IWTVL S3 Musings: Reviews Are Out! (Pt2: Spoiler Heavy!)
Just like I did for S2, I'm compiling the current reviews thematically, to see what they each have to say at once. Here I'll only be looking at reviews from Q+ Magazine and HollywoodNews, cuz they both spoiled TF out of the show (I'll do the Nerdist's general review & DM review later; I'm exhausted 😅).
Right, we were already told that there'd be a "posthumous auction" and everyone assumes Lestat's dead.
But "following a global catastrophe....." 👀🔥🔥🔥
Ohhhh, so Akasha's already dead & gone!
The auction is run by the Talamasca WHAT?! Lestat's Failures & documentary are both part of the thins being sold off.
Louis & Armand are there, because ofc they are--Louis probably buys the whole kit & kaboodle.
So WHOSE POV are we seeing in any of S3? 👀
The documentary can't film Lestat hallucinating any of his ghosts--that's all mental/psychological. So we HAVE to see Lestat's POV--which means either this is AMC's 3rd party narrator giving us the rundown after the fact, or Lestat's somewhere and we're seeing it all thru his eyes, separate from the documentary & Failures.
Ok, and they already told us Akasha shows up in Ep5 (that Hannah Moscovitch co-wrtote with Daniel Hart). I'm seated.
I am deeply interested in seeing the full gamut of Nickistat's failmarriage. I'm already expecting to cry; cuz as much as I don't like him, it's undeniable that Nicki was the first victim/casualty of Lestat's failure as a Maker. The false-start with Gabrielle (who thrived as a vampire) gave Lestat the wrong impression about vampirism as the panacea for pain, and he irresponsibly failed to understand this with Louis, too; repeating the same mistake all over again. People keep saying Claudia should've never been made, but in fact it was Nicki & Louis who should've never been made. 😬
Unreliable Narrators Abound 🧢
"This is not a show about objective truth. It is a show about emotional truth under distortion, which is why sometimes the truth only appears when the narrative fractures, when the ''muses' interrupt his control and the past reveals itself in sharper, more violent detail."
My question remains how reliable the hallucinations/ghosts are. If they're just manifestations of a guilty conscience that WANTS to be cussed out or given confirmation bias about things, then the (objective) truth can't come from the muses, either; just the emotional truth.
"Reid is meticulous in the way he modulates Lestat depending on who he is with. Around his band, there is dominance. Around Louis, there is softness and love buried beneath hurt and provocation. Around Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), there is a child’s hunger, endlessly reshaping itself into whatever might earn him her closeness. Around Daniel (Eric Bogosian), there is antagonism and resentment. Around Armand (Assad Zaman), there is exasperation and defiance. Around his fans, there is performance. Around himself, eventually, there is just exhaustion."
Which is why Q+ also says the closest we get to Lestat's "emotional truth" IS with Louis. But IMO the most important (and harrowing) of these dynamics is Gabrielle. 👀 The more I hear about her, the more disgusted I'm getting. 💀
"A swaggering sex obsessed arrogant idiot"
STFU--"coupled up" with WHOMST?! 👀👀👀 Do they mean the Montreal Teaser, where Loustat was flirting around each other b4 the book dropped--or is this someone else Louis' with? 👀👀👀
(Whoever made this Q+ article is a beautiful writer. Just as an aside.)
"Only one relationship feels consistently grounded in something real, even if that “real” is messy, painful, and often destructive: Louis.... He is positioned as the closest thing Lestat has ever had to emotional truth.... Even when Louis is absent from parts of Lestat’s narrative, his presence shapes nearly every choice Lestat makes.... The anger, heartbreak, desperation, and vulnerability threaded through most of the songs trace back to Louis.... Jacob Anderson once again proves why Louis is the emotional anchor of this universe."
Character of all time, LDPDL, the man that you are~! 😤👌
"The Vampire Lestat succeeds because it understands Lestat himself. The series does not reduce him to a monster or myth, nor does it attempt to redeem him into a hero.... So by the time viewers reach the season’s climax, whether they love Lestat, hate him, fear him, pity him, or all four simultaneously, one thing is certain: they will understand him in ways they never did before."
And that was the whole point of TVL: for LOUIS to finally understand Lestat. I've said 1000x that book/film!Loustat was Vegas Married, where they just didn't KNOW each other--and Louis certainly knew EFF ALL about Lestat, which is why he drew so many horrible conclusions about him based on the horrible things he saw Lestat actually DO, but never explained. 🤷♂️
TVL was Lestat's apology to Louis--but I have an inkling that AMC's version is also a larger apology Lestat's making to ALL of his "Failures;" esp. Claudia & Nicki who are dead & gone.
Gosh, they're REALLY tight-lipped with Claudia deets!
