be so happy to have him doing what he’s doing.

He’s clearly rogue and has been since he had Doris turned. And I must say, it was very slick how you never overtly said that Doris was a witch. All we were ever told was that she lived with the witches.

Lafferty: Yes, that’s right.

You also seeded the season with future potential. We still don’t know about Guy’s mom, you have this alliance between Helen and Ridge, and Olive seems to be adopting Checkers? What does a possible Season 2 look like in your minds?

Hancock: We left a lot of characters [hanging] on purpose, on a cliff’s edge, to see exactly how the situation they’re in is going to play out. And yeah, that’s the fun part of these characters, that sometimes they have a function like Ridge to give us a terrestrial examination of these things, as opposed to it just being, “Oh, it’s just Talamasca and vampires and supernaturals and stuff.” There are real-world ramifications to this when people get killed and somebody might come across the body and call the cops. So, that was really always fun just to keep the thing grounded. And Ridge became kind of a favorite character of all of ours. And Bryony Hannah, she’s amazing.

David Gennard/AMC

She’s a dog with a bone.

Lafferty: And what I love about that moment you’re talking about, Damian, is that Ridge seems to have just gotten a little glimmer, like a little peek through a keyhole into a much stranger, much larger world. She’s not necessarily going to understand or know or be invited into all of it. Bryony is a brilliant actor and we love her, and also, that’s the kind of thing where we hopefully have such an amazing cast of characters and a well to draw from that, even if we maybe didn’t come immediately back to a character, that those are people we might pick up eventually. For Olive, she is in a place where you might say, “Look, she might go off with Checkers and be kind of her own little rogue, two-person thing.” Who knows? She’s got this pet basically. And so, in some ways, it’s a resolved story and in some ways, it’s an open story, but there were two very, very fun characters.

Right, because Maisie is so good at playing enigmatic that we still don’t know what her motivation is. What is she in this for? You only had six episodes, but we have reason to suspect everyone…of something! The only trustworthy person at this point really is Guy and maybe Doris now that all of her cards are on the table.

Hancock: Right, right.

But obviously they can’t operate in London anymore.

Lafferty: No, they’re not safe in London at all.

Have you landed on a location for a potential Season 2?

Lafferty: We’ve been thinking long and hard about that and looking at different places, fingers-crossed that we get a Season 2. We’ve very excitedly talked about a lot of possibilities, location included.

Hancock: And you are correct though. There’s one place that we know that it is not primarily set, which is London.

And with a change in location and half the cast on the run, that would really lean into the spy world of disguises, new aliases, all of that stuff.  What espionage content are you looking at now?

Lafferty: In Season 1, we talked a lot about John LeCarré. We did talk a lot about “Three Days of the Condor,” and now it’s expanded. We didn’t really talk about it in Season 1, but to things like the Jason Bourne movies and more kinetic sorts of spy movies and TV shows, we made a list. I have a list now that is very sad for me to look at because there’s about 40 movies and TV shows that I want to watch that people have mentioned in the room. And they’ll say, “It’s like this scene from this and this scene from that,” and you just want to have the time to actually absorb all those again. But yeah, that’s all to say our writers’ room is very, very, very inventive and has a lot to draw from. And I think should we get a Season 2, there will be a lot of great, great things in it.

David Gennard / AMC

Now, obviously everyone wants to talk about the crossovers. You dropped the Lestat song in Episode 5 and it was so great. You got Molloy (Eric Bogosian) in the opener to help solidify Guy’s transition into acknowledging the supernatural world and that’s all we needed him for. With Raglan Jones (Justin Kirk, reprising his role from Interview With the Vampire), because he’s Talamasca, he totally fit into the story. But then you definitely dropped an Easter egg in there of him. He’s seeking Akasha’s blood, right?

Lafferty: Maybe? [Laughs] I would say that look, he leaves that room in Episode 4 with a suitcase full of very powerful blood and it seems like he’s clearly a dog with a bone as well. He’s on a certain mission to deal in certain kinds of things, and I wouldn’t be surprised. Raglan’s such a player and he’s such a mover-and-shaker that it’s somebody that I think all the shows want to use. And who knows, maybe we’ll see him elsewhere? But Justin Kirk, I worked with him on the show Manhattan, and everything he’s in, whenever he pops up anywhere, I always sit up and pay attention. He’s always phenomenal, and he was such a pleasure to work with.

What about Franka Potente? They introduced her on Mayfair Witches as the head of the Amsterdam Motherhouse (above) and her scenes with Sip (Tongayi Chirisa) were so great. Is it on your vision board to revisit that situation?

Lafferty: Without spoiling anything? [Laughs] I guess I would say that I wrote some of that stuff in Mayfair with Franka, and we’ve had a long desire to explore the inner workings of the Talamasca to a more fulsome degree. John, I’m going to spoil some stuff! I’m going to stop talking. [Laughs]

Hancock: No, I think the one thing to say, and this goes back to Raglan and obviously Eric as well, is that we look for any opportunity to cement our world alongside the other shows and give helpful hints and reminders that this is happening alongside them, on a slightly different timeline at times. But it’s a gentle reminder. And obviously Justin and Franka are two fantastic actors that are Talamasca and we would be silly not to consider them as part of this organization. They exist in this organization, they exist in our world.

Before we go, can we talk about that scene where Helen sees Doris at the train station? Elizabeth’s wordless reaction was perfect, better than any line of dialogue we could have gotten for this reunion. That heavy sigh of recognition was so lovely.

Hancock: So lovely! Elizabeth is amazing, and she understands moments.

Lafferty: I’m really glad you said that, Damian, because as John said, she A) understands moments and B) she understands writing. That scene was always written that way, and we knew she could pull it off. She can do something with a look that just stops your heart. But she also came to a scene in Episode 5, the scene that she has in the peep show with Guy and there was a lot more dialogue written in there. But she came to us and said, “Can I just sit down and talk to you about this? I think we can do a lot of this with less.” And we went through and she started to cut and cut and cut and cut her own dialogue, which for an actor is a very brave thing to do, to say, “No, cut my lines. I think I can do this with a look.” And her performance in that scene, to me, is so much more phenomenal. It’s brave to subtract, but in subtracting, she added so much more to the scene.

Anne Rice’s Talamasca: The Secret Order, Streaming Now, AMC+