The Vampire Lestat Season-Finale Recap: Could Be

The engagements are booked through the end of the world, so here we are at the end of the tour. The episode begins seconds before Armand gives Lestat the bluntest bob ever (a.k.a. a full decapitation), this time from Lestat’s POV as he slides off his own neck and the world turns sideways. His eyes blink shut and he dreams of following a “murder of waiters” into the woods, continuing the motif of Lestat as fairy-tale damsel while hinting at the opening canto of mommy’s favorite book, Dante’s Inferno . Lestat’s standing at the precipice of the sweet hereafter, and this episode is his death dream. In a clearing in the forest, his younger selves sit at a long table with the abbott, who is wearing the final boss of season three’s awful wigs. Lestat greets them Malkovich style, and the table shifts. Now, he’s sitting opposite Magnus in his tower. Taking the seats in between are his fledglings: Gabriella, Louis, and Nicky on one side, TC and Antoinette on the other. At his right hand is an empty seat for Claudia. The waiters serve course after course of “the Soul,” presented as fancy, Hannibal -esque food, and everyone chows down, loud. It makes me appreciate the fact that these characters usually don’t eat at all; I’d take their goriest, bloodiest kills over misophonia any day. TC sets a timer on her phone. Gabriella tells him he’s dying, not yet dead, and Magnus says this bad-vibes banquet is a deliberation on his life and its failures.

Then we’re yanked into Louis’s hazy POV, from which Armand is reading another one of his apology letters. I do wish he had kept his English accent from past seasons, as it would have made lines like “I took aesthetic pleasure in making your death visually exhilarating” sound both more delicious and comprehensible. He apologizes for taking credit for saving Louis’s life at the Theatre des Vampires when it was Lestat all along because “that lie bound you to me like a corpse in the boiler room of our companionship,” but the irony of his speaking to an actual (albeit living, disassembled) corpse is lost on him. They’re in the back of a kosher butcher shop, closed for Shabbos (props to Armand for saying it like he’s mishpocha by the way) because in Cote-des-Neiges on a samedi , no one can hear you scream. Not that Louis has the strength to scream. His head is bleeding into a pan, and his body is seated at a butcher block. Lying on a table behind them is Lestat’s headless body. The whole scene looks like Carmy went full Dexter on the back of house crew. Having said his piece, Armand puts a pen and paper in Louis’s headless hand. Now, it’s his turn to apologize. You gotta imagine there’s an easier way to get an earnest apology from your ex than by decapitating him; it won’t make the guy feel more magnanimous toward you. Laboriously firing neurons from his brain to his hand, Louis scrawls his two cents: “FUCK YOU.”

Lestat’s head, meanwhile, is in a bowling bag carried by the Gremlin’s Gremlin, Daniel “ya boy” Molloy, who is once again ranting to himself in a bowling alley. He sticks his head into the bag while griping about his “day-walking yaoi-manther phase,” yet another online-brain-rot script flourish that costs this episode at least a half a star from me, even though it’s a cool, trippy effect to see his big red mug intruding into Lestat’s mind palace and a creative way of showing how Lestat is hovering between this world and the astral plane. Then my personal mentor and hero Raglan James ambushes Daniel to seize the nuclear football that is Lestat’s head; it turns out the Talamasca was behind the concert idea as a massive herd-culling effort on the growing vampire population, which has reached a tipping point. All Daniel can do is bare his fangs, impotently.

Daniel isn’t this devil’s only minion; Armand’s got an Illumination movie’s worth of cronies doing his bidding. Fareed is there running neural scans on Louis’s head. He’s got Regina tied to a chair and is threatening to make her slit her wrists; he reveals that he searched the world for a Claudia look-alike with which to torment Louis and put her in his path 19 times before he noticed. This is meant to be a shocking twist, one of the revelations that “the whole season has been building up to,” a masterstroke from puppetmaster Armand announced in a Bond-villain speech. But that story line made so little sense to me from the beginning that this reveal doesn’t land with the intended emotional impact, despite Delainey acting to the nines (the tens, even). Armand then threatens to cut Regina’s head off and sew Louis’s onto her body: real sick-freak shit. Louis is close to death and can’t write or talk, so he uses the mind gift to deliver a beautiful, genuine apology for not loving Armand the way he needed, and for what was done to him as Arun at age 12, explaining that of course he has reason to be dark-sided. Armand speaks the apology aloud for the record until he can’t bear the painful feelings it brings up. He frees Regina, tells Fareed to reassemble Louis, and disappears.

