Critic’s Rating: 4.6 / 5.0
4.6
It’s always going to be Louis and Lestat.
The crux of this story, the one being told to us through this medium, has consistently returned to the same central theme.
You strip it all down, lay it bare, and there are two things at the center: Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lioncourt.
(Sophie Giraud/AMC)
The Vampire Lestat Season 1 Episode 6 is the kind of hour that leaves you reeling, both from shock and awe and from the overwhelming sadness left in its wake.
The sadness that comes when you’re hollowed out by harrowing performances and the devastation vulnerability leaves behind.
When the credits began to roll, my only thoughts were, “Thank God this isn’t the end.”
One of the criticisms of this season, depending on where you look, has centered around the separation of Louis and Lestat, the stars of the show who’ve had separate, albeit at times overlapping, stories that have kept them mostly apart.
They always carry the other with them, something that’s been abundantly clear, but they haven’t been physically together for much of the season, which has been frustrating for some because of their importance to the series.
(Sophie Giraud/AMC)
They each had their own journeys to conquer, but despite time and distance, they were drawn back to one another when both were mired in emotional instability.
After The Vampire Lestat Season 1 Episode 5, we’re hit with yet another off-screen time jump and, again, told everything we’ve missed via voiceover, which remains a crutch I wish the show didn’t lean on so heavily.
Not only have we missed the weeks of Louis and Lestat reconnecting, but we’ve also missed the fallout from the band’s turning.
We’re meant to digest all this critical information in a couple of sentences thrown in at the beginning of the hour, which also name-drops Pitchfork and Drake.
Understanding why these information dumps are necessary still doesn’t make me like them.
The banter and the ease with which Louis and Lestat coexist in the beginning of the hour is grounded and domestic in a way we haven’t seen from these two in ages.
(Sophie Giraud/AMC)
There’s an innate comfort between them that shines through whenever the two aren’t pushing and pulling at one another but instead are open and drowning in each other’s openness.
As the two walk from Lestat’s home to Louis’s restaurant, a respectable and convenient three-block walk, it’s reminiscent of the early hours of Interview with the Vampire Season 1, when the two saunter around New Orleans, learning one another.
By the time they reach the restaurant and encounter a tanned Daniel, there is almost a sense of calm enveloping them that you just know will break at any second.
Daniel’s disdain for the two of them is palpable, and even though Daniel typically walks around with an air of entitlement and annoyance, it’s strong when he sits across from them.
Needling them about their New Orleans reunion feels disingenuous and more like an attempt to get in their heads, which the pair later confirms. And that’s Daniel Malloy in a nutshell.
His confession that he is seeing someone, coupled with his tan, screamed Armand, but it went over Louis and Lestat’s heads, or they were too deep in their love bubble and anxiety about midnight to give anything Daniel said much thought.
(Sophie Giraud/AMC)
The hour takes great pains to have Louis and Lestat talk, especially about things from their shared past, which was much appreciated, even if some of the confessions were of the head-scratching variety.
Antoinette is an oft-discussed character in discussions of the Loustat relationship. If Nicki was the first love, and Louis is the great love, then where does Antoinette fall on the list?
It’s telling that even with everything they’ve been through since Antoinette was alive, Louis still wants to know why Lestat kept her around back then. It’s something that affected him and probably still does to an extent, and that’s what Lestat wanted back then.
His admission that he wanted to provoke — and then punish — Louis, without much understanding of why, doesn’t read as deflection or an attempt to avoid accountability. Instead, it reflects how little Lestat understood his own motivations.
At that point in their lives, Louis was depressed over Claudia, while Lestat sought validation elsewhere in an attempt to make Louis feel the depth of his own pain.
It was cruel, but also clearly stemmed from Lestat’s profound abandonment issues. Not that that makes it any better.
(Sophie Giraud/AMC)
But let’s not act as if Antoinette were some poor, innocent victim in the tangled web that is these two troubled vampires.
She was awful about Louis and Claudia, and “Justice for Antoinette” will never be a change.org petition you’d see my signature on.
Side note: Lestat’s first saying that everything he did was because he had Akasha‘s blood in him was played for laughs, but it’s yet again reinforcing the idea that the blood is almost in control of Lestat’s actions at times.
Or it’s something Lestat feels is true when he’s pushed to such monstrous levels that he hurts the people he knows he loves.
It’s such an interesting piece of Lestat’s history that we’re seeing pieces of, and it’s one of the most exciting things to anticipate if the series continues forward (it will!).
The evolution of the hour means the whole narrative is condensed into this singular evening, which is masterful because the tension ebbs and flows, yet there’s a steady build toward something ever greater.
(Sophie Giraud/AMC)
The Vampire Lestat soundcheck for the biggest vampire concert, which will ultimately change humanity forever, features a chill first meeting between Gabriella and Louis.
Poor Louis has no idea who he’s actually meeting, while Gabriella’s very much aware of Louis, which sets them on an uneven playing field.
