Warning: The following contains spoilers for The Vampire Lestat through episode six as well as what came before in the TV show and the books. Read at your own risk.

Intro

Talking about the entirety of episode six of AMC’s The Vampire Lestat, Montreal, feels a little strange given the ending. But look, you’ve already watched episode one of The Vampire Lestat. You know Louis survives at the very least. This is twice now that not for nothing we’ve been told vampires don’t instantly die when you cut off their heads, especially not Monsieur I Have The Blood of Akasha in Me.

So ending gets sorted out later and we’ll deal with that next week. Or as much of any answers as we get next week since we already know this season was constructed as the first of two parts, same as the two seasons of AMC’s Interview With the Vampire was. It’s a no brainer to know next week will have unanswered questions and a cliffhanger as well.

Given all that, let’s focus on the rest of the episode then. And how for the most part this is a great example of how not much has to happen plot wise if what’s going on is happening character wise.

And oh what two characters. Louis and Lestat. Our boys. Our babies.

Our assholes as well, let’s not get it twisted. But even so. Lestat is the unbeating heart of The Vampire Chronicles and Louis is his love. And we only know Lestat because of Louis, so it makes sense that before the drama of the season one finale the climax - heh - of the penultimate episode is Louis and Lestat hovering around each other.

So let’s talk about that.

How Costuming Shows Louis and Lestat’s Relationship

Look it’s me so the first thing I want to shout out is costuming. I’ve already gone on at length about the costuming for AMC’s Interview With the Vampire when Carol Cutshall was at the helm.

As a super quick refresher, the conclusion was that the costumes in the first two seasons were beautiful but didn’t tell a story. Carol pulled her inspiration from contemporary photos and artwork, which are perfectly valid sources. Beautiful pieces were created too, I am by no means besmirching the quality of the results. But what kept the costumes simply good and not great was that on their own they didn’t tell a story. Or they did, but they told someone else’s story. Great costuming tells it’s own story.

This year we have a new costume designer in Lex Wood, something I was able to immediately clock back in episode two, Toledo when I saw Lestat’s fur collared coat evoking his wolfkiller cloak. That wasn’t Carol’s costume language. Carol did do some work with color and where she pulled her inspiration from, to be fair, I’m not saying she didn’t. But she didn’t take that extra step to make these stories their own. Lestat in a wolfkiller jacket is that step.

I say all this because one of the things I pointed out in the article is that Lestat and Louis’ clothes didn’t relate to one another. Carol pulled Louis and Lestat’s clothes directly from the artwork of JC Leyendecker. Which works if you’re doing “Give me examples of queer male relationships in this time period” but doesn’t for “Give me the exact dynamics of this relationship at any time.”

Which is why you had things where Louis and Lestat’s clothes looked wonderful but at no time could you look at a still photo of the two of them and guess how they felt about one another. Were they in love? Hate? If you didn’t know the show could you figure out their relationship at all? Could you tell in one scene Louis was pretending to be a servant? No. Not by the clothes. Which is - not a problem but it’s a lost opportunity for sure.

Let’s compare that to what we got in this episode:

Bang! Look at this! Even if you never saw this show before you can instantly - and correctly - tell these men are connected. You can also tell they are largely on equal footing. Their outfits are almost, but not quite, the exact same.

Peep the silhouettes, which were similar even when Louis was in his dark overcoat and Lestat in his black cape. But here it’s buttoned down shirts with similar collars and both of them have their shirts open to expose their hearts. This entire episode is about them feeling their way around one another. They want to have that connection. Hence open shirts.

But of course it’s not exactly the same but this is on purpose too. Lestat is bare chested. This goes with how he loves to show off but - as Sam Reid’s beautiful acting also shows - Lestat’s making himself more vulnerable here than Louis is. Lestat desperately wants to be with Louis again. Louis? Ehh he’s still trying to protect himself. His outer shirt is open, but he’s got an undershirt keeping his heart from being fully exposed.

Of course it’s Louis, whose outward behaviors often belie what he thinks he’s doing in the world, so his shirt is the blue of Lestat’s eyes. He can’t help but give away that he wants to be with Lestat again even as he’s trying to protect himself from that very thing.

(And later? During the seance? Louis has that shirt buttoned up higher.)

