The season finale of The Vampire Lestat is titled “The Failures” and it does anything but deliver on the ill omen of its name. The episode is loaded, trippy, and open-ended, but it’s the farthest thing from failure that could ever grace television. The finale, like the entire season, is a lot, in a perfect mirror of its titular character.
It’s heavy: the scenes involving Armand (Assad Zaman) torturing Louis (Jacob Anderson) are hard to watch. The episode feels like a mental trip, because it is: we spend more than half the hour in Lestat’s (severed) head; and it does leave many questions unanswered, because this season was part 1 of 2, in the same way that Interview With The Vampire could only fully be grasped after season 2 had come out. The season 4 renewal has not yet been announced, but the air is certainly buzzy, with The Vampire Lestat taking over Hall H at San Diego Comic Con this weekend… stay tuned.
But the episode is the worthy conclusion to Lestat’s chaotic journey this season. After sweeping all his issues under the rug, running away from his traumas, Lestat learned to face his past and now confronts it headfirst in the finale.
After being decapitated by Armand and Daniel in the cliffhanger at the end of last episode, Lestat spends the majority of the episode inside his head… Lestat’s reckoning is coming, not from an enemy, but from within, deep inside his own soul.
The Long Table
In what must have been intended as a nod to the incipit of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Lestat finds himself walking through a forest, hungry to examine his life and his wrongdoings. He is led to a familiar table where an abbot instructs his younger selves. When adult Lestat sits down to join them, the scenery changes: the table is still his father’s, but now placed inside his maker’s tower, and Magnus (Damien Atkins) chairs an assembly of Lestat’s fledglings: Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), Nicolas (Joe Potter), Louis (Jacob Anderson), Antoinette (Maura Grace Athari), and TC (Sarah Swire). Lestat laments Claudia’s absence, but there is nothing more for her to share with him.
After the many tribulations of the season, when he is the nearest to death he can ever be, Lestat is put on trial by his very subconscious, which manifests itself in the faces of his loved ones… and chief abusers. In his dream, all of them speak cruelly to him –—perhaps because Lestat has been conditioned to believe that’s what he deserves from those he loves.
This episode investigates the very entity of a soul — in a secular context. Ontologically, is our soul the amalgamation of all our feelings? Our actions, our attempts, even our failures? The fledglings dissect Lestat’s soul, his life, everywhere he knows he erred.
His mask of composure drops, any attempt to save face abandoned on the park bench he and Louis sat, and Lestat finally comes to terms with the fact that his life is a series of failures. He owns this devastating knowledge, and is rewarded by a much more powerful epiphany: that attempting and failing is better than not having tried at all. There is power in vulnerability, and Lestat takes something, becomes more himself, from all his failed attempts.
The tipping point is a memory of his mother Gabriella taking child Lestat to see innocent women accused of witchcraft be burned at the stake, including his nine-year-old playmate. Gabriella intentionally made her youngest child witness that, and it started an endless cycle of beloveds dying by fire: horrified, Lestat re-lives the night he made his own daughter Claudia watch as the corpse of the boyfriend she drained burned in their incinerator. Lestat’s own first love Nicki also sits there as a constant reminder of that first stake, that original sin.
Both in the trial and in real life, Gabriella’s cruelty knows no bounds and it finally clicks that his relationship with her has never been good for him. At long last he understands it was toxic from this tender age, that it went on to become deliberatively manipulative and sexually abusive.
Lestat takes back control of his fever dream, which becomes a concert he headlines, “Sofia Gabs and the Fledglings of Failures,” sidelined as the mere opening act in his reckoning. (Notice how he switches to Sofia whenever he tries to distance himself from his mother).
The crowd in the intimate venue is made up of all those Lestat has hurt, from his family to people he saw once and ate. He is now ready to face them all. The Lestat we know from season 1 did not seem like one who would remember his every kill, and yet this Lestat, the one finally narrated by himself, does, and feels remorse.
What carries Lestat through the episode, his one link to reality when he’s trapped in his guilty head, is the promise of a future with Louis. That “Could be nice,” “Could be,” from episode 6 and their fingers touching, is the moment Lestat plays again and again in his head, the only reminder that there is a world out there to return to. That beyond a past to recriminate on, there is a future to look forward to.
Lestat tells his fledglings — Louis and his mother in particular — that he loved them truly, as grotesque as that love may have appeared to them. While Gabriella professed love for Lestat and showed the opposite, we are reminded by the narrative that Lestat has never had the certainty that Louis reciprocated the feeling. So it’s poetic that Lestat's brain manages to convince Lestat that Louis did, that he does — through the guest star appearance of Paul de Pointe du Lac (Steven G. Norfleet), Louis’s late brother.
The last person Louis told “I love you” to, who committed suicide mere seconds after. Paul, who never approved of Lestat, is the keeper of Louis’s love, and the only person Lestat could believe. Lestat’s mind is catching up with his failing body, but Paul does not escort Lestat to the underworld — rather, back to Louis, back to real life. In the heaviness of that last scene, I loved how the dialogue somehow returned light with Paul’s joke, “I still wish you were a woman,” and Lestat responding, matter-of-factly, “Me too, sometimes.” A victory for all Genderstat truthers out there.
