I want to start by praising the writers’ room behind Interview With The Vampire and The Vampire Lestat: if previous seasons followed a precise motif, TVL is a masterclass in heterogeneity, and episode 4 breaks whatever semblance of a pattern the first 3 had established. The season reflects Lestat’s erratic personality, in the same way IWTV mirrored Louis’s orderliness. The feat is how the season still feels cohesive despite its intentionally messy form. Sam Reid’s superb acting — in his fan-dubbed Lestat possession — makes the vision a reality.
Episode 4 is titled "The Devil’s Road," which is both a physical and a metaphorical place — in the here and now of Lestat’s present, it’s the tour, which is a foil for Lestat’s early vampiric existence, nomadic, traveling around the world because no place feels quite like somewhere he can build a home.
Somehow, we’re already past the mid-season point and even Lestat is aware of the shift that’s occurring within him. Behind the seemingly static hedonism, there’s a new awareness about him; giving in to the music and slowly embracing his past helps exorcize his demons.
We’re digging deeper: this episode, Lestat faces not one traumatic event, but the cursed companion that has followed him all his life, abandonment. The loneliness haunts him both in the past and in the present, triggered by Gabriella’s desertion, just the latest in the list of their unbalanced relationship.
With the finish line of Lestat’s tour in sight, the band finally goes viral and signs a record deal. He narrates: “Our bus never stopped for gas. We ran on bots and abandonment.” Even as he recounts the story months – years? – later, Lestat still sees his entire life revolving around the perceptions and actions of others. We touched upon this in our articles for episode 2 and episode 3: Lestat never reflects on himself as his own entity, but always in relation to everybody else. He puts on performances for others to react to.
Catching up with Armand
A reaction is indeed what Lestat seeks this episode during his two interactions with Armand (Assad Zaman). Lestat rises from his coffin — calling for his mother, a fact we shall unpack later — to find Armand waiting in his quarters of the bus, and proceeds to tantalize him as he strips and showers before Armand’s wandering gaze as the older vampire attempts to recite an apology. This is vintage de Lioncourt, a provocation begging to be met in kind, in a two-century-long chess game the two vampires have been playing since they first met.
Armand’s visit is not only motivated by his therapy-induced desire to apologize for past misdeeds. He brings a warning, for Lestat to stop his rockstar act and cease indirectly inciting the Great Conversion. But anonymity does not suit Lestat and the music is quite literally keeping him alive. When he invites Armand to his concert, Lestat has already hatched his plan to humiliate him, using the blueprint of a song that TC and Salamander showed him earlier in the episode, with a few well-placed tweaks.
You’ve got a lot of rules for a theatre kid, Lestat mocks. Only the big boss gets to decide who dies and who stays alive, referencing the trial in which the Paris coven executed Claudia, Madeleine and Louis, nearly, if Lestat had not intervened.
Every element of the performance is curated down to the tiniest details. Lestat’s eye make-up and girlish pigtails are reminiscent of Claudia’s in the play she so hated that Armand directed. Lestat may be shirtless — he usually is, during concerts — but his pants look suspiciously similar of those he wore during the trial staged by Armand. His every moment, that playful gait, is a performance of the mischievous Harlequin, straight out of Armand’s fake retelling of Lestat’s actor past. Just like the original Arlecchino in the Commedia dell’Arte, Lestat breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly, to rage-bait Armand with an unflattering but not untrue introduction and the mocking song he dedicates to his “friend," Big Boss.
After publicly executing his daughter, it may come across as underwhelming that the worst Lestat does to Armand is public humiliation through a diss track. But isn’t that just their little dance? Lestat admits to being grateful for what Armand has done for him (putting Nicki out of his misery when Lestat himself couldn’t), and he probably feels he has punished Armand enough in the past 77 years, through psychological warfare, never letting him rest easy as Lestat could reach out to Louis and reveal the truth of Armand’s involvement in Claudia’s murder and shatter their life together at any point. Lestat has not yet let himself unpack what he feels for his daughter, and he may choose to believe he and Armand are even now.
Too bad, that’s rather one-sided, after Lestat’s little stunt at the concert.
