The Vampire Lestat Season 1, Episode 4
“The Devil’s Road”
Writers: Jonathan Ceniceroz
Director: Claudia Llosa
Cast: Sam Reid, Jacob Anderson, Assad Zaman, Joseph Potter, Delainey Hayles, Jennifer Ehle, Eric Bogosian, Jeanine Serralles, Gopal Divan, Noah Reid, Ryan Kattner, Seamus Patterson, Sarah Swire, Kurt Yeager, Amaka Umeh, Shepherd Monroe, Guy Maddin, Kyle Allat
The vampire Armand doesn’t strike me as the rock and roll road warrior type. The gigs, the girls, excess, the exhaustion, the increasingly disgusting and cocaine-frosted bus — they’re not the centuries-old aesthete’s style. Nevertheless, he is on a tour of sorts: an apology tour. Turns out that whatever else he was up to by attending the same meeting as Lestat’s once and future guitarist Alex, Armand really is doing the 12 steps, and he’s out to make amends. (Allegedly. You can’t take anything these, uh, people do at face value.)
Armand’s first stop is with Daniel, the fledgling “son” he abandoned immediately after turning him ... on a private jet, midflight, as he was travelling to finally visit his estranged daughters. (Over Newark, no less. Daniel’s vampire birthplace is New Jersey! The shame of it!) Needless to say our intrepid journalist is not thrilled to meet his maker once again.
Isolated with Armand in a bowling alley from which everyone else disappears — this is not Armand’s doing; he experiences the same strange phenomenon from time to time and believes it’s some inherent aspect of their vampire bond — Daniel lets fly with a very, very Daniel monologue. Among other things, he calls Armand “a friendless bottom twink sociopath” and “a 500-year-old pussy.”
More pointedly, he blames Armand for his whole disaster of a life. This includes not only his stint as a vampire and his resulting estrangement from the human world, but also his decades of deadbeat-dad junkiedom. All of that, he says, stems directly from the buried trauma of his lost weekend at Armand’s mercy in San Francisco, before Louis recovered enough from his attempted suicide-by-sunlight to put a stop to it. I don’t care how well-written Armand’s apology is — that’s a lot to answer for.
Meanwhile, Lestat’s catty narration hints that Armand will need to answer for a lot more before the end, saying he wound up doing more damage than even the Queen of the Damned herself. I wonder if Alex’s cult-like devotion to his newfound friend, whom he discovers is the vampire Armand at a concert when Lestat exposes his old frenemy to the audience, is a sign of things to come.
That unpleasant turn in the spotlight courtesy of a wild-eyed, pigtailed Lestat is Armand’s souvenir from the second stop on his apology tour: Lestat himself. Attempting to apologize on the tour bus, Armand is distracted by the delicious (in more ways than one) sight of Lestat taking a blood shower while gloriously nude. When Armand mentions the “generous endowment” Lestat left to the Théâtre des Vampires, his eyes are pointed at a different generous endowment entirely.
Anyway, Lestat mocks Armand, calling him a “fuck cloud” and saying he deliberately didn’t expose Armand’s lies himself because he knew the waiting would tear him apart and make Louis unhappy by proxy. Lestat then humiliates Armand at the concert, sending him scampering outside.
Daniel, still pissed, follows him. He’s been halfway convinced by Lestat that Armand was toying with Daniel all throughout the events of Interview with the Vampire, and knew of Daniel’s plan to expose his lies. Armand insists this isn’t true, and says everything he did, he did out of love ... and not for Louis. Daniel, needless to say, is stunned. Has this 500-year-old twink fallen for a 70-year-old documentary daddy?
Armand isn’t the only vampire who has a complicated relationship with their beloved. Louis returns over and over again to a diner where a waitress named Regina bears an uncanny resemblance to Louis’s slain, adoptive vampire daughter, Claudia. (Both are played by Delainey Hayles.) When he passes her a copy of Interview with the Vampire to explain that he’s more than just one of the 500-odd wealthiest people in the world, Regina gives him the boot, despite him offering her the world.
But vampires can tempt people in any number of ways. Louis, who really should know better by now where roads paved with good intentions tend to lead for him, keeps watching the diner, and finally she summons him back in. For $500K, she’ll call him “Daddy Lou” as much as he wants.
Lestat spends the episode fruitlessly texting his beloved mother Gabriella, who ditched him a couple stops back. Ditching him, we find out, is what she does. They only saw each other twice during the entire 20th century, so you’ll forgive him if he finds her excuse that she’s currently in Bar Harbor getting a bikini wax a little dubious.
In flashbacks, we watch the rise and fall of their initial incestuous romance. Driven into a jealous rage by the sound of her fucking a human being, he bursts in to confront her. Bosom heaving bloodily, Gabriella correctly guesses he’s not there simply to tell her the sound annoyed him.
“When I killed the wolves,” Lestat says, trembling with rage and love and lust, “and you tended me, we were mother and son.” He’s referring to her highly sexualized rubbing of ointment on his wounds as she described her sexual fantasies to him. He’s saying that this happened before their new vampire natures unmoored them from human morality. He’s saying her desire for him was present when they were human, when she was just his mother’s boy.
“And?” she replies. With that they both fall in and make love, for the first time.
But it can’t last, not with someone as insatiable, in every sense, as Gabriella. After a decade she grows bored, wondering how they can possibly sustain this relationship for 50 years, a century. After causing a shipwreck by killing the lighthouse keeper so they can feast on all the sailors, she sneaks off just before Lestat wakes up for the night, leaving him alone on the sand.
In the present, however, she comes back — just after an enraged human (Kyle Allatt) shoots Lestat (and wounds Christine) to prove vampires are real and out to get everyone. He’s got a manifesto and everything.
We’ve already heard from Armand that the Great Conversion, the point at which vampires multiply and kill faster than humanity can reproduce, is already happening, which is why he and others want Lestat to stop performing. His behavior is making other vampires think they can have it all, too, which can only lead to disaster. Since all this is narrated from the future, we know it does.
So why, do you suppose, does Gabriella vanish inexplicably, only to return as a full-throated supporter of Lestat’s musical career, which she’d done nothing but ridicule since the moment they met up again? Why is she telepathically playing him the thoughts and voices of all the humans who’ve been moved by his work? Why is she so delighted when he writes a song about her, using the words “a ravenous queen”? Lestat may be too horny for her and too full of himself to wonder, but I sure do.
This is sort of the platonic ideal of a Vampire Lestat episode. The entire core cast — Sam Reid, Jacob Anderson, Delainey Hayles, Eric Bogosian, Jennifer Ehle — are given meaty material and make meals out of it. The vampire action, however you want to define action, is both bloody and sexy as hell. Lestat has never been more unhinged onstage than he is during his cheerleader-chant diss track against Armand. Gabriella has never been sexier than she is covered in the blood of a man still inside her, beckoning to her own son. (The show’s never been more perverted than that, either; hell yeah, brother.) Louis and Daniel’s hearts are tested, and one of them, at least, has already failed. Richer and more decadent than eating a shipful of sailors, The Vampire Lestat is better than I could have imagined.
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