The Devil Butcher
It’s here that the series truly lives up to its gothic horror genre. All this while that Lestat has been torturing himself inside his mind, his severed head in a bowling bag carried around by Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), Armand has been physically torturing Louis in a butcher shop. Just because he can, because scheming destruction has always been his forte, “ruining for the sake of ruining,” Armand finally lays all his cards on the table. It’s so good to watch him own that part of him he had concealed for so long, hidden behind that self-flagellating stare, behind that pitiful “I could not prevent it," behind every patient moment of pretending to care for Louis when Louis couldn’t care for himself.
In a mad experiment which may as well be his new play, Armand wrote decapitation as the closing scene of the first act, not to eliminate Louis and Lestat, but simply to show he could, to have and maintain the upper hand as he gets what he wants. Armand, who has hurt and manipulated and lied to Louis for almost 80 years, demands to be owed an apology, one that Louis isn’t willing to give.
Despite his circumstances, Louis shows a will of iron. Instead of making amends as Armand demands, he infuriates his ex by speaking of his love for Lestat, how everything in their relationship revolved around him, how Louis only has apologies for Lestat, not the man currently capable of ending his existence forever.
To break Louis further, Armand reveals the last piece of the puzzle in his twisted game and brings out Regina (Delainey Hayles). Like a comic book villain unravelling his plan, Armand reveals it was him pulling the strings behind every interaction Louis had with Regina: after their break-up, Armand looked for a Claudia lookalike, trained her, and set his plan in motion. Now, he wants to make Louis watch as he kills Claudia again.
The acting in this scene is superb, from Zaman’s preternatural evil, to Hayles’s raw desperation, to Louis’s exhausted pain. In the final leg of this sequence, when Louis’s strength has left him and all he can do is think, Armand repeats his words for the audience, and they start to feel suspiciously like understanding, an admission of guilt, an apology for his shortcomings in their relationship.
Armand is brought to the brink of tears. He brands Louis, heals Regina, and leaves, letting Fareed (Gopal Divan) save Louis and, presumably, Lestat, whose head Raglan James (Justin Kirk) takes from Daniel.
The sweetest reunion... and back to business
Lestat wakes up in his coffin on his tour bus, surrounded by everyone except the person he longs to see. He runs through the bus looking for Louis, and once their eyes meet, a sense of calm pervades the scene, even with hundreds of hands trying to reach Lestat outside the bus (ah, the symbolism of his coffin decoration!). Lestat sits next to Louis, naturally slides an arm around him, as Louis gently caresses the scar on Lestat’s neck, a twin to his own.
They fall into an easy intimacy as Lestat and Louis exchange words we can’t hear, but that look suspiciously like a continuation of their conversation on the bench before they were brutally interrupted. It's the promise of a quiet life together, and their matching neck scars may as well be wedding rings.
Gabriella walks in on their private moment, and Lestat finally stands up to her, angry that she still expects him to perform a concert for 45,000 vampires and 10,000 humans that will undoubtedly end in bloodshed literally minutes after waking up post-decapitation. Lestat yells at his mother that he won’t do it, but we know he inevitably will.
His narrating voice spoils us with a “Should’ve quit right there and then,” something he said a lot in the first episodes, then stopped after 4, when he accepted letting Sofia back into his life no matter the catastrophic consequences.
We are transported to the future, as Lestat finishes recording his voiceover for “The Failures,” and when he walks to his balcony, we realize this is an after world: after the concert, after Akasha has unleashed the apocalypse, for which Lestat now takes full responsibility.
How we get there is part 2 of The Vampire Lestat, or season 4 of Interview With The Vampire, which could or could not be titled Queen of the Damned, like the Anne Rice novel it will be adapted from.
Even if the audience is left to wonder about the world-changing events that follow Lestat’s awakening, “The Failures,” by writer and executive producer Hannah Moscovich is an epic conclusion to The Vampire Lestat, the introspective journey that led the protagonist to accept himself for all his choices, for better or for worse.
For a show that was fully prepared to not be everyone’s cup of tea, The Vampire Lestat has surely exceeded expectations, maintaining a perfect top critic score of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. Let’s applaud the writers, directors, and anyone who had a hand in this show, from set designs, to costumes, to make-up and beyond. It would be remiss not to mention composer and writer Daniel Hart, who made this season more special by writing all of Lestat’s original songs in a way that encapsulated his character and the story flawlessly. I can’t wait to see what this creative team has in store for the story and the characters in the future.
One last standing ovation for the faces of this show. Sam Reid has carried the season on his back, embodying Lestat beyond perfection, fully inhabiting his contradictions and his every emotion. The Emmy is his, if AMC can get him nominated. Anderson, Zaman and Hayles also deserve honorable mentions for stealing every second of their screen time with their performances.
The season achieved all it had set out to do — investigate how Lestat’s mysterious past informed his persona and his present — and “The Failures” is the cherry on top, a final episode sui generis of a daring season that stands in a league of its own.
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