Review: Interview With The Vampire Episode 5 goes too far

Well, Interview with the Vampire episode 5 sure was a doozy, and is bound to be an incredibly polarizing episode for several reasons.

Major SPOILERS ahead for Interview with the Vampire episode 5

Interview with the Vampire Episode 5, “A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart,” ends with one of the most graphic and brutal scenes of violence in the entire series up until this point as Lestat reaches his breaking point and viciously attacks Louis.

Lestat is evil. He’s a murderer. He’s never been a good guy and has been abusive, albeit not physically, since Episode 1. However, this series has also been heavily marketed as an epic queer gothic romance story, so the sudden prolonged scene of domestic violence did feel rather sudden, especially because there was no warning of any kind that it was coming at the start of the episode. Even the depiction of vampire murders and torture hasn’t been as graphic as the scene at the end of this episode. And no, it doesn’t happen in the books.

It’s not so much that the show decided to include domestic violence but how it was included. Everything is shown on-screen, and it’s hard to understand why the writers felt the audience needed to see Louis beaten so viciously. In a series that has been pretty adept at handling racial politics thus far, having a white man brutalize his Black partner on-screen is…a choice.

The entire incident is shown through Claudia’s perspective, so it’s possible the series could retcon this by claiming Claudia misrepresented what happened, but I think that would make it even worse because then it would seem like the entire sequence was added purely for shock value.

I believe the scene’s purpose was to showcase just how horrifying the true nature of Lestat and Louis’ relationship is. Now that viewers have seen that; there’s no real justification for “stanning” a character like Lestat. Interview with the Vampire has toyed with audience expectations since the start, usually through the lens of Daniel Molloy interviewing Louis in Dubai.

Molloy has previously pointed out that Louis is a victim of abuse, but Louis refuses to see it that way; likely as a response to his trauma, he’s romanticizing his past so he doesn’t have to accept the reality of what happened to him. So I can see how the scene in question might have a point.

If Louis were telling this story, we probably would not have seen it play out so viciously, but because Mollow is reading about it in Claudia’s diary, it makes sense that we see the unvarnished version of events.

Claudia leaves home

Apart from that scene, there was another plot point in this episode that I’m not thrilled with. Episode 5 picks up after Claudia’s attempted suicide. She’s been running amok all over town, killing people willy-nilly and throwing bodies into the river without much care. Louis and Lestat are understandably pissed about this because she’s left a trail of bodies behind her and it’s drawing suspicion.

Eventually the bodies are discovered in the river and the cops start sniffing around Louis and Lestat since at least one of the victims lived just a few doors down. Claudia’s room is full of “souvenirs,” including some severed fingers and toes. She’s a stone-cold killer with a vicious streak a mile wide.

When Claudia’s vampire parents try to get her to reign it in, she lashes out. Frustrations over being stuck in a teenage body and her grief over Charlie’s death come to a head. Claudia admits that most of the people she’s killed have involved her desire to turn someone else into a vampire so she can have an immortal companion, similar to what Lestat and Louis have with each other.

Claudia decides to leave home and go out on her own to find other vampires, although Lestat warns that they won’t be kind to her. Claudia learns that the hard way when she meets a vampire named Bruce on a college campus, and he sexually assaults her. Thankfully, the actual assault is not shown onscreen. That’s because Louis rips the pages out of Claudia’s notebook, but more on that in a minute.

I’m tired of writers using rape and sexual assault as a plot device to force female characters to mature or “grow up.” It’s cheap and lazy writing. Claudia gets assaulted and suddenly becomes a much more mature version of herself. Seriously? In the “Inside the Episode” featurette, one of the show’s executive producers says that Claudia’s experience with Bruce “toughened her up.” Again I say, seriously? That whole part of the episode just felt very unnecessary. Using rape to rush character development for female characters is reductive and insulting.

In the present, Molloy and Louis disagree about the pages containing Claudia’s assault. Louis is protective over her and doesn’t want that information to be shared with the world. I wish the writers had shown as much care for Claudia’s story in this episode as Louis does. Molloy points out that Louis is editorializing again, and when he does that, it makes it hard for him to trust everything else he’s been saying.

Taking a page from Lestat’s playbook, Louis uses his vampire abilities to trigger an attack of Parkinson’s in Molloy’s hand. In return, Molloy slaps the vampire, and they move on from the disagreement. For now, Molloy drops it.

The conversation regarding these missing pages is interesting because Molloy points out that when the story is released, it won’t belong to Louis anymore. It becomes something else. He makes a snarky comment about how people might make sexy Claudia costumes. I thought it was timely, given that we’re probably about to see a lot of tasteless Jeffrey Dahmer costumes this Halloween, thanks to Netflix.

Once Molloy and Louis get past the missing-pages argument, Louis urges Molloy to keep reading.

A breaking point

After returning home from her trip, Claudia witnesses an emotional meeting between Louis and his sister Grace in a cemetery. It’s now the 1930s, some seven years and change since Claudia first left, and the Great Depression has started. Grace and her husband have lost everything and are moving north.

Grace wants to say goodbye to Louis for good. Not only is she moving away, but she shows Louis that she’s had his name added to the stone marker beneath their mother’s. Even though “Louis” is still alive, Grace can no longer see him as her brother and tells him it will be easier for her to think of him as dead. It’s really heartbreaking seeing Louis lose his very last tether to his human life. In the years since Claudia has gone missing, Louis has become seriously depressed.

Since Claudia was basically a “bandaid baby” for him and Lestat, their relationship has fallen into disrepair. They constantly snark at each other, and Lestat has started seeing Antoinette with increasing frequency.

When Claudia sees Louis break down in tears at the gravesite after Grace leaves, she realizes that he needs her and finally comes home. But she doesn’t plan on staying. Claudia invites Louis to go with her as she travels to places like Romania and Europe to meet other vampires.

Well, that suggestion does not go over well with Lestat, who is very possessive of Louis. And when he realizes that Louis is considering leaving with Claudia, he loses his mind, hence the long, violent altercation that ends with Lestat taking Louis on his first flight into the skies (Lestat can fly). There he tries to make Louis admit that he never loved him and then drops him from thousands of feet in the air.

Obviously we know Louis doesn’t die, but that doesn’t make seeing him land with a sickening crunch any easier for viewers or Claudia to watch. That’s where this episode ends, and we have another week to try and process…all of that.

Grade: B-

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