Just - UGH. Beautiful. Love it. This is what I’ve been dying for for seasons now. Again, no offense to Carol. Replicating historic pieces is not easy and it is commendable. It’s just that for me personally I would keep replication to things like Titanic where the goal of the costumes is to evoke the real world at the time. For example, Rose wears dresses that are one to one recreations of actual dresses and that works because Rose is supposed to have been a real person. The whole point of Titanic was for sets and costuming to recreate the reality as much as possible while slipping a fictional story in.

We’re not watching a recreation of a real thing, though, we’re watching vampires. So for me personally the call should’ve been to even push historic accuracy to the back burner if it meant giving more attention to costume storytelling (The Bridgerton, if you will). Lex Wood is doing costume storytelling and I love it. Perfect. No notes. Thank you.

How Montreal Gives Characterization in a Story About Nothing

I don’t want to put down the episode but purely from a plot point perspective Montreal doesn’t establish a lot in the same way that Detroit and The Devil’s Road didn’t establish a lot. Other than that ending, which is gasp-worthy but only takes a second, what did we get? “Louis and Lestat hang out, people find out Lestat’s fucking his mom, Louis and Lestat talk to dead Claudia, GASP!”

See what I mean? Not much happened from a plot perspective. But! Unlike Detroit and The Devil’s Road, a fuck of a lot happened from a character perspective and that’s why that makes this ep pretty good.

This is what I’ve been banging on about with how Detroit and The Devil’s Road didn’t do much. Not only did they not do much with plot they didn’t do much with anything. It was an hour to establish a sentence’s worth of stuff. Maybe a slightly run on sentence but even so. You’ve got seven episodes to do a very big book that did not lack for shit happening in it. Why are we dicking around here?

And I will say at this point in the show I am over the singing. I get it. They worked hard on it. Sam took singing lessons. There’s even a progression where now we know it’s on purpose that the first songs were god awful and then they get better as the season goes on. Great. They take too fucking long.

Look, I am a Lestat/Louis shipper. As the third known person to write Anne Rice fanfic on the internet I am arguably the Lestat/Louis shipper. Which means 1) I will be dead in the cold ground before I call it LouStat and 2) nobody is more primed for a scene of Lestat sing-fucking Louis while Louis watches him in adoration than I am and I was still checking my watch the whole time because Jesus Christ you’ve only got an hour here move it along already.

It’s called songfic, my dudes! We all fall victim to it, there’s no shame, but this is when you either admit that you let your id splooge all over the keyboard or you have friends as beta readers who remind you this is way too self indulgent to post.

And it’s every god damn episode now. Again, it’s great that y’all did this but “Lestat prances shirtless on stage while we have to wait and see if these are the lyrics that won’t make our ears bleed” is done. We’re good. We got it. Do a verse and release the rest of it on your YouTube channel, okay? Picture me clapping my hands here as I remind you We! Have! Story! To! Get! To! Seven eps is your time frame and you’re the ones wasting it!

But this goes back to my very point with Detroit and The Devil’s Road which is look: I get y’all are struggling budget wise. I get that the concept of the documentary - ie put Sam Reid in a chair on a soundstage you already have and just record him talking - and Lestat’s mental state - ie take existing clips from what is now three seasons of filming and reuse them - are clever ways to save money. I’m for it! I’m on your side!

Which is why I’m pointing to this episode and going yes! This! Do more of this!. Other than the restaurant which is simply set dressing changes, it’s a whole thing told with locations used in other episodes - if that, note how often we’re just looking at Louis and Lestat in the back seat of a car - but the locations don’t matter because what does matter is character development.

Detroit’s character development was “I’m fucking my mom, did I mention I’m fucking my mom? Fuck fuckity mom fucking” and that was it for that character beat. Contrast that with what we’re getting here of Louis and Lestat - again just talking! It is very cheap to have characters simply talk! - going through multiple lifetimes’ worth of relating to one another as they, to borrow a turn of phrase, work on their shit.

The scene of Louis confronting Lestat about fucking his mom could have in and of itself been an episode climax. And I want to stress this was beautifully done by Sam and Jacob Andersen (also shout out to Kevin Hanna and Ryan Kattner for writing). That was such a complicated scene of Louis rightfully calling Lestat out on so much he’d hidden and the mom fucking thing and Lestat likewise rightfully being able to point out Louis has done some fucked up shit too just last month as a matter of fact and they’re both wrong and both right even from a vampire perspective let alone a mortal one and they’re both angry and they still love each other and it’s really fucking complicated and Just! One! Scene!

