Hello again, my friends, and welcome to Vampire School. Today’s class covers telepathy, victim selection and murder technique, race politics and queer theory, various undead dining practices, and coffins. Pencils out?
As “… After the Phantoms of Your Former Self” gets going, we are blessedly spared no more than a few moments of Molloy making smalltalk with Louis’s henchmen before the vampire returns. We’re back in 1910 and Lestat is rolling a wheelbarrow full of priest through a cemetery. Lesson one: No drinking from the dead. Lesson two: The painful dying part doesn’t last too long. Lesson three: Human beings are now, per Lestat, “Your savory inferiors.”
For baby’s first murder, Louis wants to go for the hot, drunk sailor guy (“Yum”), but Lestat says bros cause problems (wise) and redirects him to a lonely salesman who’s so boring Louis starts nodding off at the bar. The evening goes okay. They manage to lure the salesman to the house to “talk about farm equipment” — LOL — and then Louis clobbers him while Lestat sits on the stairs with an iPhone going, “You’re doing amazing, sweetie.”
While Louis is learning how to be a vampire in 1910, in the present day, Molloy is learning the particulars of Louis’s current lifestyle which is morally … murky. Molloy’s functionality as audience stand-in also extends to getting the series ahead of any think pieces or potential social-media dragging, so he peppers Louis with self-referential observations about identity and questionable thematic subtext. So, before you start wondering if it’s at all problematic for Louis to conflate coming out of the closet with becoming a vampire, or for the Black vampire character to take a subservient position to the white vampire character — Molloy has already asked and answered these questions, okay? Okay.
Furthermore, Louis no longer kills people. How does he eat, then? So glad you asked. First, a server (Servant? Worshipper? Unclear) decants a blood bag of “AB negative straight from the farm,” into a glass. The next course is a live rabbit Louis kills with a chomp to the neck right there at the table, its little animatronic neck slowly nodding back and forth as it bleeds all over the plastic-wrapped tabletop. For dessert, Louis is delivered a whole adult man who chats pleasantly with Molloy while Louis sucks on his neck — raising a lot of questions about consent and abuse that we simply don’t have time to address amidst all the other problematic stuff.
Back in Vampire 101, Louis learns the hard way that he cannot go out in the sun and that milk is not an effective burn treatment. He is troubled to next discover that Lestat sleeps in a coffin in a hidden room accessed by pressing a button on the bed frame. For now, Louis can sleep in Lestat’s until they get him a coffin of his own. “It’s okay. You can be on top,” Lestat says, because this is a perfect show. Even better is that when they do get Louis his own coffin, it goes in the coffin room right next to Lestat’s, and sometimes they have little marital arguments from within their separate closed boxes. Sometimes Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire is a soap opera and sometimes it is a screwball odd-couple comedy.
When instructing him on mind-reading, Lestat tells Louis that humans are only ever thinking one of three things: I want to eat, I want sex, or I want to go home. But while Lestat is a murder “artist,” he was wrong to think murder would come naturally to Louis. As it stands, for Louis, there are good murders and there are bad murders. A good murder, I think we can all agree, is when Louis kills the white dude in a straw boater who calls him “an exceptional negro.” Louis had decades of pent-up rage but only now did he also have power, he explains, and so, “it was random and unfortunate that the man picked that night to dabble in fuckery.” No, really. That was the line. Lestat chides Louis for his indiscretion and asks what the man did to insult him and Louis says, “He told me I did a good job.” Understandable!
A skillful but ethically very bad murder, on the other hand, is Lestat finding an opera singer’s bad performance so offensive that he picks him up after the show, makes him feel like garbage about his entire life, then slowly sucks him dry over the course of several hours. “Do they pull in talent from roadside gas stations!” rages Lestat, who can pull cultural references from 100 years in the future. He’s also feeling a little judged by Louis right now. Savory inferiors, Louis. Savory inferiors.
Speaking of which, eating your sister’s baby would be a very bad murder. Against Lestat’s advice, Louis is still trying to stay close with his family. Grace has just had her third kid and wants Louis to hold him, which he does in the deeply terrified way all childless uncles hold their infant nephews, as if trying to cradle them while also touching them as little as possible. Grace would probably feel differently if she realized that unlike most uncles, Louis kind of wants to suck his nephew’s blood. He doesn’t — but he did leave us hanging for a while. (“Did you eat the baby,” Molloy asks a third time. “Did you eat the baby!?!?!?!” I shriek at my screen.) Because, as Louis would very much like to stress, he still has a moral compass even though he’s a vampire. His new business, for instance, is a club with doors open to anyone with money to burn. Not only that — he pays his employees better than anyone else and pays it forward by hiring his old pals in the poor neighborhood. He’s a progressive vampire.
But Lestat is not a progressive vampire. He wants Louis to stop reaching out to his family. Stop caring about the poor people he used to employ. He wants it to be just the two of them against the world, forever. Lestat wants to mate for life, like ducks. Loneliness is the only thing he fears and Louis is the only one who takes it away. “We must stay together and never part,” he says.
I can’t see that ending well.
