Something to keep in mind about the seance is that everyone, both the audience and the characters diagetically, knows how Claudia feels about Lestat. She hates him because he sucks and is awful, but he's her father who made her so she kinda loves him a little despite herself, and she has a begruding respect for him because of how much she recognizes herself in all of the above. That's it, that's the deal. This has been not so much telegraphed as a central conceit of the show from like, episode 1.5. She murdered him. She COULD burn him. She stuck a pen in his neck and wrote his last words in his own blood in her diary. "To beat Lestat you have to become Lestat" etc. etc. She didn't forgive Louis for bringing Lestat with them to Europe (metaphorically). Remember? The show remembers. Lestat remembers. The season isn't in Louis' point of view but I bet he remembers. These conflicting emotions are not contradictory and bad writing. It's extremely realistic and makes total sense to have complicated feelings about other people, especially your parents.
One of the things ghost Claudia says about Lestat in this scene is that as much as she hates him ("two men I hate") she can at least admire that he knows what his own deal is. I don't think this is always true, at least in terms of the ways in which he has been a victim. Much of season 3 concerns his coming to terms with his own traumas. But she's right that he is aware of his own monstrosity. Likewise, we are pretty aware of it. Louis is aware of it. It's in character but it's not a turn that demands focus and dramatic weight.
The interesting part of the seance is the reveal that she is deeply angry at Louis. She resents him and wants to hurt him. I don't think this is out of character or shocking. There are many scenes that deal with Claudia's frustration with Louis. Again, going back to 1.5, the consequential scene before she runs away is between her and Louis. She asks Louis why he did this to her. Her time away seems to soften her -- maybe. She writes in her diary that she's returning to him to be his sister. Then again, he's already read her diaries. Who knows why she wrote that. Then she stays with him, tries to take him away with her -- and remains angry at him when they actually manage to go. She's frustrated with him in Paris. She appears to be dismayed by at least one thing she learns about him at their trial.
The shock of ghost Claudia's anger and resentment comes from the fact that her feelings about Louis have been deep yet unresolved. The show has been from Louis' perspective, and so we've mostly seen a skewed view of their relationship. Not in a "Louis is a liar and a bad person" way; a relationship is two people and only one of them is there, so, it simply is. The scene where Daniel tells Louis he can't control the book's reception is really smart on this. People hate it because they find the idea of sexy Claudia Halloween costumes distasteful, and they are. But -- beyond that Daniel was apparently right and Claudia is a Halloween costume now, actually -- the point Daniel was (crassly) making is that how Louis sees his daughter is not how she will be viewed by anyone else. Louis loves control, but he cannot control anything other than his own feelings and actions. We've watched this show set up Louis' controlled narrative of Claudia. The dramatic impact of this scene is how that narrative is ruptured. Claudia does light into Lestat, but of course there is less emphasis on it. It's not as revealing. We've already pretty well covered Claudia's feelings on Lestat.
The thing that's cool about this show, or vampires in general, is that it exposes the horror of just like mundane real life by putting on a supernatural frame. What happens in life is that someone dies, and you miss them, and you do whatever you need to do with their memory and their possessions to heal yourself (or not). They're dead, so they don't get to tell you how they'd feel about what you're doing in the aftermath of their death. It's possible my dad would not like the cemetery plot I got him or the groundskeeping package I did or didn't pay for, but like, you know. He's not here to comment, and once he's dead the important thing is how I feel. Maybe I wonder if he'd be okay with what's happening to the shit he left for me, but that's my burden to internalize. If I'm bothered by this, at least there's a finite amount it will torture me, because I'll also die at some point. You know, probably.
So now we're on the supernatural show where the vampires who don't die can hire a witch to bring back their vampire ghost daughter. Crazy stuff. The horror of this is being confronted with what the dead person thinks about what happened following her death. It's cognitive dissonance that the living prioritize themselves and dispatch with the death of our loved ones basically however. You think that if only you could say goodbye and I Love You and I'm Sorry your dead person would be like, aw. But maybe they wouldn't. How would we ever know this? It's kind of a mercy that people just die and we keep going. You never have to find out that this person you care about is tortured, or suffering, or has been judging your stupid life decisions from beyond the grave. You get to conrol the narrative. You can't libel a dead person. They're not here to sue you.
We are all being presumptuous about the correct way to honor the dead. We tell ourselves we're doing what they would want, or what's best, what's correct. It would at least be emotionally honest to admit that how we treat the dead is based on the wants and needs of the living (and/or undead).
The point of the supernatural gothic horror show is to say, isn't it kinda nuts how people deal with grief? Wouldn't it be insane if your dead daughter actually saw what you were doing with the dress she died in? If Claudia's never coming back then who cares if Louis reads her diary entries, or for that matter, gives them to Daniel to incorporate into the vanity pseudo-memoir? Claudia is dead, so like, she's got no more use for this. Louis might as well do whatever he needs to with it. There's no better use for this than his own comfort. He's still here and she's not. But I think a lot of us have an emotional block when it comes to recognizing the things grief makes us do. Like, this isn't for them, it's for you, and that's fine. But again, the point of the show is, the vampires have the unnatural ability to talk to their ghost daughter. The show is not saying anything about the characters' grief, or grief in general, if Claudia's reaction is like, loving and normal.
As with inviting a journalist to interview and write a book about him, Louis is enterting this seance under the pretence that there will be a certain outcome that he gets to dictate. The drama and the catharsis and the entertainment and the fun of watching it lie in the turn. Like, wow, crazy fucked up if it turned out that the dead daughter whose absence I'm fixated on really hated me! What a nightmare, right? And the entire scene is emphasizing that reveal because the matter of the Claudia-Lestat relationship is not an open question. She stood there and watched him die, and then he stood there and watched her die. To give this equal emphasis would be giving air time to something we already know, and so do the characters in the scene.
This is not bad writing. This is like, very good TV. Actually.
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