The Vampire Lestat, Episode 6: Montreal

The penultimate episode of TVL is surprising for a number of reasons. There are no flashbacks and very little lore. Instead we get a  Louis and Lestat relationship “open bottle” episode in which the two characters warily circle each other and try to reconcile their vast baggage. That and a completely bonkers ending. 

Personally, I am a huge fan of these kinds of character-focused stories in which we follow characters around for a day and watch them interact. And it works early well here due to the strength of the these two actors and their incredible chemistry together. I can’t even be mad about not getting the kind of novel material I would have wanted. I'm honestly happy to let these actors and this creative team cook.

Failure is a recurring theme in this season and Lestat is stewing in the fact that his album is poorly reviewed and only reached a mediocre number sixty-eight on the Billboard Top 100. This is a distinction from the novel in which (at least as Lestat tells it) the album is a huge success.

We are full circle from the season premiere and Lestat is back in Montreal on Halloween, although now with Louis in person instead of via FaceTime. It has been a month and a half since the “New York” episode and the two have been spending more time together in the wake of Louis’s crash-out over “Fraudia.” Since then, Satan’s Night Out has been turned and guitarist Alex has taken his brother’s apparent suicide hard, seen here lurking around moodily in a Dracula mask. 

Lestat seems to be taking his  death-faking at least somewhat seriously, as we seem him thumbing through some fake passports featuring some of his known aliases from the novels. We see here Sheridan Blackwood and Clarance Oddbody. This does give some context for his apparent “death” in the framing device in episode one. Maybe he’s just leaned into is faked death and has fucked off somewhere.

Although Lestat and Louis are not back together, they are certainly interacting comfortably together. A familiar refrain in this episode is “Should we cancel?” both referring to some dinner plans and mysterious other event. One of the joys of this episode is seeing the two interact and interact in a (for this show anyway) healthy way. “Why you bein’ nice,” Louis asks him.

Lestat (complete in Grim Reaper costume) and Louis meet Daniel to conclude the documentary interview. Dan is a suspiciously Trumpy orange color. The two proceed to fuck with Daniel as they had been all along but one again Lestat gives him an honest and gracious response to his question about Louis and Lestat’s reunion in New Orleans, “It was enough that he showed up.” Dan is not in a place to really appreciate the candidness and intimacy of this answer.

Lestat and Louis then head to a band rehearsal where Louis and Sofia/Gabriella finally meet. At this point Louis doesn’t know who she really is other than that she is an intimate of Lestat. She toys with him, clearly threatened by his hold on her son. When Lestat sings his ballad “Brutal Love” in their direction, it becomes clear he is singing to Louis and Gabriella is not happy about it. At this point a bunch of music has been released and some of them are clearly about Louis (a few are specifically about Gabriella) despite Lestat’s protestations. Although in this episode he does admit that “most of them” are about Louis.

When asked what he though of Sofia, Louis responds “I’ll tell you in the car,” which is never a good sign. Sofia, threatened, is attempting to get Lestat to go with her to Spain to watch the fallout of the Great Conversion but he brushes her off. It seems like he is finally getting sick of her manipulative shit.

Much of this episode takes place in the back of Lestat’s limo and Louis is sent a link to a video that Daniel has posted showing Lestat and Gabriella in bed and an interview with him and Armand outing her as Lestat’s mother. I love that Armand has descended into high school Mean Girls cyber-bullying at the this point. Also, Dan and Armand are seen in the daylight. This is one of those weird deviations from the lore established on the books. While certain vampires are old and powerful enough to survive the daylight, none of them are what might be called “daywalkers” in other lore. Certainly, Daniel would not survive this.

This Gabriella information causes a blow-up with Louis and Lestat. I think the show is making too big of a deal over this. As Lestat says, they are “unnatural beings” and he accuses Louis (rightly so) of whipping out his “half human soul” to win an argument. The problem with Gabriella is less that she is Lestat’s mother but more that she is toxic and manipulative and that he was lying about it.

The make it to their final appointment of the night which is with a witch named Merrick Mayfair, a character who was a protagonist of the eponymous Anne Rice novel. She is a character spun off from The Lives of the Mayfair Witches and is also associated with the Talamasca and the apparently-dead-on-the-show David Talbot. Here she is a New Orleans acquaintance of Lestat, and a voodooine that he brings to Montreal to hold a seance to reach Claudia and provide Louis with the closure that he seeks.

