The Vampire Lestat Season 1 Episode 3 Review

Critic’s Rating: 4.8 / 5.0

4.8

The one thing that stands out to me most in the early hours of The Vampire Lestat is how viscerally arresting it is.

Your eyes are drawn to so many different things in every scene, and you’re terrified you won’t catch everything in time before the show sweeps you into the next image.

Not every show has that capability or even that desire per se, but The Vampire Lestat demands it.

By The Vampire Lestat Season 1 Episode 3, the show makes it clear that it’s delivering a gift so rich and deliberate that looking away would be a mistake.

A lot has been made of the differences from Interview with the Vampire this season, and it’s easy to understand the criticism, but I think it’s equally important to point out everything this series is getting right.

This feels like the first hour that’s complete in a way that moves the story forward and gives you an even deeper understanding of where it’s going. And that’s not to knock the previous two, but if they were the opening appetizers of a five-course meal, we’ve finally reached the soup-and-salad portion of the affair.

The concept of Lestat sitting down with Daniel Molloy and bearing his soul would have sounded like a fever dream at one point, but it unfolds the way you’d expect: with Daniel thinking he’s in control and Lestat toying with his food until he gets bored.

The continued dives into Lestat’s past do more than just inform the vampire of today; they also provide additional context for Lestat’s time with Louis and, later, with Louis and Claudia.

One of the most striking lines from Interview with the Vampire Season 1 comes when Lestat tells Louis and Claudia about Magnus and explains why he doesn’t do well with abandonment.

Finally getting a glimpse into Lestat’s turning — both explicit and obscured in the way he has perfected it — allows us to see him much more clearly.

To Daniel, he presents his turning as a gift, and describes Magnus as his emancipator, instead of the obsessive, abusive, and all-consuming vampire who stole him from his bed, did unspeakable things to him, and then left him completely alone in a brand new world without a map.

Having Magnus sing to Lestat felt campy, but it was also another way of showing how Lestat wants to reclaim his trauma and cope with it on his own terms. It was both campy, creepy, and thought-provoking.

But before you even get into Lestat’s turning and Magnus’s role in it, you have to also understand the place he was in at that time because Magnus’s abuse was not the beginning of his story.

There was a mortal life before that. A mortal love.

It’s always going to be Louis and Lestat, but before Louis, there was Nicki.

Nicholas de Lenfent was more than Lestat’s first love; he was also something tangible, his and his alone. Lestat came upon him playing in the streets, and the music that drew him to Nicki beautifully encapsulates their connection.

Lestat uses his music to express himself, and his attraction to Nicki seems to stem not only from physical curiosity but also from a deeper understanding of another man channeling his emotions into his music.

There is a lot packed into this hour, so while we witness the genesis of Lestat and Nicki’s romance, there’s not enough time to chart every step from flirtation over beers to its inevitable collapse. But that only adds to the tragedy of it all.

When you think of a first love, it’s often characterized by passion and, ultimately, growth and understanding, because of how much you learn about yourself and your relationships in the process.

Lestat and Nicki were happy, but that happiness was ripped away by Magnus’s cruel hands, and nothing was ever the same from that moment forward, as lies, deceit, mental health struggles, and mountains of things Lestat wasn’t saying festered and grew between them until it all exploded.

Nicki seemed to carry a sadness with him even before things between him and Lestat broke down, and that melancholy curdles into something even darker and harder to understand when he’s turned.

The scenes between Joseph Potter’s Nicki and Sam Reid‘s Lestat are among the most affecting in the series. Potter inhabits Nicki’s fear, grief, and unraveling psyche, while Reid delivers a devastating portrait of a man torn between his desire to save the person he loves and his inability to protect him from forces beyond his control.

You can see why Lestat carries a profound amount of grief surrounding this relationship because he feels like he drove Nicki mad, and then, in trying to save him, only broke him down further, until he was a shell of the man he loved so dearly.

Lestat was powerless when it came to Nicki, and that’s both a frustrating and heartbreaking realization when you love someone. Recognizing you can’t be a solution or a balm to ease their pain is crushing.

Nicki’s unraveling only intensified over time, growing darker, and the scene of him in the pits at the Théâtre des Vampires looking up at Louis, Armand, and Gabriella in their box was heartbreaking in its own right.

In that moment, Nicki was utterly alone, staring up at the people who had access to Lestat in ways he believed he never would. More than anything, it was a reminder that no matter how deeply Lestat loved him, there were parts of him that would always remain just out of his reach.

Once again, Potter and Reid prove indispensable to the episode’s emotional success because the tragedy of Nick’s death rests entirely on their shoulders, and they are magnetic in their performances of gut-wrenching, total anguish.

Nicki’s descent and Lestat’s realization that death is the only way he’ll ever have a modicum of peace are so hauntingly grim and tender, which is incredibly difficult to pull off, yet it’s done here with an ease that consistently sets this series apart.

To then show us Lestat reliving those moments in real time, complete with a mesmerized and smug Daniel looking on in triumph after thinking he had finally been able to say he caught the canary, was too brilliant for words.

I cried no less than three times during this hour, and none more than when Lestat remembered Nicki’s final moments. The end of a first love whose impact still ripples through his veins.

The decision not to show Nicki’s death aligns with what we’ve seen from Lestat’s POV. He’s not exploiting these transformational moments.

Everything devolves into Lestat rushing out into the night, unable to give in to Gabriella after reliving some of the most traumatic moments of his life, and it’s Lestat at his most vulnerable and self-conscious.

