Regarding the theme of failures, I think Daniel looking gleeful when Lestat is narrating his harrowing story has very little to do with Lestat himself and very much to do with Daniel not feeling like a failure of a journalist anymore. Daniel has been off his game throughout this entire documentary-making process, things are obviously made infinitely harder for him by having Lestat as his interviewee, and having a bunch of people all around them when he stated in s1e1 that he did his best work one on one. And Daniel knows he’s off his game. All his life, journalism has been his one stable ground. No matter how turbulent his personal life was, he always had his tremendous skill as a journalist as his grounding tool. Journalism wouldn’t abandon him even if everyone else does. And he knows he is great at it. He depends on it like it’s his life force.
Now, all of a sudden, everything in his life has gone haywire in a matter of days. His forgotten trauma of the 6 days in SF, which has probably affected him his entire life, has come to the surface. He has been made into a vampire against his will (as Eric has said). And he has been abandoned by his maker. He has no one to help him with his transformational trauma. No one to show him the ropes. We know that the first years of being a vampire are the hardest. And he is totally alone in this misery. A misery that is significantly heightened by his vampirism. He has relapsed into his addiction to cope with this and possibly it’s more severe than ever before because drugs are no longer doing much physical damage to him, so he’s probably taking copious amounts of them. He left his addiction back in his youth, lived a rich life, and now has relapsed after so long.
And the fucked-up cocktail of all this is taking a toll on his work. He tries to rely on journalism for his sense of self, like he has always done when shit hits the fan, only this time it isn’t working. At all. He is like an incessant provocative battering ram with his questions instead of a brilliantly perceptive investigative journalist at the top of his game. (Just imagine telling human Daniel what question he should ask in his interview. Yeah.) And he’s making no progress despite his almost desperate attempts at making Lestat talk. Lestat is totally fucking with him. He’s an inexperienced baby vamp before this centuries-old mega-powerful god of a vampire. He is nothing in front of Lestat. And he knows and understands all of this even if he is in denial mode. And it’s destroying his self-esteem and his self-identity. He thinks of himself as a professional failure now on top of everything else.
So when Lestat starts spilling the beans about Nicki, Daniel’s open glee is more like, “Yes, finally! I am not a failure anymore.” rather than him finding delight in Lestat’s pain (although that’s there too.) Like, everything in his life and self, right now, depends upon Lestat talking. Daniel is drowning and that one moment of him thinking he made a breakthrough was his raft.
When I first watched ep3, I really despised Daniel in it. Which was hard on me because I love love Daniel. I just couldn’t get past his glee at Lestat’s pain and while he had been mean in the past, and he was mean most of the time, there had also been a streak of humanity, of kindness in him. So, I have been thinking about him a lot these past few days. And these three posts really made me reflect on him.