The Vampire Lestat Season 1 Episode 5 Review: Grief Is the Real Monster

Critic’s Rating: 4.35 / 5.0

4.35

Well, Akasha certainly knows how to make an entrance.

And to think, her awakening was only one of the biggest parts of the hour.

The other belonged to Louis and Lestat, whose reunion this hour was as emotionally chaotic as it was heartbreaking.

The thing I enjoy most about The Vampire Lestat is getting to know Lestat on a deeper level, through his own eyes. We were promised that this chapter would tell us Lestat’s story, and it’s most certainly doing that.

But in telling us this story, which spans decades and continents, there’s so much to indulge in that not everything is given the same weight.

Lestat’s narration, which should serve as additional context more than anything else, at times leans too heavily on exposition, which is impactful to the story but is not necessarily treated as such.

That likely has more to do with the short season than with a narrative deficiency, but it was noticeable at the beginning of The Vampire Lestat Season 1 Episode 5, when Lestat shaded in everything that happened between his shooting and the moment we found him in the recording studio.

Interview with the Vampire Season 1 led us to Lestat’s “death”; Season 2 led us to Claudia’s death; and The Vampire Lestat is leading us to this concert, foreshadowed as a catastrophe of epic proportions.

We know Lestat to be someone who strives for perfection in his musical space, and that’s on full display as he tweaks and hones his band’s sound countless times, though it’s obvious there’s a simple disconnect between him and them because they’re not vampires.

It’s a barrier between them, and it’s something Lestat both hides and makes known at various times.

When Gabriella returned at the end of The Vampire Lestat Season 1 Episode 4, it was with those messages from the voices, the vampires who turned Lestat into a martyr of sorts, and a voice of The Great Conversion.

Her presence this week, as both a trusted member of his inner circle and his de facto manager, reinforces the truth at the heart of their relationship: Gabriella has always held power over Lestat.

She doesn’t return because she misses him, or because she feels bad about how she abandoned him for the umpteenth time.

Gabriella returns to Lestat because she needs something from him, and that need is rooted in his music.

For much of the episode, Gabriella is busy negotiating deals and orchestrating every detail of the massive concert, but Lestat himself becomes little more than the means to an end.

Lestat is a vehicle for Gabriella, one she uses for whatever she needs at the moment, and she never hesitates to abandon him when she has no further use for him.

Their relationship has been at the core of much of the season, with Gabriella’s rejection, abandonment, and abuse shaping nearly every facet of who Lestat has become.

Those wounds reverberate throughout his adult life, shaping everything from how he builds intimate relationships to how he responds to life’s stressors.

Her admission that she was a bad mother came with no caveats or excuses, because it’s not something she’s ashamed of. It’s as fundamental to her as anything else.

But I like to believe that his walking away from her at the end of their conversation and kiss, and his acknowledgment that he knows her games, may be a turning point for them and for the nature of their dynamic.

Plus, you can’t discount Louis’s presence and what their relationship inherently means to him on levels that no one else could ever understand.

Louis spent much of The Vampire Lestat Season 1 grieving Claudia’s death, and the series goes on to show that grief isn’t something you simply move past.

There’s no timeline for grief, and there’s certainly no finite book of rules to follow that will carry you through it.

Instead, grief ebbs and flows. Some days it’s something you can quietly ignore, but other days it sits heavy on your chest, an immovable object you learn to deal with as you move through the mundane aspects of everyday life.

That’s where we find Louis now, moving through everyday life, but still haunted by a loss that has reshaped his entire existence.

Meeting Regina completely altered Louis in various ways, blending reality with a kind of fiction he desperately wanted to be true.

Louis harbors so much guilt regarding Claudia’s entire vampiric life, and seeing this person who looked just like her must have felt like a sign to him in ways that he could not separate himself from.

It was only when it reached a certain level that he even tried to do something about a situation that had entirely escaped his very limited control.

You could see the light leave Louis’s eyes when he looked across to “Claudia” and “Madeleine,” because the war inside him, which flipped between real and not-so-real, was firmly settled in one direction, and it had to have scared him.

Even his and Regina’s paddleboat ride was another moment for Louis to feel the wide chasm and disconnect between them, realizing that this woman, who bore all the physical resemblance to Claudia, was no more than that — a resemblance.

No amount of familiarity would bridge the gulf between the daughter Louis lost and the woman sitting beside him.

Louis and Lestat, together, are the anchor of this whole story, and it’s that complicated, indescribable love at the heart of everything.

Lestat is in the midst of his own breakdown, with hallucinations taking root every second of the day and night terrors dragging him back to an isolated and neglected childhood. Yet when Louis needs him, he shows up.

There’s something genuinely powerful about an hour that features one of the most surreal and captivating moments, with Akasha’s awakening still not the most fascinating part of the episode.

Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson have such beautiful chemistry that shines through whenever they are in the same vicinity.

