reactormag.com
The Vampire Lestat Goes Deep and Dark in “The Failures”
Movies & TV
The Vampire Lestat
The Vampire Lestat Goes Deep and Dark in “The Failures”
The too-short season comes to a close in appropriately dramatic fashion
By Molly Templeton
|
Published on July 20, 2026
Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
Comment
0
Share New
Share
Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
Well, my chaotic theories were all wrong, and I love it. We did not end with the concert, and Lestat was not in on the beheading. Which was a stretch, I know, but Lestat’s blasé attitude toward the Great Conversion and his obliviousness to Armand’s presence when he sensed the gremlin before? Those things still don’t add up unless you really buy the vampiric “fog of love” thing, which I don’t; it keeps coming up too conveniently, and feels like an excuse.
But none of this is all that relevant to a season finale that went deep into one vampire’s psyche, dredged up everybody’s trauma, and wound up on a cliffhanger that tantalizingly teases the least interesting part of the future that we have yet to see. The single most applicable word for “The Failures” is brazen. This season’s tonal shifts have been delicious and wild. The swings are big, the performances bigger. On the one hand the finale did everything I expected it to; on the other, nothing I expected happened, and several things shocked me. It is grand and personal, performative and intimate, over-the-top and heartbreaking. In other words, it’s just right. (It’s written by Hannah Moscovitch and directed by Deadwood and Game of Thrones alum Alan Taylor, who also directed the Interview with the Vampire pilot.)
I’m going to borrow a structure here from our boy himself. Let’s start with Side A: Lestat
This entire season has been an extended breakdown for the brat prince, and now we have rock bottom: almost dead (“Dyyyyyying,” insists Gabriella, in one of my favorite line deliveries of the week) and faced with all of his failures. Or rather, representations of his failures: the people who made him, the people he loved and let down, all reminding him of all the things he’s done wrong.
Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
Does he need reminding? All of this is in Lestat’s head, every table, every location, every face, every line. This show has always been interested in perspective, in the stories each character tells and the way they don’t agree with anyone else’s stories, but this is different. This is Lestat’s psyche, shattered into fragments while his body is in pieces. A slightly more romantic way to describe it might be that we all carry pieces of the people who’ve shaped us. Lestat, in his unraveling, has given all of those pieces weapons to use against him. They call themselves the failure finders, but they are the ways he’s failed each one of them.
As the table moves from forest to tower to Paris street to recording studio, and the courses (all souls, all numbered) come and go, Lestat relives his existence: the people, the places, the mistakes, the horrors. Magnus is the chair until Lestat insists that Gabriella take the role. She occasionally defends him, but even she giggles at his bad reviews. Claudia is not present, having already said her piece.
The idea that Claudia had nothing more to say to him snagged me, since in the seance, she (assuming, for the moment, that it was her) mostly lit into Louis. In Lestat’s telling of that encounter, what did he edit or leave out? Was that, like so many other moments, framed in the kindest-to-Lestat way possible? We are still in Lestat’s perspective, but at the long table the suggestion is certainly that he is no longer in control. As the timer TC set ticks down, he begins to also seem unmoored in time.
The tenor he murdered appears to critique his vocal delivery. Daniel’s giant head appears from the ceiling as he berates Lestat’s head in the bowling bag. We finally visit the absolutely horrible burning of the witches, only to discover that two of them were girls Lestat’s age—and that Gabriella wanted to horrify him so badly that he would run away from Auvergne. “Did you run?” she asks him as they sit alone at the long table. “No. Did you stay home until you were 30? Cabbage!”
At least that’s what this version of Gabriella says in Lestat’s mind. He is calling himself a cabbage—but he is also clocking that there is no separating her love for him from her behavior toward him. Even the person he felt closest to, as a child, would hurt him in order to try to drive him away.
Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
(The music is always great, but the music in the witch scene is as split as Lestat’s mind is: it’s poignant and tragic, but at the same time reflects the murderous enthusiasm of the crowd. I could also spend a lot of time going on about the sets! The costumes! The way every element of this series works so perfectly in concert with the rest! But there is a lot of story to talk about.)
