The Review: The Vampire Lestat

The Vampire Lestat 10/10

It's hard to try and describe this show. The fact that a lot of it bounces through time makes it hard to try and talk about this in a linear fashion so I'm not gonna even try. So far this show has managed to do three incredible seasons. That is close to being unheard of in this day and age. I was worried that there would be little interaction between Louis or Daniel or Armand this season because I've read these books and I need to realize that they have done something so different with this series that it is gotten to a point that I and a lot of other people need to let those books go. I see so many arguments and anger about certain things that are changed when people either don't realize or seem to forget that Interview With The Vampire, Lestat, and Queen of the Damned are pretty much the only good books in that series that contains so many books. No, I do need to point out that the Mayfair Witches or the Witching Hour is a very good book but they have managed to make a horrible series out of it.

So this starts off with an auction where they're selling off Lestat's stuff. We see Louis walk in and he has a whole foot missing and then after him Armand walks in with an eye patch on. All I know from reading the books is that at the concert all hell broke loose and there was a lot of crazy stuff and even though this series does not get to that I am still okay with it. So at this auction there's two sides there's all these personal effects and items of Lestat's and stuff that people want and before it's bid on they set it on fire and one lady buys it. So the next thing that's up for auction is a bottle of Lestat's blood and a bottle of wine and a series of albums known as The Failures in which Lestat explains everything that has happened since some cataclysmic event.

So Lestat is on tour with his band and he's having it documented by Daniel. We flash back to Lestat talking to Louis and they're having a nice little conversation on the phone and suddenly Lestat gets an alert and he asks Louis if he knows who Daniel is. Louis says yeah I do but I burned the laptop so I didn't know he was saving it in the cloud. Lestat goes and buys the book Interview with the Vampire and he is very upset with Louis. Letstat is on stage and performing and he ends up, you know, he's like kind of hiding the fact that he's a vampire but not doing a very good job of it. He brings this girl on stage and drinks a little bit too much of her blood and she was full of drugs so now he's tripping out and they save and give her transfusion so now she's a vampire.

Lestat ends up getting into a fight with these people known as the Fang Gang and Daniel and Sam (who worked with Armand at the theater of vampires) shows up and they start fighting and next thing you know Lestat burst into this room and kills one of the vampires in front of everybody. By the way his band had absolutely no idea that he was a real vampire. Lestat looks around jumps out of a window and flies off into the air. This was all in just the first episode.

I am not sure how I want to cover the rest of the season. We go through the story of Lestat's childhood where he was stuttering as a child and living at home with his abusive father and brothers and his mother who's abusive in different ways. One day he goes to fight off some wolves that have been terrorizing his village because his father who runs a place does not care to do anything about it. Lestat ends up killing I believe it was eight wolves all by himself and is very much wounded. His mother takes this as opportunity to tend to his wounds and say a lot of inappropriate things to someone that is her son. I need to also mention that at the time she was also dying. Lestat soon after ends up becoming a vampire and we see through a music montage that Magnus had kidnapped him assaulted him and turned him into a vampire and was pretty much just like “Hey here's a bunch of money make sure you spread the ashes of my body as stay out of the sun byyyyye!”

Meanwhile Louis is going through a whole another set of drama. Louis sees this girl named Regina who works at a diner that looks exactly like Claudia. This is a great way to get that actress back into the show and I thoroughly enjoyed it. So he lets her know that he's a vampire by exposing her to the book that came out and that he knows that she needs money she's been arrested before and all this other stuff and then at first she's like no and then she finds out how rich he is and now he has her cosplaying as Claudia. Daniel is trying to come to terms with being a vampire saying that he's very okay with it and it's not a problem at all. He keeps having this weird thing where everybody seems to vanish around him and Armand lets him know that hey by the way I've been protecting you for the last five decades or so and that I'm in love with you.

This show is a lot and it's really hard to talk about and even with spoiling it's hard to talk in order because its covering a few hundred years of history and the first four or five episodes of the show Lestat talks at such a insane rapid fire way that you have to watch this show at least twice to catch everything that's going on. So I'm going to skip forward a whole lot because we get to a point where Lestat hires one of the Mayfair witches to do a seance. By the way this Mayfair witch looks nothing like the ones from that terrible TV show. If that show had been set it up the way this lady did in just one scene we would have loved that show. So they bring one of Claudia's dresses and another object I can't recall at the moment. The spirit of Claudia comes back and takes over the witch's body and smashes her face on the table knocking one of her teeth out.