Devil’s Minion
Armand storms out of the venue and Daniel (Eric Bogosian) follows him out. After an earlier scene in which Daniel aired out his anger and his frustration at being turned and then abandoned by Armand, Armand cautions Daniel to stay away from Lestat, and the two of them shout about the inconvenience of their vampire bond. When Daniel accuses Armand of still messing with his head given that the rest of the world seems to disappear when they are near, his maker reminds him, with a little too much frustration, “I can’t get into your head any longer,” with emphasis on the last part, considering that he did a lot of mind-wiping to Daniel over the past five decades.
When confronted about the way Daniel tricked Armand in Dubai despite the vampire having full access to his thoughts back then, Armand, at a loss for any other explanation, confesses his love in the most indirect way possible.
Strap in, Operation Devil’s Minion is fully a-go.
Louis and Regina
It’s poignant that Lestat narrates Louis’s obsession with Regina (Delainey Hayles) with a tenderness he doesn’t allow his own story, his soft voice betraying how his heart is breaking for Louis (Jacob Anderson) as he essentially stalks a waitress who undoubtedly resembles their daughter. Louis is lost, feeling empty, and he seeks solace in the closest he can get to the person he once described as, “My light, my Claudia, my redemption.” He’s trying to fill that chasm where his heart should be.
Regina calls Louis out on his ambiguous behavior. The stalking obviously remains problematic even if it’s not sexual in nature, but let me open a parenthesis to say that it felt good to watch Louis finally be confident in his sexuality and proudly declaring himself “gay, gay, gay” to a stranger, after witnessing all his 20th century Catholic guilt.
Both Louis and Regina do some online research on the other and he oversteps again by offering her monetary support to better her life condition, perhaps helping her will make him feel like he did not completely fail his own daughter. At first, she refuses his offer, but that doesn’t stop Louis from going to see her. Understanding that his hurt runs deep and she is not getting rid of Louis any time soon, Regina decides to indulge him in exchange for a ridiculous sum of money. In a terribly poetic cycle, Daniel’s prophecy from season 1 comes true: “You’re still Louis the pimp, paying a whore to sit in a room and talk with you.”
The interactions between Louis and not!Claudia we are about to witness in episode 5 are some of the most disturbing of the show because, although we’ve seen Louis in various states of distress across three seasons, the sheer desperation Jacob Anderson masterfully displays in these scenes is beyond heart-breaking.
Back to Lestat (and the absence of) Gabriella
It’s equally as devastating that Lestat has had 265+ years to try and emancipate himself from his mother’s thrall and he still hasn’t managed, because every time he tries to, she comes back to manipulate him some more with a semblance of love. Judging by his calls, texts, voicemail and visible upset Gabriella’s umpteenth desertion hit him just as hard as the first. “Where did you go?” he asks over and over again. When will she come back, and most importantly, “Why did you abandon me?”, the Biblical dilemma that echoes maker-creature dynamics from Paradise Lost to Frankenstein.
To Daniel, who insists on asking Lestat about his mother, he feeds an easy lie about his mother not being fit for vampirism, how she was weak, struggled to feed, and eventually begged him to let her be consumed by daylight in a clearing. Perhaps, at his most lonely hour, Lestat almost wishes the story had gone like that. Better another failure — another fledgling he had left to madness — than having to confront the notion that Gabriella simply does not want to spend eternity at Lestat’s side.
But the past creeps in, and Lestat’s memories tell a different story: initially a perfect complicity, as they travel around the world and enjoy the gift. He is utterly besotted with her, ecstatic at the idea of their platonic companionship. Soon enough, though, their goals are no longer aligned.
Gabriella’s hypersexuality in itself is far from being the issue, what’s disturbing is the way she uses it to provoke Lestat into a jealousy he can’t explain. Angry and confused, Lestat reproaches that when Gabriella first initiated their incestuous relation back when they were still human, “we were mother and son.” He wants to hold that impropriety against her, put an end to the ambiguity, but she immediately manipulates him to cross the boundary he was trying to set. Despite her lack of empathy, Gabriella does exactly what she needs to keep him leashed to her, and speaks the three magic words she knows he’s dying to hear. Even as tears fall down his face, Lestat is desperate enough to mold himself to his mother’s twisted desires, to accept the abuse masked as love, and to become whatever she wants as long as they can stay together.