Every Lestat scene in “The Failures” is deeply, enjoyably surreal, all these vampires judging, talking over each other, Louis mostly quiet, Antoinette taking notes, TC digging into all the horrifying food. And yet, oddly, it’s kind of straightforward. The unraveling has intensified, and Lestat, facing his potential death (again), is facing himself. (This is what happens to Louis, too, but we’ll get there.) There’s a hint of Labyrinth in the way things from Lestat’s past recur in his dying mind’s dream: “Come now, Lestat; no falling behind,” says his terrible brother, and also one of the “murder of waiters” that leads him out of the dead forest full of unseen birds.
(It’s interesting to me that he doesn’t seem to clock that all the trees are dead.)
Everything echoes: Lestat’s mom forces him to watch the witches burn, and he forces Claudia to watch the boy she killed burn. Lestat mocks a musician; he is mocked in turn. And in any one of these scenes you can find the key to the whole thing, the whole sequence, the whole show: All these vampires are terrible, majestic monsters, and all of them are so wounded, so painfully shaped by the lives they’ve lived, that their attempts to demonstrate love look like anything but.
It is to the show’s credit that it does not oversimplify this and reduce it to too-basic trauma math: Thing A happened to person B and therefore their behavior is C. The math is much more complicated than that, an equation that never ends, only continues to reshape itself. Lestat is not just the product of his abusive family and deeply inappropriate mother and traumatizing childhood and nonconsensual vampire transformation—but the person he is will always be shaped by those things. And maybe blame himself for those things.
Until it stops. Until a dissolving Lestat veers backward through time in a fantastic montage, and then takes the table—the stage—himself. The performer returns, welcoming to the audience everyone he made, murdered, or memorably traumatized. “Congratulations for your historical proximity to me,” he says, stalking around the stage to a looping, playfully sultry bit of “Butterscotch Bitch.”
Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
The powerful, painful suggestion is that Lestat remembers everyone he has ever harmed. Enzo, with the beautifully wrapped package. The train guy. The kid he killed in the Lower Ninth. He greets people by name. He recognizes the venue: the Parisian street where “music first wrapped its belt around my aorta and yoked me through two centuries plus of vampiric life.” He recognizes the people. And when Gabriella snaps “Failure!” at him, he finally pushes back:
“I don’t agree! I think in the end, in the end, I think, I was pretty fucking great. But if I failed, if—if I failed, then that means I actually attempted something. Which is more than I can say for most of those I love the most. I don’t know if I mean that. That was performative. I loved you. I did. As grotesque as that love appeared to you, I did.”
It’s such a basic idea, a thing you may have heard over and over again if you are a writer, an artist, a musician: failure means you tried. Fail, fail again. Fail and try harder. But being told this, in a well-intentioned, advice-giving way, is not the same as taking the concept into yourself and accepting that failure is necessary for greatness. Lestat does not come to this moment easily. He has been through his failures, cataloging them, examining them—if unwillingly—and has begun to put some blame where it belongs. Sometimes your failure is your own; sometimes it’s something someone else has put on you. In one moment, he recognizes and accepts his own ugliness and his own success. It is, as they say, progress.
Throughout it all, he flashes back to Louis, to the “could be nice” exchange, to their hands touching. It’s like a lifeline. But eventually he stumbles. Even grammar leaves him. (Lestat the pedant! I love Lestat the pedant.) And the least expected cameo happens: Louis’ brother Paul appears to tell Lestat the most important thing: “He has a hard time saying it. Got that from our daddy. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t. It’s just his way. Thank you for loving him, for loving him the way he needs to be loved. I still wish you were a woman.”
“Me too, sometimes,” says Lestat. But there is no time to dwell on his feelings about gender, because there is a great light from above, and “silver threads stretched out over other threads,” and Paul listening carefully to some birds, and replying “Yes, ma’am.”
Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
Paul appears walking across the stage to sit by Lestat. The implication may be that he is not part of this audience, though he certainly was traumatized by Lestat. I think you can read this two ways (like so many moments in this densely fantastic show): Paul, too, is part of Lestat’s mind, and Lestat here is allowing himself to know what he has been afraid to face: that Louis loves him. The theme of birdsong connects Paul and Lestat, but it also brings us back to the beginning of Lestat’s long dark teatime of the soul. (The soul!)
But you can also see Paul as something separate from Lestat—an apparition from outside his mind that comes to communicate something important to him. The silver threads are straight out of The Queen of the Damned, and are something Lestat might not know about yet (though of course he has the blood of Akasha in him). Paul is the last thing Lestat sees before he wakes up on his tour bus (not actually sunk in the river) in a field of screaming vampires and beautiful unwell.