You hang on their every word, and when Louis is describing to Lestat what the past few months have been like for him, you can see the cogs turning in Lestat’s head and the pain etched across his forehead.

These two men have never properly grieved Claudia, and they are the only two people who understand each other best when it comes to grappling with that loss and the guilt they feel around it.

It takes Louis hitting rock bottom for the two of them to share a space and for Louis to be honest about the depths of his break from reality, and I appreciated that, in that moment, Lestat accepted it without trying to make Louis feel any worse than he already did.

Now Lestat did make it about himself at first, and why Louis didn’t call him after the shooting in The Vampire Lestat Season 1 Episode 4, and that’s one of the central flaws in their relationship.

Instead of approaching hardships with the mindset, “You’re going through this hard thing; how can we handle this together?” they retreat into opposing corners and weaponize pain.

If these two ever went to couples counseling, they would have so many things to address, but their inability to think beyond themselves and how it hinders their understanding of one another would top my wishlist.

When Lestat sees Regina, you can tell in his stilted moments that he’s just as affected by her as Louis was, but there’s also something different in the way he observes her, not as just this physical representation of his fledgling, but as this person who’s hurting Louis.

I’ll be honest: the relationship between Lestat and Claudia was something I found hard at times to parse, especially without Louis at the center of it.

But those few moments of Lestat cataloging Regina were so purposeful, as the little pieces of Claudia, as her maker, remain forever etched into his memory.

That leading into that gorgeous ballad, an ode to Claudia and the moments of her death, was so effective because it was a reminder that, although we don’t always see Lestat’s heartache about her death in the same ways we see Louis’s, it is present.

They exist in him, and they have carved a hole into him that will never be filled.

Lestat’s filled with holes, marked by physical and metaphorical scars, and getting a bit more context on his origins, via his past with Akasha, was as fascinating as it was occasionally frustrating.

Lestat being pulled from the grave of his sorrow at Akasha’s behest, and then thrown into these years as both a keeper and a teacher, felt like we were witnessing the Lestat with the kind of childlike wonder he should have experienced in his mortal life.

He starts off confused and pushing back against Marius, and then the years go by, and he becomes not only fully ingratiated into the role, but he relishes it.

And he absorbs the role with aplomb, to the point that he gives Akasha a little blood lipstick as a treat.

That small act helps awaken the Queen and can change the world’s trajectory.

Sheila Atim, the actress that you are.

Akasha’s awakening is more than just a moment; it’s an experience.

It’s completely all-encompassing in its intensity, even when you’re not completely sure what you’re witnessing.

All you need to know in the moment is that Akasha’s power, her blood, has now become a permanent part of Lestat, and thus has to be put into context when you think about Lestat’s past since that moment, and I don’t know how to feel about that.

The show chooses to show us one of Lestat’s worst moments, from the dragging of Louis’s body to its dropping from the sky at Lestat’s hand, as it’s told to us that the blood inside of him, and thus the rage he displayed, is something Lestat cannot control.

Does this new context risk reframing his violence as something driven by an uncontrollable force rather than a choice for which he remains fully responsible?

Lestat himself has never shied away from accepting responsibility for what he did, but it feels as though the show’s framing is beginning to shift, and I’m just not wholly sure how to feel about it yet.

Elsewhere, Armand and Daniel were once again reunited, and Daniel discovered that Armand had been meddling in his life since San Francisco, completely changing his view of their relationship and potentially starting to mend the distance between them.

Armand’s an incredibly shifty character whose motivations are never fully clear, making him one of the most, if not the most, titillating characters in the universe.

To think Armand’s reemergence was simply due to his wanting to make amends would be naïve, as it would be to assume that his sudden desire to bare his soul to Daniel is only rooted in his deep love for him.

That may be part of it, but there’s a reason he tells Daniel about Lestat and Gabriella’s relationship, and an even greater reason why he compels Larry to kill himself.

Armand is opposed to everything Lestat is doing with his music and to the deadly implications of The Great Conversion, and Daniel can help him.

The two of them, bridging the divide partly because of their disdain for Lestat de Lioncourt, should make for a very stimulating end to this chapter of the story.

Lestat Liner Notes

• ‘Thomas Pitty He’s A Whore’ feels a little much. I could understand Lestat being unhappy with Louis, but that’s a little much.

• As a non-book reader, who is Amel?

• So, if the TC, Salamander, and Alex were turned, which vampire turned them? Did Lestat, Gabriella, and Sam each take one?

• “I am the answer!” I will be thinking about this for days.

• I really do love seeing Louis through Lestat’s eyes. Maybe I’m doing too much, but I can feel the love he has for him in the gentleness of his actions.

There was a lot to discuss about this one, and I’m so curious to hear your thoughts on the story’s trajectory.

With only two hours left to go, it feels like we’ve only scratched the surface in certain areas.

Let me know in the comments how you’re feeling so we can discuss!

And check out our exclusive chat with the Queen herself, Sheila Atim, right here.

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