Interview with the Vampire Season-Finale Recap: Paris Is Burning
PHEW! Interview with the Vampire had me worried for a second there. I knew season three hadn’t been announced yet. I knew this show wasn’t cheap or easy to make. And on top of it all, the season finale is titled, “And That’s The End Of It. There’s Nothing Else.” Were they just gonna leave Louis and Lestat and Armand and Daniel’s stories here and do a full pivot over to the Talamasca spinoff? I love the work of Raglan James (a provisions shop in Marylebone) as much as the next girl, but I still want O.G. Interview with the Vampire running alongside whatever other Anne Rice shows they devise. I want to follow these boys for 17 more books’ worth of stories. Thank Akasha, it’s coming back, and we’re getting a Rockstar Lestat plot! Now I can enjoy this season finale in peace.
Hahhahaha, just kidding. I’m watching in madness and delirium, as always! For our final interview with the vampires in the show’s first book arc, Louis describes what it felt like to be buried alive in a coffin, while Armand acts like he’s being overdramatic. I personally think it’s valid to be upset about getting buried and starved alive by the people who murdered your sister-daughter, but whatever. All the while, Armand has been demoted back to the chorus, with Santiago as maitre. It’s so frustrating that, after all of the tears and bloodshed, after staging an entire coup, Santiago is running the coven exactly as it already was.
Armand rescues Louis from his tomb and Louis starts over as a new man, a dead thing piloted exclusively by rage and madness, like a very dark sequel to Inside Out. Jacob Anderson is giving an awesome crazy-guy performance. He’s rambling to himself, talking with corpses, crawling around on the ground drawing diagrams, biting open a motorcycle gasoline line like he’s Furiosa, and at one point, he meows? One night, after warning Armand to steer clear of the Theatre, Louis struts into the coven’s lair and tosses gasoline on their coffins. The sequence is set to awesome old-school espionage-spy-caper music, and there’s a fun shot of him at Claudia’s vanity, reflected in the mirror where (presumably) Santiago has graffiti’d ‘Tweedily deedily dead” in cursive. He snatches her diaries into a bag as the room behind him catches fire and the vamps scream in their coffins. He gets “six by fire, two by blade, one by a combination of the two. No legs, one arm, still clutching onto his clarinet.” This means four are left, including Celeste and Estelle, who we see making their getaways on motorcycle before they go kablooey (you can’t spell kablooey without … Louis. Sound it out.)
Santiago is making his escape through the tunnels when he hears his henchwomen’s voices die in his telepathic vamp-chat Discord channel and screams out in rage. Then, Louis telepathically deadnames him, which causes Santiago to go on one of the wildest, most villainous rants of the series to date. Or maybe in television history, period. He asks Louis if Armand ever told him what the troupe did with Claudia’s ashes, and the answer … might surprise you.
We used her as eyeshadow for the next month’s performances, we put them in the pepper shaker for the popcorn we sold in the aisles, and some nights, Louis, I put a pinch of them in my fist before I closed my coffin at night. I would spit in them, and I’d use her hot, wet ashes to pleasure myself!
These writers are the ones who need to be put on show-trial! Guilty! Banishment! Louis taunts Santiago, saying he has a tiny dick, so the vampire formerly known as Francis shoots out of a manhole cover and Louis decapitates him with a fluid blade swipe. Thus ending a stylish, playful, and mildly disgusting mass revenge sequence.
Then we get a really well-constructed shot of Louis and Armand the morning after in Louis’s apartment, pale light flowing in through a crack between the curtains causing an uncrossable divide between the lovers. Armand sets his doe-eyes to stunning and admits that he had kept the coven’s plans from Louis in the lead-up to the play, but you have to understand that they were going to kill him. That night, Armand leads Lou to the Bane Pit, where Lestat was born into darkness and where Lestat’s currently hiding out. “I came here to have a think. On my origins,” he says. He is so fun when mopey. Expect to get more backstory in season three, but for now, Lestat says that his sadistic maker Magnus “had a knack for design. Nordic blonds on walls, dirty blonds in piles, right about where the gremlin stands now.” Cut to: Armand frowning. Ijbol.
Louis wants to kill Lestat, but Lestat is basically unburnable for reasons he never bothered to explain to Louis: “I have the blood of Akasha in me.” R.I.P., Aaliyah, you legit would have loved this show. Louis goes into legendary petty queen mode, says, “Here’s your death, Lestat,” and makes out with Armand, who would rather be trotted out as a revenge prop than not in the convo at all. We will learn why imminently as we cut back to the present day, where Armand and Louis tie a neat tidy bow on their story and call it all happily ever after, fin.
Only not fin at all because Daniel springs some follow-up questions on the vamps, beginning with softballs. We learn that Sam is the fourth vamp who escaped Louis’s Paris coven massacre, and that he’s currently a DJ. Happy pride, everyone. Then he pulls out the big bomb: with Rashid’s help, Raglan James (an animated carrier pigeon with a heart of gold) sent Daniel a rare copy of the Trial! script, with red notes in the margins by the guy who puts the ‘turd’ in ‘dramaturge,’ Armand. Flashback to Armand, directing a rehearsal, and Lestat clearly unhappy to be involved. “He didn’t witness the play,” Daniel tells Louis. “He directed the play!” It was Lestat all along who controlled the whole crowd to shout “banishment!” saving Louis from death. Armand just took credit. Why did Armand want Louis to burn? What’s the full story here?
Louis storms off after these revelations, and Armand, furious and terrified, follows him out of the room, stammering excuses. Louis slams Armand into a concrete wall and tells him that he’ll kill him if he lays a finger on dear, sweet Daniel, who is only an innocent 70-year-old boy. Also: pack up your shit and get out. He thanks Daniel, shakes his hand, lights his laptop on fire, and leaves. To where?