We’ll come back to the very end. First:
Side B: The Dubai Trio (and Associates)
Not everyone gets an emotional resolution this season, least of all Daniel, who monologues at Lestat’s head to no end, and Alex, whose only line in the whole episode is “I wanna play the concert.” Which is really interesting, as—as far as we know—he’s in Armand’s pocket, and it has seemed that Armand is opposed to the Great Conversion. It does not fit with his laws. He discouraged Lestat from performing.
Armand also knows that telling Lestat not to do things will not stop him from doing things.
It is interesting that Daniel is not present for Armand’s little science experiment. It is interesting that Daniel is fully sidelined, left babysitting the head in the bowling bag. It is interesting that if you put together Fareed livecasting Jacob’s situation, and Raglan James showing up with a whole posse, and Raglan James saying that Lestat’s still-living parts prove the existence of the soul, it almost begins to seem almost as if the Talamasca was behind this whole beheading situation. Which is a bit odd given that Raglan also says they’re on board with the Great Conversion (in order to save the planet?!?!). Could they not have timed this a little better if they wanted the show to go on?
Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
Perhaps it’s the other way around: Armand, ever the planner, carefully executed his scheme, and the Talamasca hopped on board. I’m a bit disappointed with the show version of the Talamasca—the Talamasca series was terrible, and not least because if you want to get viewers interested in a secret magical society of watchers, you might consider not making them corrupt from the very start. Also, that protagonist was boring. I miss the book Talamasca, who are essentially a bunch of nerdy researchers with special skills.
I feel confident, though, that the Talamasca had nothing to do with Armand’s deeply upsetting, shocking treatment of Regina. This reveal took my head off. It never crossed my mind, not once, that he was collecting other minions beyond Alex. The cunning, the planning, the cruelty—the things she was saying about how he signed her work visa! She had no recourse!—and then to make her one of his followers, triggered to self-harm by the word “Rest.” (It’s so alarming to look back at all the times he’s said that.)
But of course as soon as he says it, it all makes sense. Armand is the maitre, the director; he is constantly controlling things, fighting all the loss of control he endured as a child. In hindsight it’s painful that Louis ever believed Armand had nothing to do with the play in Paris. Under no circumstances would he let the coven make him do anything he didn’t want to do. And he says as much in his “Armends” letter, delivered to Louis in a situation in which the latter has absolutely no choice but to listen. “The coven was twisting my arm but I took aesthetic pleasure in making your death visually exhilarating.”
For all the ugly things it includes, Armand’s letter is devastating. “I told you I loved you, but did I?” he asks. “Or was it a clinging to the underside of anyone who would help me survive?” He says he might be a room “without walls, floor, a ceiling. An infinite nothing.”
Through all of this, we watch Armand from Louis’ perspective; he’s blurry, haggard, restless. Louis’ gurgling is awful, and so is the way his body reaches for his head (and later tries to fend off Armand’s poking). Regina is the unwilling audience, and still a weapon for Armand to be used against Louis, who absolutely refuses to play Armand’s apology game until Armand threatens Regina’s life.
Whether or not this is all a Talamasca experiment, I kept thinking that Armand was smart—in a terrible, unconscionable way—to render Louis immobile while making his demands. Armand is strong, and much older, but we’ve seen Louis tear through an entire coven. I’m not sure he would have done so well with a Louis who was not so drastically incapacitated.
Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
Assan Zaman is magnetic throughout. He has entirely transformed Armand from his retiring but intense presence as Rashid in the first season to the alluring lover of the second to the nightmare fuel flashing into Daniel’s mind—and now to this. Much of this sequence is him monologuing, as Louis can’t make his mouth work, and Armand doesn’t care at all if he’s talking over Regina. Zaman brings a specific wounded intensity that battles Louis’ own wounded intensity; the nuances are crisply different, and beautifully matched. And Jacob Anderson has to act without moving his head! I think I held my breath for half of this.
“I wasted a near century and that is not nothing. That deserves amends,” says Armand, the man who spent that near-century in a relationship built on multiple lies he just admitted to. (“He said to the head on the skewer,” Louis shoots back.) He calls Louis his Claudia, comparing the way he carried guilt over lying to Louis to the way Louis carries his guilt over Claudia’s fate. It might be true, but this comparison feels calculated to infuriate Louis.