Gabriella’s constantly analyzing everything around her, and she does that with Louis, making it clear she knows who he is and then also offering to protect him. But there’s a noticeable shift when Lestat starts singing Brutal Love.
When he begins, he’s explicitly asking for both Gabriella and Louis to judge the song and whether it should be included in the big concert, and he’s singing to both of them, it would appear.
But that’s not really true now, is it?
(Sophie Giraud/AMC)
Lestat’s eyes are on Louis as the words, the confessions, come tumbling out of his baritone register. It’s one of the more gripping moments in an episode full of them, and romantic in the twisted way a show about vampires can be.
When Gabriella, deeply affected by those lyrics and everything that Lestat represents on stage, looks over at Louis, she realizes that Louis is the one.
Louis is the great everything. He’s the one Lestat would burn it all down for. He’s the one who actually has the power over Lestat.
Gabriella must have felt her hold on Lestat slipping, hence her leaving her garments at his house, and she can feel it even more so when he’s so cavalier about her reminding him of their post-show plans to get the hell out of dodge.
Imagine my surprise when the high of Brutal Love is followed up by Daniel and Armand releasing a video of Lestat and Gabriella having sex out to the world in one of the most despicable acts we’ve seen on a show that revolves around murder.
(Sophie Giraud/AMC)
Please give Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson all the awards they’ve been rightfully denied the past few years because they’re flawless in the fallout scenes of Louis finding out about Lestat and Gabriella.
You can practically see Lestat’s mind racing as he grows increasingly feverish upon realizing what that video represents.
And Louis is there, indignant and self-righteous, immediately condemning him when Lestat doesn’t give him the answers he’s looking for.
I don’t think I’ve ever thought about what a full-blown vampire panic attack would look like, but Lestat’s fully there, and when he throws up, it’s like his body is completely rejecting the amount of downright anxiety and fear pulsating through him.
One thing this show has always excelled at is not trying to make it seem like any of these people are even close to being perfect or without fault.
The way Louis attacks Lestat is all about honing in on the idea that Lestat lied to him and that he’s committed an unforgivable act so despicable that Louis has to walk away from him on the streets of Montreal.
(Sophie Giraud/AMC)
Equating Lestat to Armand and claiming he has a sickness is Louis speaking from his mountain of superiority.
Lestat quickly recognizes it for what it is: an opportunity for Louis to reclaim the pieces of humanity he has long reckoned with by casting Lestat as the monster.
When Lestat fought back, I silently cheered because he had every reason to feel let down in that moment by the one person in the whole universe he’d want to give him space to explain, rather than bringing him down.
Louis fights his own demons, and he has his own complexities that to anyone else would read as a different kind of sickness, but when he needed Lestat to hear him, what did Lestat do?
He heard him. And he continued to hear him for weeks.
He didn’t leave him on the streets of Montreal with blood spewing from his mouth while he yelled at the love of his life to just take a minute and be there when he needed him.
(Sophie Giraud/AMC)
There’s this devastating moment when Lestat is yelling and detailing all the ways he’s helped Louis, when Louis just drops his head in total and utter defeat. He’s wrong, and sometimes it’s that simple.
It’s reminiscent of a parent scolding you, and you’re trying to stand on your soapbox of stubbornness until you realize they were right all along.
There’s real beauty in the way this fight opens them up to even more conversations and reflections, and it takes this decades-long relationship, filled with more pain than joy, to begin to ascend to new heights as they come to understand each other better.
Their conversation at the bar is as much a reset for the night as for the two of them.
It’s another chance for them to connect, but I almost wish it had been longer because it feels like we’re only getting a taste of a much larger and much-needed conversation.
There’s, of course, no time, though, because there’s a witch waiting to resurrect their dead daughter so they can disappoint her one last time.
(Sophie Giraud/AMC)
I believe that to fully understand the scope of Claudia’s words when she’s pulled from her afterlife existence at Louis and Lestat’s request, you have to rewatch much of the first season and Interview with the Vampire Season 2.
Through that, you have to remember what the dynamics were like among Louis and Claudia, Lestat and Claudia, and then the three of them.
Louis often romanticized his relationship with Claudia, not necessarily hiding the bad parts, but never fully grasping the depth of her pain because of his own selfishness.
Lestat gave her the gift, but they never chose Claudia. It was always the two of them, and when Lestat was left behind, it then became Louis and Armand.
Never was Claudia his main priority, and Louis harbors a mountain’s worth of guilt, yet still manages to fundamentally misunderstand Claudia at every turn.
Alongside Sam and Jacob, Delainey Hayles deserves her flowers, her awards, and anything she wants for the pure terror and agony she inflicted as ghost Claudia.
Ghost Claudia, who came with the rage of someone who was YET AGAIN being used as a means to assuage the guilt of the family who never chose her.
(Sophie Giraud/AMC)
I won’t pretend I don’t have issues with some of the dialogue, particularly its reliance on racially charged sentiments that feel unnecessary when there were countless other ways to convey her disappointment, resentment, and anger toward Louis.
