‘Interview with the Vampire’ Episode 6 Recap: Family Reunion

The only problem with Interview with the Vampire is that at a certain point you simply run out of superlatives. Like its contemporaries Andor and House of the Dragon, IWTV provides proof week in and week out that genre television rooted in nerd-beloved source material can be as smart, incisive, surprising, and rich as any of its more traditional prestige-TV counterparts. 

This week’s episode, chronicling the vampire Lestat’s years-long attempt to weasel his way back into the lives of his creations Louis and Claudia then take those lives over once again when he is welcomed home, is no exception. Time and again I found myself openly marveling at its wit, its warmth, its cruelty, its righteous anger, and its willingness to remind you every now and then that hey, this is still a show about horny undead killing machines. Titled “Like Angels Put in Hell by God” (god I love these episode names!), written by Coline Abert and directed by Levan Akin, it is simply a pleasure to watch from start to finish. 

The hour begins in the aftermath of Lestat dropping Louis from the sky to the ground below, and it’s amazing how weirdly disconcerting the sight of a beaten-up vampire can be. His wounds range from blindness in one eye that takes two months to recover from to horrible broken legs that don’t fully heal for years, if his continued use of a walking cane is any indication.

And for several of those years, Lestat keeps trying to buy his way back into Louis and Claudia’s lives. (Well, Louis’s, anyway; Claudia is just a means to an end for Lestat, as we will soon see.) But the rare books and Rolls-Royces aren’t what motivate Louis to return to his old lover: It’s a love song, written by Lestat for Louis…but recorded by Lestat’s human girlfriend Antoinette (Maura Grace Athari), just to piss Louis off. The resultant anger flares into passion and, well, you can guess the rest.

Upon Lestat’s return to the family home (which before long is being warded by magic spells and charms left by concerned citizens, much to the occupants’ irritation) he’s given a list of rules he must follow. One is  to kill Antoinette. Another is to be honest, which includes both not lying by omission — it would have been nice to know he could fly, for example — and by simply telling the truth when asked questions. So Lestat divulges the secret of his making, by a mad vampire named Magnus who preyed on Lestat lookalikes like a serial killer until, after turning Lestat instead of killing him, he tossed himself into a fire to die. (Claudia eventually comes to doubt this story. Everything keeps coming back to the increasingly perceptive Claudia.)

The bitch of it is that Lestat is actually fairly insightful when it comes to his family. He can sense that Claudia, like he himself, feels looked down upon by Louis for insisting on killing human victims instead of animals, a point even Claudia appreciates him making. He also points out something you get the impression Louis would just as soon overlook: that Claudia’s unspoken traumatic experience during her brief time away from the family left her permanently changed for the darker.

But Lestat is a bully by nature, and soon Claudia is calling him “massa” in her telepathic communications with Louis. (Which, amazingly and intimately, continue even while Louis is having sex with Lestat.) Claudia also susses out that Lestat hasn’t killed Antoinette at all, though it’s Louis who realizes Lestat wanted to be caught in this lie — a satisfaction Louis won’t give him — in order to prove that he won’t do what he’s told. He’s a “brat,” Louis says, accurately.

Eventually Claudia reaches her limit. After a tearful goodbye to Louis, who reassures her that she’s much stronger and smarter than she was when…whatever happened to her happened to her, she heads out for New York and thence to Eastern Europe, as she’d long hoped to do.

Unfortunately, Lestat has other plans, as Louis discovers when he returns home only to find them both sitting in the living room. Aware of Claudia’s escape, Lestat attacks the train she’s riding, kills the conductor, uses his severed head as a puppet, and tells Claudia that if she ever tries to leave Louis again — he needs her, Lestat says, and thus Lestat needs her too — he’ll set her to burn. It’s a tremendous sequence, animated by splatstick horror comedy, genuine pathos, biting irony (Lestat tells a dog in the cargo hold “Back in your cage, sweetheart,” and might as well be saying it to Claudia as well), and the backdrop of the outbreak of World War II playing over the radio.

But Claudia is not to be trifled with anymore. While she humiliates Lestat in chess after years spent apparently letting him win, she communicates to Louis her plan to kill him, and her certainty that Louis not only wants to kill him too, but that he’d actually enjoy doing so. They’re his slaves, she insists, with all the pointed racial implications this entails, and they will be slaves no more.

There’s an interesting postscript to all this that takes place after Molloy, doped by the medical treatment he’s receiving courtesy of Louis’s high-priced and discreet doctor, passes out for the evening. He dreams of the night he and Louis first met back in 1970s San Francisco, with T. Rex blaring over the jukebox in a dive bar. The two men immediately take a shine to each other, attracted by one another’s outsider status, as well as the heavy implication that they’ll probably get high and fuck after young Molloy gets through with interviewing him.

Then Molloy wakes up bolt upright after remembering that Rashid, Louis’s loyal “rent boy,” was there in the 1970s as well, looking exactly the same as he does now. A vampire, hiding in plain sight. What was that Louis and Claudia insisted about lying by omission?

I only realized in writing out this plot summary just how enthralled I am by this show’s storytelling rhythms. The push and pull of Louis, Lestat, and Claudia’s dynamic through the years is rendered dreamy, even surreal, by all the markers of the passage of time — cars, clothing styles, radio, the blitzkrieg — that pass as they do their little folie à trois. With this ethereal backbeat keeping time, the show is free to explore any number of legitimate human concerns: healing from trauma, reentering (Louis) or recreating (Lestat) the cycle of abuse, racial segregation, marital infidelity, dissociation during sex, you name it. 

And throughout, the humor is just so sharp and so funny. When we first see Lestat show up at the door begging forgiveness with a gift, Louis responds by, unseen, tossing Lestat’s coffin into the street to shatter on the pavement. Poor Antoinette allowed Lestat to chop off her finger as “proof” of her death, just like the nihilist’s girlfriend did with her toe in The Big Lebowski. The bit with the train conductor’s head, as actor Sam Reid does Lestat doing a working-class American accent while making the severed noggin’s jaws talk, is just exceptional horror comedy. The bit where Louis explains to Lestat that when it comes to their respective diets, “I eat what I eat, she eats what she eats, we respect our differences” sounds like any normal household where one person’s a vegetarian and one person’s an omnivore. When Lestat says that these days the sheep rule the dogs, Claudia responds a minute or two later by loudly “BAAAA”ing at him when he pisses her off. 

It’s just top-flight stuff, top to bottom. What a marvelous gift this show has been. I can’t wait to unwrap the next episode.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.