And we got an episode of this! Scene after scene - yes including Jacob’s amazing acting to show us how much Louis adores Lestat while watching Lestat singing, and Sam’s wonderful touches of making Lestat seem so hurt and childlike when he’s at his most vulnerable.

And on top of all that sure! Let’s throw in a Claudia denouement as well! With props to Delainey Hayles for some well done and earned scenery chewing. But in and of itself that could’ve been a whole damn season of story, let alone an episode, let alone only part of an episode.

And even in that we’re getting layers and layers. The fact that Louis was flat out doing it to make himself feel better with zero thought of hey maybe Claudia finally deserves some peace for Claudia’s own sake is perfectly accurate to Louis and again gives so much depth that other episodes didn’t add to their stories. Claudia busting out with some cold hard truths was character development for her and yet another wonderful example of this series recontextualizing everything we knew before because the story always changes depending on who is telling it.

I just - argh! So good! The whole thing was so good! This again is why I get so frustrated when the series shits the bed because I’m here pointing at the great eps going I know you can do this! We’re not even talking an A- instead of an A! We’re talking A++ and did you spill something on the keyboard that day and turn it in calling it an episode because what the eff?

But yeah. Good stuff. Keep doing this, show. Hopefully next week as well.

Lagniappe

As always, things that don’t fit anywhere else

• Given Claudia’s revelations about her emotions and reasoning when she killed Lestat, I did ponder did her costuming during that episode now make retroactive sense? Given Carol’s typical costuming choices my guess is that it wasn’t on purpose the first time around but I wouldn’t rule out a retroactive making that work when they pondered what was going into tonight’s episode. If that makes sense.
• If you want to hear more about Lex Wood’s approach to costuming, there’s this article.
• One of the things I like about the series is that it takes advantage of the benefit of having all of the novels to make things canon that would have been if Anne Rice herself had known the first time around. For example, when writing The Vampire Lestat Anne didn’t yet have witches being a real thing in this world as something on her plate. That didn’t come in until Queen of the Damned and the Mayfair Witches specifically were much later when she wrote The Witching Hour. However, eventually she wrote all the characters meeting. So it makes perfect sense for the show to go hey, we’re just gonna include this shit from the get go.
• Raglan James is another example of this. He didn’t get introduced until a later book but since part of his character was being a member of the Talamasca and the show’s got the Talamasca, may as well be him!
• I did not read Merrick because by the time that book came out even I loved myself too much to subject myself to Anne’s writing. For you new book readers, Anne didn’t have to work with an editor after Queen of the Damned and whoo boy did it start showing. Still, there was a fairly good run there but once you get past Memnoch the Devil the returns even more sharply diminish. Then we get into how Anne’s writing was affected by her on again off again relationship with god and the Catholic church where even the story concepts are weaksauce before you even get to the writing quality and yeah, it’s a whole mess.
• That being said, I do have the general idea of what happens in Merrick and I think the show did a great version of it. Also props to Sarah Afful and the writing for making Merrick seem interesting and compelling in her own right and not as the book version of her who is such a flaming Mary Sue that Lestat himself would go “Girl, please” if not for how the writing of the novels forced him to do otherwise.
• Speaking of things I love myself too much to subject myself to, AMC’s The Mayfair Witches is a thing that exists. The only good thing I can say about it is that Harry Hamlin was the only person on that show who understood the assignment and I can absolutely see Lestat and his version of Cortland Mayfair hanging out. I mourn that we can’t, frankly.
• “Fraudia” was funny, not gonna lie.
• I’ve already said that in the books Lestat has zero motivations about this concert based on his mommy. I don’t want to get too much into details for spoiler purposes. But suffice it to say given what I know from the books vs what the show has indicated both will happen and has happened, I’m very interested to see how the show connects all the dots to make its own story.
• Given that they’re hoping for the season after this (and them appearing in Hall H at San Diego Comic Con next week after the finale heavily implies we’re getting that next season) I also suspect that we’re not going to get much by way of answers. Which, just to tee this up for you newbies, would be true to the book as well.
• I noticed Lestat had taken the time to put his hair back in a ponytail before going on that walk with Louis. I assumed it was to indicate his increased vulnerability. I suppose it, uh, did that for sure. Not the way I first assumed, but still.
• (I'm guessing something about filming just their heads next week works better if Sam's in a ponytail. Just a guess though.)

So yeah. One more ep of this season to go. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves in thinking we know what might happen.

Eh? Eh??? I’ll show myself out.