Claudia’s been pulled into something again because the two of them need to have their moment, not because it’s in her best interest or because they feel she needs it.
Even with some of my issues with the dialogue, Claudia does speak a lot of truths, especially when Louis has the audacity to interject and act as if he deserves a cookie with a bloody filling because he took her personal thoughts and then read them to her abuser before killing him.
She sees that act for what it was: more about Louis than Claudia.
You could feel Claudia’s rage in every word she spoke, and the scene is played in a way that commands both your attention and your sensibilities.
It’s a hard watch, not because something is too graphic, but because it’s too raw.
(Sophie Giraud/AMC)
When Claudia repeatedly exclaims that she hated Louis, that was decades and decades of heartbreak pouring out of someone who was sick and tired of being sick and tired.
But there was a love between Louis and Claudia, too, right? Or were those moments from Louis’s eyes part of the romanticism?
When she turned her ire to Lestat, I’ll admit it took me a little by surprise to be then hit with Claudia laying out her puppet-master persona, because it further called into question so much of what I believed to be true about Claudia.
Or as true as anything is in a story with a series of unreliable narrators.
But am I now to believe that her journals were all just ways to manipulate Louis? Do I have to reframe every thought I’ve had about Claudia now?
(Sophie Giraud/AMC)
I’m still processing what I watched and what I’m now meant to take as the paradigm of truth. Then again, that’s probably the wrong question to ask.
Even when this series ends, I suspect I’ll still be wrestling with these same uncertainties.
Anyway, the idea that Claudia liked Lestat more than Louis is a bit of a tough pill to swallow, if only because it’s another moment that’s just flipping my perspective.
It’s not because I think it’s impossible, but because it’s another revelation that reorients the way I see Claudia. And at this point, every new perspective feels less like an answer and more like another invitation to question everything that’s come before these moments.
It does feel like this season is hell-bent on forcing us to view Lestat in a more sympathetic light, which is certainly a creative choice. The challenge is whether the show is simply asking us to understand Lestat more deeply or beginning to soften the harm he’s caused.
To then jump from a verbal evisceration to the two of them strolling leisurely and giving the night a cursory talk-over is abrupt and doesn’t feel like anything that comes anywhere close to closure.
(Sophie Giraud/AMC)
But it is the romantic climax of the hour, and the part of the hour that stands out as being perhaps one of the most tender moments Louis and Lestat have ever shared.
Louis and Lestat have perfected the art of dancing around things, but everything that happened within the course of a few hours opened Louis up, especially to let his guard down in this beautiful way.
The Head Entrepreneur himself offering up the idea of just retreating into a simple life with the two of them in the middle of nowhere, and wanting Lestat to live out his birder dreams, is like something out of the sappiest romantic movie your mind can conjure up.
The look on Lestat’s face is one of awe, and it’s so clear that all he’s ever wanted from Louis is for him to love and stay with him.
If only it could all be so simple.
(Sophie Giraud/AMC)
There’s not much to say about the beheading because we know that Louis and Lestat aren’t dead, but what exactly is the end goal here for Daniel and Armand?
Were they both decapitated, so that Lestat couldn’t perform at that concert? Will they resurrect Lestat and then get him to do their bidding while they essentially put Louis’s head on ice?
It’s a shocking way to end such a powerful hour, but it sets the stage for what should be an incredible ending to this chapter of the savage vampire tale.
Lestat Liner Notes
- Clarence Oddbody and Sheridan Blackwood may be the two worst fake names I have ever heard. Lestat can not be serious.
- Claudia screaming for Madeleine is so chilling. The one good thing she ever had in her life, and she can never find her; instead, she gets those two hoping she’s found a bit of peace. Deep sigh.
(Sophie Giraud/AMC)
- Louis would be a fan of Degrassi. Let me find out he was a loyal viewer of The N network in the early 2000s!
- Lestat is so 2025. His immediately likening the video to an AI deepfake was not funny given the circumstances, but it perfectly underscored how thoroughly he’s become ensconced in the modern world.
- Louis tracking down a relative of Lestat for them to feed off of at the restaurant. And you want to ever question his love for Lestat.
- Alex is definitely a dead man, perhaps before anyone else. Though I’m putting money on Daniel also biting the bullet in the finale.
- There were so many tiny moments in this one to obsess over if you’re a real Loustat truther, including the moment where Lestat put blood in Louis’s beer, and you could see that flashing second of ecstasy on his face.
- The little pinky touches between them while they’re on the bench? Lestat would be liking all the edits of that moment on TikTok with ‘Iris’ playing and ‘I’d give up forever to touch you’ overlaid.
(Sophie Giraud/AMC)
If you made it this far, good on you because there’s just so much to discuss when an episode is this rich.
Everything about this one is rooted in the truth of two vampires who have spent countless years hurting one another while still reaching for each other at every turn.
As always, I invite you to share your thoughts in the comments below so we can discuss.
There is only one more hour to go!
You can watch The Vampire Lestat on Sundays at 9/8c on AMC and AMC+.
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