And here’s the sickest part: Lestat gives in to Gabriella’s incestuous urges, but once she has him, she doesn’t care to keep him or to indulge in his romantic views of their future. It’s not him that she wanted specifically, but the freedom of not being his (or anyone’s) mother or wife, to escape the shackles that human life had imposed on her. Lestat’s love, his constant need of affection, weighs down on her, who wants to be a free spirit, roaming alone, unburdened from expectations.
On the shore, Gabriella tries to subtly distance herself from Lestat, unabashedly confesses her wish to be “an evil that answers goodness," and in a proto-Akasha speech outlines the hell she wishes to unleash with vivid images taken straight from Dante’s Inferno. She wants to decimate humanity, scourge the earth until it is ruled by them only. Of course, Lestat interprets her vision to include himself and symbolically binds them by drawing a ring of blood on Gabriella’s finger. As always, she deflects the argument and chooses to disappear when he isn’t looking and the following evening, Lestat wakes to find his mother gone. In her cruelty, she’s left him parting gifts, locks of her hair and her emerald pendant that IWTV fans will remember as Lestat birthday gift to Claudia in season 1.
Lestat gives up (almost)
In the present, the zealous fan we met in episode 1 shoots Lestat in public, hurting Christine and traumatizing hundreds of Lestat’s fans and his entourage. Despite not being afraid for his own safety, Lestat is deeply shaken by the mass shooting and he capitulates on his rockstar dream, deciding to end the tour early and head home to Montreal.
Sofia/Gabriella’s betrayal contributes to his uneasiness. Not only did she leave him again, but she did not show up to meet him where she said she would. As he reminisces about her departure, Lestat sings the acoustic song he was playing as he texted Gabriella in episode 1. He’s finally processing her desertion, almost at peace. “I never learned my lesson,” he sings, “I gave up on confession,” and Gabriella interrupts him as he’s about to move on.
Lestat is powerless before her, dependant like a child. “Why do you come back? Why won’t you let me hate you?” His abandonment accusation is met with rage; Gabriella is disappointed Lestat is giving up. On the surface, she’s a mother commanding a child to keep going even when the game gets hard, but in reality Gabriella needs Lestat to continue being a public figure to further her agenda. Thousands of lonely, lost, angry, tired vampires are looking at him and finding a way to endure and a path forward through the Great Conversion. Her encouraging to step up and lead their kind is very reminiscent of a similar plot point in Anne Rice’s Prince Lestat novel.
Still, Lestat is hesitant, believing his music not to be enough, but Gabriella finds a succinct way to convince him to do her bidding: “Eight wolves.” A simple reminder of the first time Lestat became someone worthy of worship.
There’s a narrative device at play, Lestat admits he’s not relaying the exact argument Gabriella used on him, instead quoting what Louis said in episode 1 of Lestat’s speech that convinced him to say yes to him on the altar. Lestat and Gabriella may be alone now, but Lestat’s muses are all there, bearing witness to the moment of no turning back. For the first time — that we know — Claudia is there too, foreshadowing the next two episodes.
Other significant moments
At the end of episode 3, when Lestat confronted his demons and sang "The Loneliness" on stage, the ghost of Magnus exited scene, just like his other abuser, Gabriella did in reality. But the hallucination of Nicolas stayed, and they shared a smile. This episode, Nicki is less pleasant, representing the guilt that still eats Lestat alive. Lestat called him “not a great love,” during the interview with Daniel, but everything in the story is telling us that’s false. Nicki’s ghost tortures Lestat by asking if he’s at least number 3 in his heart, after Louis and Gabriella, or if even Antoinette meant more to him.
This episode, Alex returns to the band, but his devotion to Armand will pay off down the line.
Up until now, the season has been about Lestat coming to terms with the burdens of his past. He has faced many, and he is ready to record his album, a feat that wil take a significant portion of episode 5. One ghost he still needs to confront: his greatest sin, the evil of his evil. His Claudia.
Episode 4 may feel transitional, but no part of it is to be considered fodder. Every scene, every interaction, serves a particular purpose in the grand scheme of the story.
Rating: A+
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