The Vampire Lestat - “Montreal” Review
At the end of “Montreal,” Lestat de Lioncourt and Louis de Pointe du Lac sit on a park bench together – after a night that has included a sex tape, a blood-vomiting panic attack, and a séance in which the ghost of their dead daughter called them both dumb bitches and announced she hated Louis more than anything she had ever known – and imagine a possible future.
A little trailer in the desert. Evening primrose. Lestat transcribing the birdsong of whatever birds live in the desert. Their hands graze. They look at each other with a century of age and affection and weariness in their eyes.
And then Armand and Daniel behead them from behind.
The penultimate episode of The Vampire Lestat is the best the season has produced, and it earns that distinction by returning to the thing that made this franchise extraordinary in the first place: Lestat and Louis together, occupying the same space, doing what they have always done – loving each other with the exhausted depth of people who have been doing this for a hundred years, and circling the fundamental question of what they are to each other with more honesty than either of them can usually manage.
The episode opens on Halloween in Montreal, Lestat checking a devastating Pitchfork review from inside his coffin while preparing for the memorial concert that may very well summon Akasha and end civilization. Louis is in town. He thinks the concert is a terrible idea. Their banter, when they reunite, has an unusual gentleness that Louis immediately identifies as ominous. “Why are you being so nice? I don't like it.” Lestat is dressed, with characteristic self-awareness, as the Grim Reaper.
What unspools from there is the episode’s controlled detonation of accumulated secrets. The sex tape – revealing Gabriella’s identity – lands on Louis’s phone with the timing of a precision strike, and the scene that follows is the season’s most extraordinary: Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson navigating a confrontation that involves blood vomit, genuine horror, equally genuine tenderness, and the specific grief of watching someone you love realize that the damage you carry goes deeper than they understood. Lestat collapses into a panic attack. Louis cries for him. He can see, in the way only someone who has loved a person for a century can see, that Lestat has been victimized – that his impossible nature has impossible roots. He takes him to a bar and asks more gently.
The séance, facilitated by Merrick Mayfair – establishing a crossover with Mayfair Witches – is the episode’s other great set piece, and Delainey Hayles’s return as Claudia’s ghost is a genuinely chilling piece of performance. She appears as a cyclone of rage and pain, and what she delivers is not closure but its opposite: the revelation that she framed Lestat, that she is suffering in the underworld still searching for Madeleine, and that her hatred of Louis is total and specific. It is a challenging, frightening sendoff that honors everything the show has built around this character by refusing to make any of it neat.
The cliffhanger – Armand and Daniel stepping out of the Halloween darkness to behead Lestat and Louis in a single swift motion – is the season’s most genuinely shocking image. What it means, given what we know about vampire physiology and the fact that Lestat’s voice on the recordings has described this very night, is a question for the finale to answer.