I really wish they had brought the characters back to New Orleans for this episode. Narratively it would make more sense since that is where Merrick lives and also where Claudia was born and lived much of her life. Mostly it would have been nice to get those season one NOLA vibes back.

Much as in the book, the raised ghost of Claudia is pissed and not having it from either of them, especially not from Louis. Delainey Hayles is amazing and powerful in this scene, so much so that I wish they wouldn’t have pooched her appearance in the Fraudia subplot. I think her appearance would have been more impactful if this was the only time we saw her this season. A lot of the people behind this show are from the theater and this scene really has a heightened theatrical feel and Delainey prowls this mystical circle like she is performing in the round. Lots of people associated with this show have and will deserve awards and Hayles is one of them. Hopefully she gets the recognition she deserves for this show-stopping scene.

Among the many terrible things she says to Louis is “I liked him better,” referring to Lestat. Which is basically what she says in the book. One thing I wish we had got this season was some of the events of IWTV from Lestat’s perspective and especially his take on the Claudia relationship. In Louis’ telling, the two were constantly at odds but boom Lestat describes much more closeness and camaraderie between them which we never really see on the show.

Of course, there is no closure for Louis, only more trauma but it must be said he takes it better than his book counterpart. As with the books we are left to wonder was that really Claudia? Was it all of Claudia or just a shadow of her rage? Did she really mean all those very hurtful things that she said? This scene is lifted straight from Rice's writing and is consistent with the way that she approached ghosts throughout her writing which is to say in her cosmology you can never expect to get truth, clarity or "closure" from a ghost. 

As Lestat and Louis discuss their baggage and even carefully broach getting back together they notice Alex skulking in the distance with his Dracula mask. They are then promptly beheaded by Armand and Daniel.

NOTES:

• Lestat refers to the different roles he has fulfilled as “The nesting dolls of identity” and the show is very much about him reconciling all of those  elements of his his personality. I thought that was a lovely way to put it and as far as I know not from Anne Rice.
• Louis’ solutions to his Claudia issues in this episode: seance and blocking on social media.
• Gabriella mentions to Louis that vampires from Dubai, Paris, and Detroit will be attending. All famously the sites of his rampages.
• My goodness Jacob Anderson was serving some face during Brutal Love.
• Lestat about Gabs: “I conduct the chaos, she is one of the many chainsaws I juggle “ 
• During the voodoo ceremony Claudia breaks the barrier ring. Does that mean she is loose in the world? Ghost Claudia does have a VERY memorable scene in Queen of the Damned. It's also one of the most genuinely scary scenes in her writing which despite all the monsters is not really what you would call horror.
• So, Gabriella turned Alex, which I am sure Lestat is going to be totally cool and not possessive about. Did Lestat make any fledglings? I imagine that Gabs, Sam, and Lestat each turned one of them…
• Lestat’s aliases are straight from Tale of the Body Thief and tie into the themes of that book or are literary allusions. Clarence Oddbody is a character from Its a Wonderful Life, tied to the theme of a supernatural vision of what life could have been. Sheridan Blackwood is not related to her novel Blackwood Farm but instead a combination of the Gothic authors Algernon Blackwood and Sheridan le Fanu who wrote Carmilla, an early vampire story which was a big influence on Rice for its Gothic atmosphere and complex, conflicted vampire.
• Louis was Degrassi High fan. These vampires are consuming A LOT of media.
• The uncle in question here is Cortland Mayfair who is a main character of AMC’s Mayfair Witches series, although Merrick has not appeared on that show.
• Justice for Antoinette. Indeed.
• Blood of Akasha count. Here we go again. Does Louis even know who Akasha is?
• Did we ever see Gabriella’s portrait in Interview with the Vampire season one?
• “She spared us the ambiguity.” Indeed.
• “Why do I actively, manically pursue failure?” Although a case can be made that book Lestat is less messy than show Lestat, I think this line is true for both versions. Book Lestat has some cosmic-level failures and wild lapses of judgment.
• Somehow it looks like we are getting more Auvergne and Nicky in the finale.
• Look, they have been teasing decapitaitons…They are both okay. It's fine. We're all fine.