'Talamasca: The Secret Order' May Be Over, But Guy and Jasper Belong in AMC's Immortal Universe

It's undoubtedly true that AMC's grandly named Immortal Universe has helped usher in an Anne Rice renaissance in popular culture, a fantastic development for those of us who have long loved her lavish stories of vampires, witches, and other supernatural creatures. But where AMC giveth, AMC can also taketh away, and the network has decided to cancel its third franchise installment, Talamasca: The Secret Order, after just a single season.

This is, of course, heartbreaking for those who loved the show, but also a strange decision for a network that's still struggling to prove its shared universe concept can work. (And at this point, the less said about Mayfair Witches, the better.) It's true that Talamasca's first outing couldn't duplicate the creative and critical success of the franchise's flagship series, Interview with the Vampire. (Which is, let's not forget, legitimately one of the best genre shows of the past decade.) But it had a ton of potential and was well-positioned to serve as a bridge between every other show in the franchise.

The story of a young telepath named Guy Anatole (Nicholas Denton), who is recruited by the mysterious organization that watches and is always there throughout Rice’s novels, he’s meant to help his handlers track down a mysterious object known as the 752, rumored to contain all the knowledge the Talamasca possesses. The show attempted to mix supernatural lore and character drama with spy-thriller style intrigue, and the result was a series that couldn't quite figure out what kind of show it wanted to be.

It isn’t until several episodes into its run, when Guy finally meets the vampire Jasper (William Fichtner) — avowed Talamasca hater, also on the hunt for the 752 for his own reasons — that the show manages to find some of the same addictive, transgressive spark that powers so much of Interview. The two may only share the screen for a total of about 27 minutes across the series' six episodes, but they make every second of them count.

And if AMC's smart, they won't let this particular onscreen pairing go gently into that good night. Yes, Talamasca as we knew it is over, but if nothing else, we deserve to see these two characters' stories continue.

Denton and Fichtner have an intense, palpable chemistry with one another, so strong and unexpected that it pretty much immediately overpowers everything else happening around them. Are they going to be friends? Mortal enemies? Some secret third thing that involves threatening each other and also possibly making out? Who can say! The pair walks a fine line between all these possibilities, and though Talamasca doesn’t ever quite settle on how much either of them truly trusts the other, it’s evident how much they’d both like to. 

Drawn to one another in a way that seemingly crosses boundaries between species and sides, their relationship is one part manipulation, one part fascination, and one part something that feels an awful lot like flirtation. (This is Anne Rice’s world, after all. Everything is about sex in some form or another.)

Yes, they’re both conveniently using one another for their own ends, but they also….genuinely seem to like each other at the same time. Thrust into a supernatural world he doesn't understand with a gift he doesn't really seem to know how to control, he's lost, lonely, and completely out of his depth. That Jasper is the most authentic, honest person (creature?) he meets in the series’ first season is both an indictment of Guy’s new employer and a glimpse into why the vampire is so intensely interesting as a character — and a figure within AMC’s larger fictional universe. 

Unlike most of the other immortals we’ve met so far, Jasper’s explicitly blue-collar coded, a vampire who favors T-shirts and cowboy boots, listens to country music, and sets up his evil lair in a building he’s technically squatting in. He lacks a lot of the pretension that defines Interview characters like Armand or Lestat, and often seems strangely more vulnerable and human than either. Perhaps this is because he also appears to be relatively young for a vampire, or because he possesses a uniquely single-minded focus: revenge.

That Jasper immediately decides to trust a random twentysomething with big eyes and cute hair says lots of interesting things about how long the vampire has apparently been looking — hoping, even? — for someone to choose his side. And that’s before we get to all the unnecessary touching, hair ruffling, extreme close talking, blood sharing, and pet names. Jasper, a being that doesn’t eat, even feeds Guy breakfast at one point. (He might be a murderer, but he might also be excellent boyfriend material, is what I’m saying. People can contain multitudes.)

Things fall apart between them when Guy breaks Jasper’s cardinal rule about lying to him, and the season ends with them both at odds and in very different circumstances. Guy’s on the run, Jasper’s imprisoned by the very organization he hates, and there’s little hint about how their stories might have intersected again in a second season of the series we'll now never get to see.

But even though Talamasca has officially ended, that doesn't mean Jasper and Guy's situationship has to. After all, the official statement about the cancelation says "we expect to see at least some of these characters, and the organization itself, in future expressions of the franchise.” That could, of course, be so much public relations spin, an effort meant to soothe a fanbase that's facing the first time a show in this universe has been ended so abruptly. (How Mayfair Witches is going into its third season when Talamasca is over is a mystery I fear I will never solve.)

But the thing is, although Talamasca itself didn't exactly light the world on fire, Guy and Jasper did. A quick scroll through any social media or Immortal Universe fan site will tell you pretty much immediately that "Gasper" was the primary reason a rather significant portion of fans were turning into the show at all. It's even more evident that the wildly enthusiastic response to their dynamic — among both critics and viewers — came as a complete shock to the folks actually making the show.

Yet, judging by the plethora of TikTok edits featuring that one scene of Jasper on top of Guy on the floor of a parking garage, the series’ spy elements definitely weren't what was holding viewers' attention. It was the messy, volatile connection between these two compulsively watchable characters, a complete accident of chemistry that this franchise would, quite frankly, be very dumb to throw away.

Sure, it might take a minute to figure out where these two characters could fit in the larger world of Interview with the Vampire (where I think we'd all prefer they end up), but it's certainly not impossible, particularly as the show moves into at least slightly more consistently contemporary settings in The Vampire Lestat. It's canon that Guy has met both Daniel Molloy and Raglan James already, and with the Great Convergence already on the table as part of the plot of the show's next season, it's really not much of a stretch to bring Jasper, already being forced to serve as a vampire-making machine of sorts, into that story.

Accidents of chemistry happen all the time in the world of television. Unexpected plots, pairings, and characters can often catch fire in ways that their creators may have never intended. But when you unexpectedly create lightning in a bottle, the smart move is to grab hold of it before it burns out. This is precisely what AMC should do here, even if the folks behind the scenes aren't quite sure how just yet. Because there’s clearly plenty of worthwhile story left to tell about Guy and Jasper — whether they end up reluctant allies, maybe friends, sometimes adversaries, or something less platonic altogether.  (But, let's face it, we all deserve to get to see them make out at least once.)