When Lestat gives you the finger, it’s literal.
Our unhappy family just can’t stay apart, can they?
This time Claudia’s (Bailey Bass) the one delivering birds to Louis.
Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
Daniel (Eric Bogosian), however, is stuck on Lestat’s surprise Superman-like flying skills.
“Not like Superman,” Louis corrects him.
“Superman is a fictional character.”
Bailey Bass as Claudia, Jacob Anderson as Louis De Point Du Lac and Sam Reid as Lestat De Lioncourt.Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
Daniel confirms that he does, although he always wakes up before Louis' invitation back to his apartment.
(Remember this it’s important later!)
Daniel has another word for it: Stockholm syndrome.
Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
And in fact, the estrangement between the two vampires isn’t permanent.
(Listen for the off-camera sounds of the poor thing crashing around the house.)
It may be the happiest we’ve ever seen Louis and Claudia.
Then Lestat turns back up with a wrapped copy of a 15th-century Book of Hours for Louis.
As far as answers, that one’s pretty clear.
“I’m nothing without you,” he says.
“I’m nothing without both of you.”
In the present, Daniel’s understandably intrigued to hear Lestat’s actual voice.
What delicious evidence to bring to life the towering figure in Louis' story.
“Write me a song with your lover’s voice in it?
What the f— is wrong with you?”
He swims the dang Mississippi River to find Lestat and Antoinette together in bed and orders her to leave.
In the funniest exchange of the episode, she protests that it’sherhouse, but Lestat tells her to bounce.
Now that Lestat’s back home, there are rules: Kill Antoinette.
Quit treating Claudia, now almost 33, like a child.
And no more lies.
Lestat vehemently denies it.
Then Claudia asks about his maker, and Lestat smirks at the way they’ve forced his hand.
Then he launches into his origin story.
The vampire’s name was Magnus.
He kidnapped Lestat and locked him in a tower with corpses that looked just like him.
Magnus fed on him for a week, turned him, and promptly threw himself into a fire.
Lestat received no advice, no training.
He struggled with the concept of drinking the blood of others and asked God to take this burden away.
“But I have a capacity for enduring,” he says in the understatement of the century.
“It’s why I don’t particularly like being abandoned.”
Knowing Lestat, it’s 99.99 percent the latter.
It doesn’t go well.
Then one night, Lestat comes home with a finger wrapped in a newspaper reporting on Antoinette’s death.
Claudia tosses the digit but keeps the ring.
(They didn’t have DNA back then!
Could Lestat not have taken a finger from one of his victims?)
Oh, girlfriend, you chose poorly.
(This happens in the middle of sex with Lestat, which is utterly perfect.)
The train leaves in an hour, and she’s going to Prague, Bucharest, Varna.
But Louis won’t go with her.
“Hey sis,” he says.
“You don’t need me.
You think you do, but you don’t.”
After all, a Black girl wasn’t allowed in first class in 1939.
Sure, it would cure his Parkinsons, but watching his daughters marry, divorce, die?
Good thing he stopped Claudia from heading to Europe, right?
Further, he can listen to vampire thoughts from a distance and knows exactly what Bruce did to her.
“He thinks of you often,” Lestat says.
“Could you imagine if something like that happened again?
Louis would never forgive himself.”
Eventually she cuts to the chase: “I’m going to kill him.”
Louis warns her that he’ll kill her for trying, but Claudia knows that Louis wants that too.
He’d enjoy it, even.
In the present, Louis says, “We were going to kill Lestat.”
But Daniel’s fallen asleep sitting upright, worn out by his treatment.
Louis asks Rashid to cover him with a blanket.
And here we get a new flashback.
But Louis says Daniel’s really after drugs and offers the good stuff back at his place.
Daniel asks for the interview, and that’s when Rashid joins them.
Daniel wakes up with a start.
