I really do think that the beheadings were primarily intended to stop the Great Conversion. I also recently realized I was operating under the assumption from the very beginning that the plan was never to kill either Louis or Lestat, merely to incapacitate them long enough and definitively enough to miss the concert (apparently this was not a common assumption in the fandom). Why? They had Fareed for one, who —per earlier in the season when discussing the Budapest experiments and estimating that Louis could survive about 2 hours post decapitation and that Lestat could theoretically survive 8-10 hours— already knew that death did not occur immediately at the point of decapitation (as did Louis, who seemed already aware of that fact when he went on his own beheading spree in talking to decapitated heads, which makes me believe some amount of continued life after beheading was decently common knowledge).
As such, I also think that Armand, worn down more than a little bit by the emotional upheaval of the last years and especially by the last weeks (I’m looking at you, “Big Boss”), saw the opportunity for what it was and cracked. I hear what Assad said that Armand wouldn’t have gone through with it, and indeed he didn’t go through with it. He had Fareed there to monitor Louis and sew him back together. If the point was to torture Louis until he died, he could have approximated how much time Louis had left for the purpose of his own torture plans just by observing him.
Furthermore, I think this hypothesis is evidenced by the fact that Fareed did not look to be there all that willingly or happily (and further evidenced by Fareed’s obvious discomfort during that shoulder massage scene and his general tense affect). If Fareed were there just to monitor for the purpose of research, we would’ve seen him with the same sort of disengaged, stony-faced affect we’ve seen him with previously in Dubai and on the tour bus. But he was not happy, he was uncomfortable. When Armand asks towards the end how Louis is doing, he says “terrible”. If he were willingly there to “research” a subject post-beheading to the point of death, he wouldn’t have cared. He might’ve said, “declining” or something similar. But he did care and grew more visibly anxious the closer Louis got to death, making me think Louis was never supposed to die. The more Fareed believed he might, the more uncomfortable with the situation he became.
Similarly, because Lestat was estimated to have the capacity to survive 8-10 hours post-decapitation, I wonder if the plan really was to let Lestat die or if putting Lestat’s head in a bag and walking off with it served as a pressure point for Louis and a bit of catharsis for Daniel. They had 8-10 hours, it was a fairly safe move given that Louis would only have about 2. The Talamasca then interfered before we could properly answer the question or explore it further.
So no, I don’t think this was inherently OOC or diverging from the established plot. I just think that Armand and Daniel had a plan, saw the opportunity for a side quest, took it, and were then interrupted.
