‘Interview with the Vampire’ Season Finale Recap: Die, Lestat, Die!

Could it be that at the heart of the vampire legend, there beats the simple desire to never be old and washed? By the time this episode of Interview with the Vampire, its first season finale, reaches its spectacularly bloody climax, Louis de Pointe du Lac is a man in his 60s, though he doesn’t look a day older than when he was first killed and reborn. Claudia, in her 30s, is a perpetual teenager. Lestat de Lioncourt, not a day over 21, is pushing 200. Yet they still throw the hottest Mardi Gras party in New Orleans — up to a point, of course. Is that what we’re all dreaming about when we dream of vampires? Growing older, wiser, sadder even, but never letting it show, never letting it slow us down, never growing a day closer to death?

Pardon my ramblings. I’m just a middle-aged man, watching people I know and love struggle with age, wondering what it might be like to one day sit in a palatial apartment and recounting a life lasting decade upon decade past its expiration date. And I wonder if that is what animates reporter Daniel Molloy’s combined fascination with and contempt for Louis: The ageless vampire possesses what the dying journalist cannot.

Anyway, that’s all largely ancillary to the matter at hand. This episode concerns itself almost entirely with Claudia and Louis’s plot to kill Lestat by luring him into a false sense of security before dropping the hammer. For Louis, this means allowing himself to fall back in love with his maker and abuser. For Claudia, it means painstaking planning and deft social engineering, using Lestat’s desire to get out of New Orleans before their collective cover is blown to judo-throw him into hosting a grand farewell. This being Lestat, there’s only one way such a party can end: an orgy of blood. This being Claudia, some of that blood will be poisoned, allowing her and Louis the chance to strike.

Of course it’s a bit more complicated than all that in the end. Lestat scandalizes the onlookers at least twice, first by pretending to bite into a baby on the Mardi Gras float he’s bribed his way onto, then by kissing Louis in the middle of the dance floor, sending some party-goers scurrying for the exits. But a select few — including Tom, the alderman who’s been their primary contact with square society even as he taunts them over their by-now-obvious supernatural longevity and non-heteronormative proclivities — are kept behind with the promise of the secret of immortal life. They’re the quarry, and one of them has had their drink spiked with poison by Claudia to dull the senses of Lestat, their blood’s eventual consumer.

Lestat, however, is no dummy, and he’s prepared for the occasion. He reveals that his lover Antoinette is now a vampire, and she’s been listening in on Claudia and Louis’s telepathic communications. The only problem for Lestat and Antoinette is that Claudia is no dummy either. She saw this coming and deliberately communicated misleading information to Louis, in order to trick Lestat into drinking from the real poisoned chalice: Tom the alderman, whom she knew Lestat couldn’t resist killing after the politician had insulted him weeks prior. 

So, in the midst of all the slain partygoers, Claudia impales Antoinette, and Louis slits Lestat’s throat, after which Claudia records his last words in his own blood. The pair burn Antoinette “alive,” but Louis claims he can’t bear to do the same to Lestat, and so leaves him and his coffin out for the garbagemen. 

At this point you can add Daniel Molloy to the “no dummy” column. His suspicions already piqued by his dim memories of Louis’s manservant Rashid at their previous meeting some 50 years prior, he quickly realizes, thanks to his own experiences living near a garbage dump as a starving writer decades ago, that the garbage dump is the perfect place for a wounded vampire like Lestat to stock up on rat blood and rise again. He’s disgusted with his vampire host for choosing Lestat over Claudia over and over, not because he has any love for Claudia, but because he recognizes Louis’s hypocrisy and bullshit. 

It’s when Rashid stats flying that he realizes he may have overstepped. The young-looking man is definitely a vampire, that much he already knew, but he’s also a tremendously powerful one, capable of both flight and resisting the destructive glare of the sun. His name, it turns out, is not Rashid at all — it’s Armand, the one-time director of a grand guignol Theater of Vampires in Paris. And according to Louis, he’s “the love of my life.”

If I were to lodge a criticism of this episode, it’s that it’s simply not as rich as its predecessors, concerned as it is with wrapping up the Louis/Lestat/Claudia triangle for the season by working its way through the bloody business of subduing and executing (well, almost) a master vampire. There are some subtextual points being made about the sliding continuum between vampirism and politics, I think — Tom’s hunger for whatever it is that Louis and Lestat have going on, Lestat commenting on the Nazis that “they may be nasty little beasts, but they do have excellent tailoring” only for Claudia to note that this dynamic sounds familiar to her — but a lot of the sharply observed work the show has done about race, class, sexuality, abuse, and addiction falls to the wayside here in favor of violent fireworks. Which is fine, honestly: The show had to deliver on its bloody promises at some point.

The use of Armand’s official introduction as the endpoint for the season, too, is maybe a bit shakier than you’re used to from the show. After all, the phrase “the Vampire Armand” is meaningful only to the extent that you know the source material; hell, the point I made above about him being the leader of that vampire theater troupe in France isn’t made clear by the show at all, it’s just stuff I remember from the book and the movie. 

What is interesting about it is Armand’s apparently happy position as Louis’s servant, a dom-sub switcheroo for the ages. An apparently indestructible vampire, voluntarily spending decades as a younger, less powerful guy’s dogsbody? Now that’s something, and you should pardon the pun, I can sink my teeth into.

(There’s also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in which Lestat mutters something about “Those Who Must Be Kept,” and I swear you can hear the capitalization in his voice, when they discuss potentially moving to Greece — another hint of the old-world vampires that drove him out of Europe, perhaps?)

But like I said, this is the climax, and it’s okay to get a little less nuanced and more bombastic overall. Creator Rolin Jones has constructed a remarkable show regardless, one that captures the essence of Anne Rice’s work while improving upon it, for its new era and medium, with every change it makes. I don’t know what I expected of Interview with the Vampire beyond “I hope I have a good time watching the sexy vampires,” but it delivered in every way I could have wanted, and many more I didn’t know I wanted till I got them. Interview is a beautiful and sparklingly intelligent show. It’s going to be hard to wait until next year for Season 2, but I know a vampire who could tell you a thing or two about the beauty of delayed gratification.

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.