Claudia then shows up with slashed ankles and she just rips into Louis. Louis can't deal with this and he's like hey what about what I did for you meaning when he went and found Bruce (the one who assaulted Claudia when she ran away) and he killed Bruce. Claudia after she's done tearing Into Louis she goes after Lestat but Lestat does not get it even close to as bad as what Louis got. So Claudia pretty much tells them stop saying her name and burn anything you have of mine because I'm stuck in some weird limbo and I can't even find Madeline who was the one person she truly loved. So after that horrible seance Louis and Lestat just walking and talking and it's like a super sweet moment and then they see Alex (because I forgot to mention that the band is now vampires except for the one who left the band and Armand made him walk onto a subway platform and kill himself). So Louis and Lestat sitting there minding their business and all of a sudden they get their heads chopped off.

So in the finale we get Lestat and all of the vampires minus Claudia that he turned into a vampire pretty much going over his life and explaining to him that he's a failure. His head is in a bowling bag that Daniel has at a bowling alley. Meanwhile Louis has his head on a platter with his body nearby and Armand reading one of his apology notes. This is something he also did with Daniel and Lestat. So while Lestat is being pretty much told that everything he's done has been a failure Louis refuses to apologize or say anything helpful to Armand until Armand brings Regina out and starts having her hurt herself. Louis apologizes to Armand for not loving him the way he deserve to have been loved considering how Armand grew up. He ends up letting Regina go and has Louis's head sewn back on his body. Lestat after his time in the I guess almost afterlife he wakes up in the coffin on his tour bus about to go perform for all the vampires.

The big plan of the season is to have all the vampires just go wild and start making as many vampires as possible. Well that's his mother Gabrielle aka Sophia is spearheading this entire thing. Lestat does not want to do this whatsoever and I looked at the time left on the episode and I was like there's no way they're going to be able to show the level of chaos that happens at this concert. And they didn't. I was bummed out but it didn't make me hate the season because I got a lot of good entertainment. I got to see all of the characters I enjoyed plus more. I got to see Akasha show up. I was very excited to see the character of Akasha and how she was going to be portrayed because in the film Queen of the Damned I absolutely hated that performance of her. This version of Akasha when she gave her speech and even when I watch the speech and videos online I get goosebumps every single time. It was such a great performance and I am very much looking forward to the next season of the show. The acting on the show is incredible as well as the music. Every single week I got to check my Spotify and see that there was another song or two added to the list. There's not a lot of shows that can say that.

I am bummed out that I'll probably have to wait a year and a half or closer to two years to see another episode of this show but this series has an incredible amount of rewatchability. I've already made art from it and I plan on making some more because it's really difficult for me to get into a show as much as I have this one these days. I know that there is a lot that I am leaving out from the season but like I said it's a lot that happens and it's a lot that happens out of order. I'm not trying to leave any character out or any of the secret organizations or any of the conversations. I think the biggest drawback to the show is that is that I think the biggest drawback to the show is that it is on AMC+. I do not know a lot of people that have that channel or even watch this channel except for watching that show The Walking Dead. But it's definitely worth it to have it for at least a couple of months to be able to watch this show on repeat as well as reaction channels.

Jacob Anderson as Louis de Pointe du Lac/Thomas Pitt

Sam Reid as Lestat de Lioncourt

Eric Bogosian as Daniel Molloy

Delainey Hayles as Claudia/Regina

Assad Zaman as Armand

Jennifer Ehle as Gabriella de Lioncourt

Christopher Geary as Samuel "Sam" Barclay

Justin Kirk as Raglan James

Jeanine Serralles as Christine Claire

Noah Reid as Larry

Ryan Kattner as Salamander

Seamus Patterson as Alex

Sarah Swire as TC

Christopher Heyerdahl as Marius de Romanus

Amaka Umeh as Dee Pharma

Damien Atkins as Magnus

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