I have! A theory!
The title of this essay is: "We'll Be In Hell Together After All"
The second I saw my beautiful canceled wife in the eyepatch I squinted suspiciously and whispered, "Interesting choice. Lestat's the one who loses his eye in the books. In Memnoch. Why are they giving a Memnoch clue to Armand?"
And then I thought about it and i realized that it would be a VERY clever and elegant way to get themselves out of a looming and ominous ticking time bomb situation which would be genuinely heartbreaking in real life. Which is that it takes two years to make a season, and Eric Bogosian is... what, 73? And he might... you know. Want to retire to the South Pacific with his beautiful wife, if we are being optimistic.
Fortunately they already have a Backup Daniel in their pockets, an Understudy Daniel if you will. So they'd just have to figure out a clever way to swap in New Daniel in a way that is.... sleek and sense-making. There are four possible options as I see it:
Don't swap in LBF, just cast someone new as Old Maniel. We did it with Claudia, we can do it again. This is the worst possible option, we don't like this one, no one likes this one.
Swap in LBF, put him in old man makeup, and don't draw attention to it. This is possible but clunky and inelegant and painfully Obvious and, from a production standpoint, Expensive. Daily prosthetics/makeup like that is Expensive.
Lean into Fareed's mad science vibes and at some point show us a lab that has clone bodies floating in tubes, including one of Daniel. Take advantage of canonical soul-swapping and yeet Daniel into his new body during Tale of the Body Thief. This is plausible and kind of fun, but a little bit... hmmm... Convenient. As a choice, it is possible, but it's just not the most elegant choice you could make to solve this problem.
Lean into it without flinching and make the swap an intentional plot point: We take the Memnoch plotline, we massage it from a Divine Comedy thing to an Orpheus-and-Eurydice thing, we kill off Daniel (I SEE YOU, BABY JENKS "Oh he dies baaaaad" LINE!!!), and Armand goes to hell to fetch him back. The Daniel he finds in hell is played by LBF. This is *THEEEEEEEE* most elegant possible way to do it. Not only are you leaning on canon plotlines that would otherwise be set in the "?????? anne what do we do with this" bucket, but then you can bring in the VIBES of the Devil's Minion chapter original turning scene with Armand coming to save Daniel. And the fandom makes a million fanvids to Hadestown songs.
"We shall be in Hell together after all." They think they're so clever. ;)
For posterity: Yes I did come up with this after one glimpse of Armand in an eyepatch.