Omigod to New Orleans! Louis goes on a ghost tour to his old townhouse because he’s feeling silly like that, and follows a young rat-catching vampire back to a Southern Gothic hovel where Lestat is bedraggled and practicing playing a fake piano. “I’m sorry I don’t have much time, I’m in the middle of rehearsing … I’m going on tour,” he says, kind of out of it, Justin Timberlake getting pulled over. It takes a scene like this to really hammer home how much I’ve been missing Lestat all season. Not just in flashbacks, not just as a ghostly apparition. Lestat in the flesh, Lestating. It’s such a funny and strange and sad performance Sam Reid is giving here as this lovesick immortal looney tune of a man, a fallen ego-fiend on a tragically careening struggle bus. Reid nails the character to the point that I’m half-convinced a tiny-Lestat is hiding in his extensions, puppeting him around like a Ratatouille. Louis asks why he never said that he was the one who saved him at the trial. “I don’t like to point out my virtues,” he says in the biggest lie in a season full of them. He brushes it off as no big thing, but it’s a huge thing.
As a hurricane builds around them, they have a stunning, tearful reunion, which might be the most gorgeous scene of the entire season, acting like a bookend along with the “you and me, me and you” speech from the end of episode one. It’s cathartic, with Louis admitting his own wrongs and the two of them crying and grieving for Claudia. Then they embrace so hard the house collapses in on itself.
Hard-cut to Daniel on the local evening news in Atlanta, promoting his bestselling memoir, “Interview with the Vampire.” Five million copies sold! The host wants to know why he’d tarnish a noble career as a hard-hitting journalist with some crackpot monster novel. Daniel’s like It’s real! I swear! Vampires are real! The host is like Enough with the bit! Drop the bit! Daniel is like Fuck you, man! The chyron at the bottom is like Next up … the weather! Sell-out success suits Daniel just fine. He’s dressed like Bad Boy Molloy: ACDC shirt, leather jacket, sunglasses indoors. After the news hit, he’s on his cell phone talking with Louis like Louis, baby! Your royalty checks keep bouncing! But then he ditches the cell. And the sunglasses. And they’re still talking. And you know he’s got those colored contact lenses in! Armand has turned Daniel into a vampire! The Vampire Daniel Molloy!
Oh, also, every vampire on earth is pissed at Louis for spilling in the book and they want to torture and kill him because vamps as a species are generally uncreative and like to solve most of their problems with torturing and killing. Over vamp-telepath-voice-chat, he invites them all to try and take him at his high-security tower penthouse in Dubai. He’ll even leave the doors unlocked. “So, for all you cowards out there talking shit, talking about taking a run at me? Hear this now. And hear it plain: I own the night.” Hellllll yeeeeahhhhhhhhh!
That was maybe one of my favorite seasons of TV ever? Thank you sincerely for watching along, and please share your thoughts/feelings/predictions/questions in the comments below because I simply enjoy your company too much! Alright, it’s time to crawl into my coffin and let the day sleep overtake me until season three is out.
Notes on Vamp
• Other deceased vamps in the wall include: Zacharie Brun (1653-1723), Charlotte Lavigne (1821-1899), Nicolas de Lenfent (1769-1796). For all their immortality, vampires have kind of short life spans, on account of all the violence and depression.
• On Armand and Louis’s bookshelf: Anna Karenina, Tolstoy, Sartre, a book on the life of Voltaire, and “Un ennemi du peuple.” Do you think they’re Jeremy Strong fans?
• Who was Armand spoon-feeding gray gruel to during the montage of Louis’s time in the wall?
• Of course, RJ texts like “That’s an intriguing request…”
• Of course, Daniel’s username is Pulitzerootwo.
• “If I’m not with him, I’m nothing.” Armand is so disordered in a very relatable way.
• “She only thought it was small ‘cause my testicles are so enormous!” — A round of applause for Ben Daniels’s incredible work this season.
• Genuine jumpscare when Louis kicks Santiago’s bodiless blond noggin at the camera. He kicks the head in the book, too.
• If there’s one thing 1940s Armand was going to be doing, it was wearing suspenders.
• Were Louis and Armand going to kill Daniel when the interview wrapped? When they invite him to dinner Louis’s like “We have something special prepared for you, Daniel” in a very menacing way. Or maybe I’m misreading? Maybe it was just more sushi?
• Sam has been redeemed! “Agent VSB” on the “Trial!” script is definitely “Vampire Sam Barclay.” He was the Talamasca’s “guy in Paris.” A king and an ally who I should never have doubted for even a second.
• “We need an animation here. It’s not clear how extreme the hoarding was.” Armand’s script notes are evil but hilarious.
• Lestat shouting, “You have no idea of Claudia’s strength!” Happy Father’s Day to all the dads in highly dysfunctional relationships with their daughters!
• “Worrisome fledgling. All the millennials are.” Yep.
• Lestat going “Siri pause” got a huge laugh from this intrepid recapper.
• A great line: “I didn’t know it was a gift. I wore it like a curse.”
• Another great line is when Daniel calls the Washington Post “The Bezos Bugle.”
• The news bleeped out Daniel saying, “Blow me!”
• This break-up is clearly a necessary bit of healing for Louis. Instead of shutting himself off from the world in his tower, with Armand gone he’s inviting history back in. He’s hung up Claudia’s dress and a portrait of his brother on the walls, like art meant to be interacted with and appreciated.
• It will be interesting if season three is structured as follows: A-plot, Lestat Eras Tour doc; B-plot, Louis John Wick/Yakuza-style storming-the-tower action film; C-plot, Daniel-Armand enemies to lovers arc.