Side note, Lestat completely screwing over Daniel feels like something that Daniel will never be able to get past.

“I have regrets when it comes to Daniel.” Could this be the first in a long line of regrets? And what’s with talking about Daniel in the past tense?

There are so many iconic car scenes throughout film and television, with characters having grandiose existential moments while driving on the open road, and Lestat sort of has that, with Magnus’s menacing voice in his ear, a hallucination that builds as he spends the evening remembering his turning.

The decision not to play Magnus’s scenes in a strictly linear, straightforward manner, but instead to have him sing Lestat’s song and sit shotgun in Lestat merch, is messy but also another clear indicator of what the show wants to do.

The chaos, the contradictions, and the collision of memory and reality are all part of the experience.

Magnus’s influence on Lestat is continually felt in his struggles with loneliness and in the way he embraces his immortality. He was an abuser, and that abuse eroded Lestat’s sense of safety and autonomy.

Magnus was a defining force in his very existence, and this hour gives credence to that, though it does so in a way that makes you read between the lines more than it explicitly states.

“The Loneliness” is the best song so far this season (and in heavy rotation in my household), and the entire performance is centered on Lestat finally letting some demons rest, right?

Lyrics like “How could anyone ever love you?” and “Don’t worship that grave dug on your own” are pointed ways for Lestat to acknowledge that his past is littered with mistakes and failures, alongside a healthy dose of pain, but that doesn’t have to define him.

Reid is a marvel on stage, commanding the kind of presence most performers spend years trying to cultivate, and the visual of two of the biggest characters in his story turning their backs on him as he effectively reveals the first tentative steps towards him releasing himself from some of that hurt and control they had over him.

And it, of course, overlaps with Louis’s dark journey, only making the song more poetically rhythmic.

Claudia’s death is the defining moment of Louis’s life. Has he compartmentalized and moved forward in a way that allows him to live his vampiric life? Sure, but he’s living with that ache. It will never be expunged.

When Ragland gave him Bruce’s information at the end of The Vampire Lestat Season 1 Episode 2, we all knew where Louis was headed.

Claudia’s diary provided a detailed and chilling account of that particular period, and was something that Louis carried with him because Claudia was harmed, and in danger, and he was unable to stop it.

Louis manically dismantling a whole coven is mostly off-screen, which makes the audience less voyeuristic and, in a way, scarier. Louis is snarky and cold, but we don’t even know the full extent of the horror he’s inflicting until we see him later covered in blood.

Once Bruce and Baby Jenks arrive, Louis is almost dissociated, with a clear agenda to kill Bruce, make him suffer, and ensure that his final moments are spent hearing Claudia’s words. But it does feel more like Louis’s reckoning than vengeance for his daughter.

Jacob Anderson has always been extraordinary in the role of Louis de Pointe du Lac, but in this hour, as seen through Lestat’s eyes, he gives Louis a bravado we haven’t seen before.

You can see it in the way he walks, slowly and without trepidation, like he’s a masked serial killer in a slasher film who knows he can move however he sees fit because he’s going to get what he wants eventually.

Hearing Claudia’s recollection of what Bruce did to her, filtered through her confusion and fear, is difficult to listen to. And this episode needs a clear trigger warning.

I wanted to stop listening at various points, but the reading gives the scene so much weight that it turns what could have been just gruesome horror slop into something that packs a greater emotional punch.

You begin to think that Louis walks away from Bruce’s death and the burning of those pages, feeling something akin to relief, but it becomes clear it was another indication of Louis’s selfishness when you consider that Claudia would have likely never wanted her abuser to read her private words.

We’re dealing with vampires here, killers, and taking Bruce’s life should have felt good, right? It didn’t read like that because in some ways, Louis wasn’t even fully considering Claudia but instead reveling in his own vigilante justice.

While driving away from a bloodbath, it’s as if you could see Louis remember that getting revenge on your daughter’s abuser won’t bring your daughter back.

Except, in this universe, Louis has found Claudia’s doppelgänger in a hole-in-the-wall diner. To think this ends in anything other than Louis developing a new, deeply traumatic wound—and scaring an unsuspecting young woman—is naïve at best.

Lestat Liner Notes

• “There’s not room enough in this box for your desperation.” Why did Lestat eat Armand up like that?
• Gabrielle is cruel, and everything about her in this episode was gross in many ways. They’re doing a solid job of reinforcing the idea that she lives to exert her control over her son.

• Armand is not only back, but he’s clearly plotting. Connecting with Alex isn’t by chance or some odd coincidence, and it’s intriguing, to say the very least.

• Louis having that picture of him and Lemuel, his emotionally distant boyfriend, supposedly, made me laugh out loud. Oh, Louis.

• That little tidbit about vampires with their heads being severed being able to survive for hours felt random, but simultaneously important.

• I love that you can see, even though the band still isn’t The Beatles, that their popularity subtly shifts each hour.

• “Serving cunt has its consequences” is such an iconic line. It feels ripped from the replies of a Twitter debate of a reality television show.
• LOUIS HAS THE CLOUD GIFT?

This was easily the best hour of the season so far and may ultimately stand as one of the year’s finest television episodes. It’s that psychologically devastating.

Please let me know how you’re feeling about The Vampire Lestat so far and what you thought of this one.

And be sure to check out my post-mortem chat with stars Joseph Potter and Damien Atkins about Nicki and Magnus’s role in Lestat’s life.

You can watch The Vampire Lestat on Sundays at 9/8c on AMC and AMC+.