Monday, June 24, 2024

The Trial: Lestat Returns

One more time, for the people in the back, there are major spoilers for the AMC show Interview with a Vampire in this blog post. If you haven't watched and don't wish to be spoiled, please turn back now before it's too late.

Okay, I just finished watching this episode and I need to collect my thoughts but wow. It was a doozy. I knew that this would be the episode where Claudia would die, and I figured it would have something to do with sunlight and the thing they stole from the observatory and why they were having the matinee performance so none of that surprised me. Armand saving Louis by controlling the entire theatre of humans surprised me a little and Louis not witnessing Claudia's death surprised me too. It actually makes me doubt the veracity of the tale that Louis wasn't there to see it especially considering the fire that destroyed the theatre. 

I expected to be a bit more emotional at Claudia's death scene. Maybe I'm still in shock, or maybe it's because the only one with tears in their eyes as Claudia and Madelaine died in each other's arms was Lestat, but that wasn't the emotional scene that I expected. It felt more like the death in Braveheart where the martyr dies cursing his murderers. I was actually much more emotional at the scene where they almost killed Lestat.

So we know that Lestat is manipulative, and we know that not only because of Louis and Armand's narrative, but because it makes sense. Yes, he loved Louis, but he also hurt him. He chased after Claudia and forced her to come back. He might have done that FOR Louis, but he still did it. Lestat's version of events is probably skewed, partially because the story is scripted by the coven. When Lestat goes off script, they don't control him like they control the three on "trial" which makes me think they either can't control him, or he helped engineer the whole thing. If they got to Lestat through the lawyer, then the last letter is even a manipulation tactic because Lestat probably wrote that after the attempted murder. Even though his version of events is skewed, it gives us another piece to the puzzle, a piece provided by neither Armand nor Louis.

Louis says that Lestat's version of events of how Claudia came to be turned is probably more accurate than his. In Lestat's version he tries to tell Louis that turning her is a bad idea and that making someone 14 forever never works out because their mind matures but their body doesn't. He then claims that Louis begged and pleaded until Lestat caved promising he'll do anything. If Lestat's story is somewhat accurate it shows only Louis' desperation to redeem himself after having wrought chaos on his people. We've also seen that Louis' memory is patchy and often unreliable and that Armand deliberately hides or obscures things to "protect" Louis. Does Armand love Louis? Probably. That doesn't change the fact that he played a part in the downfall of Louis, Claudia, and Madelaine. The fact that Armand could have defied the coven and allowed them a chance to escape by warning them occurs to me. Yes, what he did was cowardly. It may also have had a tinge of thinking logical thinking in there as well, calculating the odds of them escaping the coven entirely even if they did run away. But if any of what Lestat said was true, you have to wonder how much and if you wonder how much, you have to wonder if he was talking about the human lover that Armand almost killed and then they turned and if Armand killed him out of jealousy before Lestat ran away. According to the story, Lestat was heartbroken at the loss of his lover and buried himself for years before finally coming up and going across the ocean. There is no probability that this is true, he would have starved. However, if he did spend a period of time in mourning for a lost lover, that would explain the gap between Armand's Lestat and Louis' Lestat. However, if Armand's story of Lestat is inaccurate, if Lestat didn't just use him for his power and then run away, but Armand actually had something to do with the end of their relationship, then that could also color his relationship with Louis and pretty much everything he says. I'm very suspicious about the fact that the only person who can attest to what happened to Claudia and Madelaine is Armand.

Now I'm not saying for SURE they're actually still alive, but... I mean, they could be.

The part that actually did get me emotional in this episode, was surprisingly a part of Lestat's testimony. When Lestat goes off script and states that what he did to Louis was wrong and he'll never stop being sorry for it. That was genuine. It didn't move Louis, probably because Louis understood that no matter how sorry he was for having hurt Louis back then, Lestat was still here, helping the coven convict them and doing nothing to prevent what was happening to them. Not sure what Lestat might have been able to do if even Armand was powerless, though. He was able to defy them about the script and did not seem bothered by the fact that the coven planned to kill all three of them. I do wonder how the finale is going to play out when Louis realizes that Claudia is gone and how he and Armand are going to escape the coven. I think the fire might have something to do with that, but obviously Lestat survives because Armand reached out to him when they were in San Francisco after Louis tried to run into the sun.

Really excited for the finale next week and if Claudia makes a reappearance, I'm going to be so...I told you so about it.

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