Louis makes a mockery of apologizing, writing that he’s sorry for kissing Armand in Magnus’s tower in front of Lestat. He eventually says that Lestat was the love of his life, not Armand, which is obviously true to anyone with eyes. (Not that those two haven’t done terrible things to one another, but again: people demonstrating love in deeply fucked-up ways is the name of the game here.)
Eventually, trapped by the threat to Regina and with his own vitals fading, Louis relents. He has already said that he will never forgive Armand, but there are other things that he needs to admit to himself, and that Armand needs to hear. He says them telepathically, no longer able to move his mouth, because he has put this off as long as he physically can. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking speech, and one that Armand repeats for posterity up until the point Louis gets specific about Armand’s past. Then it’s camera off, laptop slammed shut. He will give that story to no one else. He can barely seem to stand to hear it himself.
Louis acknowledges his lies, the way he’s tried to be people he’s not, but more importantly he acknowledges Armand’s past, and the ways in which it overlaps with his own past in New Orleans—from “the opposite shore,” as Louis puts it. “You and I didn’t talk about it much. With you… cause I didn’t want to think on my own sins. Or picture you at twelve. At twelve. You were twelve. Scared. Poor boy. Arun. You need a love that’ll cradle you. You should have that. And I was never that for you. And I’m sorry. My coldness, my denial, drove you to this. I saw good in you. For a while.”
The layers here are matched in their richness only by Zaman’s performance as Armand listens. His face tightens up, transforms; his whole body shifts. This is ugly, difficult stuff, and so true to life, the way that sometimes people are unable to hear or deal with the terrible things that have happened to the people they love. They push it away, shove it down, let it be cold. It feels trite to say that Armand needed to be seen. But he gave Louis that story about himself in the Louvre one night, and then it sat there between them, apparently un-discussed. It was too hard for Louis, so Armand stayed alone in that history. It is another litany of failure: Armand failing Louis, Louis failing Armand, the two of them failing to be honest with each other.
Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
And despite everything, Armand does need love. They all do. This very strange, messed-up, torturous situation is, at its core, Armand looking for some kind of grace, for the ability to move on. Is there something real between him and Daniel? Can there be? I want to skip ahead to The Vampire Armand in my reading so badly, even though I know it won’t be the same. Book Armand is a very different creature at this point in the book narrative; book Devil’s Minion is much less fraught and combustible. I have this little dream that somehow, this Armand will still get to the point of living in a beautiful Florida mansion with art on the walls and enough guest coffins for all the vampires that are his friends. I think it might take a little longer, though. He’s not there yet. He did carve an A into Louis’ chest before walking out into the daylight. But he also let Regina go. Progress?
Lestat, in the end, brushes past the facts for the feelings, which is the way this entire episode works. It’s not a narrative climax; it’s an emotional climax. He summarizes the information he learns from Raglan (“a man I did not recognize but now call a friend”): how the Talamasca was there in the park (why? how??) the night of the beheading, plus some vagueness about Alex’s role. He refers constantly to the “now infamously catastrophic gig,” but the only thing that matters is Louis. Not the 45,00 vampires (down from the 50,000 they kept saying before) and 10,000 foolish mortals in the park. Not the show that Gabriella still wants him to put on. Just Louis, sitting on the bus with that terrible scar on his neck. Lestat sits close to him, but not too close, and for just a moment, the whole show calms.
There is one little breath before Lestat lights into Gabriella and they have a screaming match about whether the show is going to go on, the final line of which is “I am not fucking singing, you fucking monster.” One of those things clearly turns out to be untrue, but Lestat calling his mother a monster feels like progress from his time in purgatory, no?
The question of Gabriella still lingers: Why is she like this? How much of what we’re seeing is purely Lestat’s version of her, as not-quite-accurate as first-season Lestat was as seen through Louis’ eyes? I’ve never stopped thinking about perspective, this season, about who is telling which story—and about the rare moments in which the POV is neutral. In Dubai, the initial presentation is of a neutral situation, an interview, but as the show went on, the perspective moved closer and closer to Daniel. But he’s never narrating. We are not seeing the story through him, just from next to him.
The most narratively neutral moment in the whole show, maybe, is the auction at the start of this season. Lestat has not yet begun to narrate. We don’t know why these people are here or what has happened to them. It’s just interesting that the season that sinks the deepest into one entirely subjective psyche starts out on such neutral ground.
