Generally speaking I enjoyed watching s3, especially getting to anticipate a new episode every week. And there were moments that absolutely hit. But christ. The bad taste in my mouth.
I'll follow jam and their performance of loustat anywhere though!
So I hold out hope in my heart for s4 if we can just get Black writers and directors back in the room. Especially vital I think to bring in Black women for this project finally, as Akasha becomes a major character. God, s4 has to be good because I'm still so so excited for more Akasha.
But I was a fan of sleepy hollow and american gods, so I'd be more optimistic about turning the ship around if I hadn't been burned before. Am I going to watch an incredible show go up in flames because of anti-blackness AGAIN???
Not that it would be any less terrible if it was a worse show or something, but these actors deserve a positive working environment and scripts that honor the depth with which they play these characters.
Actually just rambling about personal complaints below:
I think there were a lot of structural issues with this season also and the poorly paced arc and complete failure to tell a complete story (which they absolutely did in seasons 1 and 2) is very unsatisfying. But I never expected to like this season as much as the first two, and I could be like "well that's too bad, but there are growing pains with the switch in main character" about all that if it wasn't for everything that happened with Louis, Regina, and Claudia. Like I don't have anything to add that Black fans aren't saying about the racism. So I won't get into specific problems that others have spoken on more eloquently already. But also like... what was the point of any of that!!! What did that add to not only Louis's character arc but the narrative of the show as a whole???? Did they just want to keep Delainey around but came up with all THAT???? As much as I appreciate her work with the material she was given, I do think narratively having her appear more sparingly only as Claudia would have hit harder emotionally. A heavy weight in the story in her absence, or appearing as a hallucination to Lestat and Louis until the seance when the real Claudia finally gets to speak (which should have been, almost was because Delainey's amazing, a powerful and gratifying moment for that character like I do think they Both deserved to be screamed at, I can fully believe that she would express resentment and anger towards Louis that has grown more hateful in her decades of a lost, lonely death. But I can't appreciate what worked about it because I am distracted!!! By the fact that a team of non-Black writers wrote her saying all that shit!!!!!) And why am I watching those two actors getting gruesomely tortured as the climax of the season for the second time in a row. What's the narrative purpose of that repetition??? I think they failed badly if it they meant it to feel poignant for Louis to find himself watching a woman who looks like Claudia being harmed by Armand again. Not that I think Armand doesn't love torturing people or that he wouldn't try to force an apology under duress, but there had to be a better execution for a confrontation between him and Louis. (Though Assad Zaman looked incredible in that scene and "armends" did really get me.)
And While I'm Complaining. The framing device of "The Failures" did not work. In the first two seasons we could question Louis's memory of his past while taking what was happening in the modern day as objective reality. Framing the entire season as something Lestat is telling us breaks that established expectation, so either we're being asked to take everything he says at face value OR I'm supposed to question literally everything that happens. And I really don't enjoy in stories when they give the audience room to be like "well maybe that was made up by Lestat actually so we can't judge the characters or the writers for it." And also, if it was the case that I was seeing this season through Lestat-vision, the lack of passion and complicated love and obsession, yearning, regret, all that in addition to the petty selfish anger, in the portrayal of Louis is even more frustrating. I think Louis's subjective depiction of Lestat came through in s1-2: we saw how for all the monstrous ways that Lestat hurt him, despite thinking Lestat was personally responsible for Claudia's death and not knowing that it was Lestat that saved him, he couldn't stop the love coming through.
I also think: episode 1 was a little too much for an entire season to be that chaotic, but the season overall absolutely could have been Even More frenetic, weird, kooky, and messy in terms of aesthetic and storytelling while having also better pacing and a complete arc. (Now we've fully descended into complaints based my personal taste.)
here's to season 4 being better than this one, so I can look back on s3 as a low point in a series that regained at least some of the strength of its early seasons. Poor execution really doesn't matter that much to me, as unfortunate as it is given the quality of the first two seasons, if they can address the loss of the level of care that was so critical to its storytelling.