CRAP, she doesn't show up until later in the season.
"Without giving away too much of how this is handled, there comes a moment where that carefully constructed image begins to fracture in a way that feels deliberately mirrored across that specific episode’s emotional structure—the show asks us to watch different layers of harm collapse at the same time, and it’s, for lack of a better word, simply brilliant."
I DEEPLY suspect that they're skirting around the Claudia-shaped elephant in the room, and whatever the seance episode (3x6? 👀) will be.
Cuz none of Lestat's history of abuse really matter in the grand scheme of things, except for how that started a cycle that perpetuated with all of his fledglings, culminating in the worst failure of Lestat's life: Claudia. Cuz there's no reason she had to die, except for the fact that BOTH of her fathers royal effed up raising her. But because she's LESTAT'S Blood Child, the cycle MUST stop with him.
"The Vampire Lestat does not sanitize its protagonist, nor does it attempt to excuse him. Instead, it contextualizes him."
Staple this to the heads of every Lestan who keeps VICTIM BLAMING Louis & Claudia, please.
"One of the show’s greatest strengths is how directly it engages with the abuse that shaped Lestat long before we met him."
"His mortal life is marked by neglect, emotional violence, and forms of abuse that continue to echo long after his transformation....The show returns to this repeatedly, not as exposition, but as emotional logic. Lestat doesn’t just hurt people but reenacts patterns of being hurt, even when he believes he is in control of them."
"Trying to shake off his abusive mother."
Trust me, guys. The superfans already told us "this isn't The Abuse Show." Rest assured that no toxic dynamics were harmed in the making of this show. 🙄 No generational abusive cycles are cycling, where Lestat perpetuates patterns where hurt people hurting people, surely not. 😒
The ONLY thing that's shocking me is how AMC's apparently diverting focus from Lestat's FATHER as the catalyst of his rage ("I have my father/maker's temper") to his frikkin MOTHER. It reveals a buried layer of his trauma, where he attributes all of his toxic traits to his dad; when really, the most toxic one in his life's been Gabrielle the whole time. But because of the way she's twisted his mind up, he can't even process the damage she did to him, and puts it all on his father & Magnus, the ones he has an easier time acknowledging abused him at all.
"She...is competitive with Louis,"
Gabrielle, I PROMISE you, I will drop-kick you into the volcanoes of Mordor if you even THINK of stepping in Louis' face. 😤🔪😤🔪😤🔪
"Zaman is brilliant whether being subjected to Lestat’s rage baiting antics or carrying out acts of such profound villainy you will be aghast."
"Eric Bogosian as Daniel is arguably underused this season."
Uh-oh. So even Ebogo's additions he told Rolin to give him weren't enough? Which is wild, cuz the promo's been shoving Ebogo in our faces since day one--which is precisely what they did on Talamsca, acting as if he was gonna be equal prominent on the show itself, when in reality he was only in like 5 minutes tops of the first episode and never showed up again for the rest of the season, LOL.
"Eric Bogosian’s Daniel Molloy also receives far more material than viewers may expect,"
This is hilarious--cuz THN said Ebogo wasn't in the show enough, LOL.
"viewers should absolutely not underestimate how much damage Armand is capable of causing. The season understands exactly how terrifying he can be beneath all the restraint and elegance, and it weaponizes that beautifully."
What on earth...? 😰😰😰 WTF is this dude UP TO?!
The first 2 episodes are (initially) more comedic. We've already been told that Magnus shows up in Ep3, so it makes sense that that's when The Horrors will begin.
"Despite Lestat's desire for a rewrite we do not go over old ground.... All the key elements of the book are touched upon. The wolves get an AMC budget friendly appearance."
Uh-oh. As long as y'all pull the CGI BS they did on Mayfair Witches (x x).
But are there EIGHT wolves or not then? 👀 We only saw ONE of Lestat's dogs in the trailer, which already concerned me; that it wouldn't be an entire pack vs pack battle. But oh well, wtvr, I'm sure they'll do the quality justice, even if the quantity leaves us wanting. Which is the vibe I'm getting with ALL of these reviews, really.
"It’s television at its best, at its most alive. Easily one of the year’s strongest series and an early contender for our best television of 2026. And with only six episodes seen for the purposes of this review, we’re left with one certainty: the Vampire Lestat has not played its final note yet. And something tells us the encore might just kill us all."
What makes me nervous is how none of these reviewers/screeners have seen the season finale. And 2x8 already taught us that Rolin Jones is ready & willing to rug-pull TF out of us in the season finale; flipping everything we THINK we know clean out the window. He's a SADIST.
I'm so excited for June 7th that I could burst into tears. These 2 years have been BRUTALLY UNFAIR, AMC.
