The Vampire Lestat - “The Devil’s Road” Review
The flashbacks in “The Devil’s Road” are telling us something essential about where The Vampire Lestat is heading: Lestat de Lioncourt is not merely losing his mind. He is being unmade by the same force that made him. And Gabriella, it is becoming increasingly clear, is more than just a complicating presence in the story of the Great Conversion. She may be one of its primary architects.
“The Devil’s Road” is the fourth episode of a season that has been openly warring with itself – the kinetic energy and contemporary reference humor of the rock tour setting in constant friction with the atmospheric, lyrical psychodrama that has always been this franchise’s most distinctive quality. And when it trusts itself to carry these two tones simultaneously, it is extraordinary. The flashbacks to Lestat and Gabriella’s early vampiric life together are the episode’s most fully realized material – a portrait of a dynamic so thoroughly toxic that even the most romantic gestures are expressions of control. Lestat’s willingness to go along with whatever Gabriella wants as long as she stays with him does something crucial: it reveals that the Great Conversion is not a new threat but the inevitable product of a relationship that has been moving toward catastrophe for centuries. Lestat might just destroy a world he seems to genuinely love because destroying it is the only thing that will keep her.
Sam Reid continues to carry the season with a performance that operates simultaneously on several registers – the manic, performative Lestat of the tour and the wounded, increasingly destabilized Lestat underneath, who is beginning to see Nicky’s ghost in mirrors and hear the voices of vampires around the world being emboldened by his music. The shooting at the stage door lands not as a thriller beat but as a symptom – another external shock to a psyche that is already fracturing from within.
The episode’s parallel storylines maintain their own emotional weights. Louis’s increasingly complex grief-projection onto Regina, the Claudia lookalike waitress he has hired to stand in for his long-deceased daughter, is one of the season’s most uncomfortable subplots and its most honest – a man so unable to confront his grief directly that he has outsourced it to a transaction. Daniel and Armand’s bowling alley confrontation gives Daniel the magnificent vulgar monologue he has clearly been rehearsing in mirrors, while Armand’s warning about the Great Conversion signals that a larger threat is beginning to crystallize.
But where broken people like these will land when that threat fully arrives remains the biggest question of all.