Sad thoughts after TVL ep 7
Ok. So I really didn’t like the finale. It honestly made me re-evaluate even the things I did like earlier in the season, which is a difficult thing to process. Having the cognitive dissonance around having loved the first two season, having devoted so much thought to the characters, and having defended the season up until the reframing of the finale episode is really difficult. There are still things I enjoyed and maybe I’ll come back to them. But for now I need to process my feelings, and I do best in writing. So here are my thoughts.
To me, Armand has never actually been a schemer. He’s a manipulator, but he moves out of fear. When he chose the coven in Paris, it was to ensure his own survival. (And also to eliminate the reflection of himself that he saw in Claudia, perhaps. More on that in a bit). When he erased Louis’s memory, it was to preserve his companionship. These are all game-time decisions made to preserve himself. And sure, maybe he took some pleasure in the aesthetic art of the trial. That doesn’t change the fact that he was and always is grasping for security.
Because of that, I find the idea that he would use facial recognition software, track Regina down, blackmail and cajole her into following Louis around the world in order to bait him into… what? Reliving the misery he spent seven decades trying to erase out of Louis’s head? Pretty out of character. I can see Armand wanting revenge. I cannot see him carrying out a three year detailed multi-step scheme to get it. I also don’t understand logistically what this was supposed to accomplish—Regina didn’t actually lure Louis back to Armand, because Regina was in NYC and the butcher shop is in Montreal.
I also feel like that whole thing being designed by Armand really lowers the emotional impact of the weird emotional incest between Louis and Regina. It cheapens a thing that felt really emotionally complex to me. It was actually just a part of an evil plan. A puzzle box all along.
Speaking of Regina. It is wild to me that the episode critiqued Louis as a pimp so much without pointing out that Armand was basically doing the same thing with Regina- paying her to pursue a client. @bluedalahorse I talked a lot about how the scene would have been way more impactful if Regina hadn’t been an Armand plant, but had accidentally stumbled into the scene in the butcher shop while searching for Louis to get him to give her the money he owed her. That could have created a moment where Armand was suddenly confronted with her resemblance to Claudia as well. Armand could have reckoned with why he did what he did to Claudia. He could have acknowledged some of the parallels between himself and Claudia, and that would segued into the way that Louis genuinely understands his pain and creates that moment of empathy between them. Armand letting Regina go because he realizes some of the mistakes he made with Claudia would have been an actual moment of growth for his character.
I did like that moment. Assad’s acting in that moment especially was wonderful. But the fact that it had to literally be tortured out of Louis did make it feel cheap to me. I did not like that two South Asian men were portrayed to be conducting non-consensual medical experiments on two Black people, one of whom resembles Claudia who was a disabled Black woman. There are too many examples of very real medical experiments unethically conducted on Black people for me to be comfortable about that. There are too many instances in fiction of Muslim coded characters being maniacal villains for me to be comfortable with that. And the fact that they made such a big deal about it being in a Jewish deli?? Why??? That was so weird and uncalled for.
I think people are going to justify Armand’s apology/revenge tour as him reverting back to his Children of Darkness days, but I actually find it kind of hard to square with that. Armand’s actions are rooted in a search for survival, but also, always in self-denial. That’s what being a part of the cult taught him: pleasure and beauty is barred to him. He must carry out Satan’s wishes. So he’s violent, and he’s cruel, but those things are based in self-flagellation more than they are based in animus against the outside world. There’s a world where in this season we saw Armand sink deeper and deeper into self-harm as no one accepted his apology, where he denied himself food and happiness, and only arrived at these horrible acts at the end of that journey. I could even see a world where they put his end-of-Memnoch suicide attempt in this season. Maybe we still will see some of that if we rewind and see some of Armand’s point of view of the events. But that does not square with Armand birthing this horrible plot from the moment he was thrown into the wall in Dubai, and meditating on it for three years.
It also doesn’t really square with Armand turning Daniel three weeks after Dubai in my mind. If Armand was already occupied developing this evil plan—why stop to turn Daniel along the way? Maybe he really was turned out of spite, and to spite Louis specifically and not Daniel. I will hold out hope until we see otherwise that that is not the case, and that there was tenderness in the act. In general, I don’t really see how Armand being so hung up on revenge against Louis squares with him realizing that his love for Daniel was so present in Dubai. Maybe this is me woobifying devil’s minion too much, but the thing that is so special about them to me both in the text of the book and meta narrative of Anne’s writing is that loving Daniel is Armand’s redemption. The devil’s minion chapter prevented Armand from ever becoming the revenge-seeking person we’re seeing here. So what does it mean for Armand to be doing this with Daniel by his side? How can their love ever have that tenderness and that redemptive quality to it?
I can think of some answers and places the show might go. I can see that Daniel was initially able to surprise a true moment of emotional vulnerability out of Armand, and that Armand then clamped down by revealing the stalking and nothing more about a past relationship (and I do still believe that there is more; the lack of information in this season just feels like there’s more to come). Daniel is won over by the promise of vampiric power and revenge against Lestat and also a sexual attraction to Armand he can’t control. He goes along with the plan and gets swept up in the sex they’re having. But maybe he’s also there to get answers. Maybe he’s not so in the fog that he isn’t also investigating Armand still. He loves him but he can’t trust him. And that would honestly square more with what I know of Daniel. Daniel is mean and vicious but not without a point. It doesn’t seem in character to me for him to be chopping heads for the sake of chopping heads. (But he’s the minion! I hear you say. Well yes. But the whole point of devil’s minion is actually Armand granting Daniel’s every wish. Not Daniel being a henchman for revenge plots). But if there’s a story at the other end of it, then I believe he’d be there at Armand’s side. And maybe it’s in that reveal that they will find real honesty with each other, and that’s when that true and redemptive love can start. But will the show do this? I have no idea.