Back in Lestat’s (disembodied) head, he gets all his unresolved feelings out while he still has time. He confronts Magnus about how he gave Lestat the dark gift against his will, then burned himself alive in front of Lestat, leaving him on his own. (It bears repeating how much I would have liked to see this story line actually play out in an episode, rather than in a “music video” and tiny flashbacks.) “Consent is a 20th-century concern,” says Magnus. Lestat asks Gabriella why she took him to see the girls burned at the stake at such a young age. She wanted to traumatize him into escaping Auvergne; instead, it paralyzed him, made his whole life stutter and skip, and trapped him in the closed loop of a mother sleeping with her son, a symbolic undoing of the creation of life. Lestat sees all of this flashing before him, is reminded that he inflicted the same trauma of watching a burning on Claudia, and lets out the same moan as Nicky. This segment is excellent for how it doesn’t just spell this all out, but then the peanut gallery doubles down on taking my job, recapping the season and saying what we already know: “When she told him she wanted more darkness, he looked at her with the eyes of a juvenile … a great abandonment.” We just watched that happen a few weeks ago , but roll the clips anyway, I guess. The countdown clock is ticking, and both Lestat the vampire and Lestat the TV season are frittering away their last moments on restating the facts.

The timer sounds an alarm, but Lestat isn’t done with life yet. He hits snooze, buys himself nine more minutes, and seizes control of this infernal Dinner for Schmucks, hopping on the table and turning it into his catwalk, a purgatorial good-bye concert for thousands of his fangirling victims. He’s stalling, vamping, reckoning with the failures. “In the end, I think I was pretty fucking great. But if I failed, then that means I actually attempted something.” You tell ’em, Brat Prince! This whole sequence borrows generously from All That Jazz, a perfect choice for this character, and it do take nerve to put yourself in conversation with one of the greatest movies of all time. He’s losing breath and about to die when Paul de Point du Lac sits with him at the edge of the stage and says, “Thank you for loving him, for loving him the way he needs to be loved.” Paul’s the angel who will usher Lestat into the afterlife, a bright white light appears above them, which of course symbolizes death to heliophobic vamps even more than it does to humans, but God, who is a woman (Paul calls her “ma’am”), says it’s not Lestat’s time, and next thing he knows, he’s back on his tour bus with 50,000 fans screaming outside and a scar for a necklace. Alive. “The shoe leather of how I got there was explained to me by a man I did not recognize but who I now call a friend,” Lestat says, referring to Raglan James, making my heart soar. Everyone is there, pressuring him to go onstage; it’s all very Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz, which fits Lestat’s sad, Judy Garland, ass life as a performer. Lestat does not want to do the show, and he stands up to his horrible stage mom, yelling, “I am not fucking singing, you fucking monster!” He runs to Louis, back in one piece and sporting a matching scar plus a new one Armand carved into his chest. God or Raglan or whoever has given them another chance at making it work, but we know that Lestat goes on with the show. We cut to his living room in the future, as he records “The Failures.” The world outside is postapocalyptic, and it’s all his fault.

Anne Rice often spoke of Lestat as if he were a part of her self, as well as an independent force outside of her, and I wonder if Lestat as an entity has had a similar effect on Rolin Jones, on Hannah Moscovitch, on Sam Reid, as an animating animus coming from within, and also an external, eternal creation who’s bigger than any story trying to rein him in, a modern commedia dell’arte archetype. How much of this season’s doomed focus on creative failure is Lestat’s, how much is Jones’s, and how much did that affect the its trajectory as a work of adaptation and entertainment, frequently running headfirst into mess for mess’s sake? I had some huge issues with this season, so much time spent on songs, and yelling, and Gabriella, but, to quote Lestat, at least it actually attempted something. Encore!

• Thank you for reading and commenting all season! Akasha in four !

• The repetition of “Could be” as a hopeful romantic thought moments before tragedy reminds me of West Side Story. Yet another week of sneaky Sondheim.

• “You may own the night, Louis, but you’re as kosher as clams casino.” Astonishing to watch Armand invent noir femme fatale aphorisms in real time.

• “The plays ran for a century and a half.” “That’s longer than Wicked. ” Oh TC, I’ve grown quite fond of you.

• The most evil thing Armand does all episode is call Regina a Berlin seven.

• “She give you the autism gift?” was my heartiest laugh of the whole season.

• “Does that ever happen to you? You think of the perfect thing to say to the Pope right after you leave the Vatican?” Yeah bitch, it’s called esprit de l’escalier , and it’s a fundamental French concept that you should be well aware of, Monsieur de Lioncourt.

• The most heartbreaking moment, for me, was how in his final seconds, Lestat is fixated on Enzo and hopes the Christmas present he was carrying got to whom it was meant for. The tiniest of details, the love of beauty and connection in the human world. I love Lestat for that.

• Between 2022 and 2025, the vamp pop exploded from 1,600 to 290,000. That’s reverse-black-rhino numbers.