The end here certainly isn’t the end of the story. At long last, we return to the future, where Lestat is smoking and recording his story. “Am I talking to myself?” he asks before he switches off the recorder. The narration doesn’t end, though. With the hiss of a needle hitting vinyl, Guy Maddin’s voice comes back: “You are listening to The Failures, Album 58, Side A.”
And Lestat says: “What did I say at the start of this, as to the Queen, as to destruction unleashed? Something about the regretful dead and the hmm, what was it? Traumatized alive. That I had made a contribution. Let me take that back. The fault was mine. All mine.”
Outside, Montreal is a wasteland. And Lestat is kind of standing in the light, like he was in the dead forest.
Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
Lestat? Taking responsibility for something? Something this massive? He’s clearly been changed by his experience. I want to argue with him, but that’s book-brain talking: I just reread The Queen of the Damned, which is largely all the backstory to Lestat’s disastrous concert, as experienced by a whole bunch of other intriguing characters whom I would very much like to see on screen. The Vampire Lestat, the novel, is mostly Lestat’s biography, with a bit of rock-band-chaos at beginning and end. The bigger picture comes through in the third book, which we are essentially set up for now. He’s there. The vampires are there (though not trying to kill him, as they were on the page). Akasha is clearly going to show up and wreak havoc.
None of that would have fit in this last episode of the season. I thought that we’d end mid-concert, with a certain amount of the chaos that happens there, but “The Failures” is a different kind of performance entirely. It transforms all of the novel’s backstory into a crucible for change. The Lestat that we’ve seen for three seasons has often been a projection in some way starting with Louis’ version of him as a villain, and then as a haunting. In this season he is spurred into musical activity by anger and betrayal—the book’s release—and then all of that is twisted when Gabriella starts pushing him toward the Great Conversion. His near-death experience is like a very belated coming-of-age, or at least the conclusion of his quarter-millennium crisis.
The Vampire Lestat is about its title character’s transformation, but what of Louis, who has also been through so much? It’s harder to guess what the show will do with him; in the second and third novels, Louis is just kind of there while a lot of wild things happen. But his encounter with Armand will have changed him, too, and I hope we get to see how that shapes his future.
There is resolution in this episode, but it is specific, emotional, psychic resolution that leaves us with Lestat doing two things he would previously have found anathema: Being alone, and taking responsibility. But that last scene is still in the future. There are still mistakes to be made. I hope we get to see them.
THE LAST LITTLE SIPS
Image: Sophie Giraud/AMC
I did not clock at first that one of the waiters, who is also in the studio later, is Dee Pharma. We never got enough of her. But it’s right that she’s here.
This is the only time we go straight into the titles, no messing about—and there’s no little sly comment at the end of “All Fall Down,” just silence.
The episode opens on Album 57, Side A, which I just need to note is bananas as at the end we’ve moved on to Album 58. All of that on just one record?!?!
The flipping of the image of Alex, like the flipping of a record, or the flipping of reality, is a nice touch.
Sam is not in the band at the end of Lestat’s vision. Gone back to the Talamasca? They do seem to have been quite busy.
Some of the course/soul numbers are 187, 205, 214. I do not know what the numbers mean. Ages at which Lestat failed in specific ways?
Lestat’s cheery little, “Antoinette, hello” was oddly delightful.
“The plays ran for a century and a half.” / “That’s longer than Wicked.”
I had to look up Wheelchair Jimmy, which turned out to be another Drake joke.
I love that in Lestat’s final psychic concert, TC is both on the stage and in the audience.
Is Fareed Talamasca?
What is it with Armand and white-tiled spaces this season? The subway, the butcher shop.
HOW did Armand listen in on the seance? Psychically? Through Louis’ mind? Or did he get in Merrick’s head? (Would have been crowded in there.) Or bug Lestat’s apartment? I wouldn’t put it past him.
Speaking of heads I cackled at Daniel saying, “Rescue the head, save the planet?” Was that a Heroes reference, Dan?
I’m fascinated by the way Raglan describes the results of this little experiment: “meaning beyond mortality. Wonder returned.”[end-mark]
The post <i>The Vampire Lestat</i> Goes Deep and Dark in “The Failures” appeared first on Reactor.
New Posts (Home)
ChatBox
Popular Posts 
Game Zone
Top PodCasts