(I also can’t imagine that Daniel would have co-signed Armand torturing Louis like that. Louis and Daniel are made at each other, but they still have a profound connection, and Daniel starts the season out hoping for Louis’s approval. I wonder if Armand lied to him about what he planned to do with Louis’s head, and why he needed to separate Lestat and Louis.)
I also really hated the cracks that Daniel made about autism. That felt especially wild considering how autistic coded Armand is. I also wonder if Alex refusing to talk is a nod to book Daniel going mad after being around Armand, and if so I doubly dislike the comments. I’ve always loved Daniel as a disabled fan, and to have the one-two punch of him being magically cured and then to have him say those things felt really bad.
Everything in Lestat’s mind palace was pretty fine I think. I liked him having to confront all of his failed loves and his kills. I liked it culminating in Lestat refusing to perform for Gabriella. That’s the answer to the dramatic question of the season—will Lestat shake off Gabriella’s control, and be able to reconcile with his past? And the answer is yes. But it feels so overshadowed by the B plot (btw I’m so sorry y’all for this post, I was wrong, Armand was not the C plot protagonist but simply the extremely villainous B plot antagonist, once again) that it didn’t really have the punch I feel like it should have. Why were we spending so much time in a horror movie when we should have been building up to this moment of emotional catharsis? Why were we bogged down by puzzle box reveals when we should have been letting Lestat’s emotions soar? The engine of this show has always been relationships, especially the romance between Lestat and Louis, and I felt like this episode barely touched on it.
The other thing that this finale left completely unaddressed was the trial. Since there was no “Armand was keeping Lestat hostage” reveal, I have to assume that Lestat really was there of his own free will to get revenge. I don’t think we’re going to dip back into the past of Paris again, or at least I hope not, because at this point I cannot survive another “Armand is secretly evil” reveal. In another better finale, Armand would be torturing Lestat’s dismembered head, not Louis’s. We could have focused more in on the Lesmand relationship, and about how desperate Armand always was for Lestat’s love that he never got. We connect that back to a flashback in the 18th century with Lestat being cruelly dismissive of a desperate Armand, and then to the trial as well, with Armand keeping Lestat in Magnus’s tower. Then it’s up to Lestat to extend understanding to Armand, and it becomes about him recognizing the ways in which he and Armand are similar and have both fallen into the role of abusers to people they claim to love. It becomes more about Lestat reckoning with his failures (the theme of the series!), rather than a Black man being mutilated and then convinced to apologize to his abuser. But since none of this actually happened, it’s very weird that Lestat’s dream sequence doesn’t touch on his role at the trial at all. Paul tells Lestat that he “loved Louis the way he should be loved” or whatever, but no one’s addressing that he went to Paris to seek revenge (after dropping Louis from the sky). (I also did not enjoy another Black character arriving simply to sanctify Lestat. In another episode with less going wrong I would be 100% caught up on that. But as it is it barely enters my list of most egregious sins).
I honestly wish that they had completely cut Armand out of the present day in this season and let him just be in flashbacks. Save devil’s minion and his emotional arc for season 4 if this was the alternative. I think a season 4 that actually does some Armand pov and develops devil’s minion could go a long way to putting the Armand we just saw in context. But at this point I don’t really trust the writers to necessarily deliver on that. And there’s no way for me to erase the image of him torturing two Black characters in a moment that feels deeply out of character from my mind.
I haven’t even really written in depth about my feelings about the séance scene yet, but I also felt really frustrated by that and the way it throws so much of the first two seasons into question. I feel like the writers really felt excused from having to think seriously about questions of race (and disability and queerness, to a lesser degree) now that they have “proven” themselves in the first two seasons and now that the show has changed title. Things that I think really needed an adaptational deft hand like the séance were ported over unchanged from the books, uncomfortable implications about abuse victims intact, while other things that I did not think needed to be reinvented or made up whole cloth, like Armand’s revenge tour, where given their own spin by the writers. It really felt like the things they picked to bring over were highlighting the worst elements of Anne’s writing rather than the best. I really, desperately hope that can change moving forward.
I also have no idea how much we’re supposed to trust Lestat’s recounting of events. Does Daniel really know the word yaoi? Or is that something Lestat is putting into his mouth? Did Claudia really say she hated Louis more than Lestat, her primary abuser? Or is that Lestat’s spin on the séance? Does it matter, if the show runners are implying that Lestat is inherently more trustworthy than Louis?
I feel a little embarrassed in some ways, because I am normally quite good at spotting a writing flip like this a mile off. I’ve done it with other shows I’ve loved less. But because I shared a playwriting background with Hannah and Rolin, and because of the quality of the first two seasons, I really defended them and the promise of this season. And there were a lot of elements of this season earlier on that I really liked! But I can’t ignore what is wrong with it now, and I’m sorry I tried to minimize the possibility of things going south like this. I do have faith in the careful attention this fandom pays to these characters, and I am looking forward to reading fic that adds the depth that was missing in canon, especially around Armand. I love how people in my little fan circles love Armand and Daniel and the other characters too. I guess that’s the note I’ll end on. I’m going to go work on my own writing now, with characters I love and can control, and when I’m feeling ready, maybe I’ll get back to writing about these vampires too.
