TV Review: "Interview with the Vampire": "Like the Light by Which God Made the World Before He Made Light" (S2, Ep. 6)
As the season races toward its conclusion, the stakes for all of the characters grow ever higher, and emotions start to careen out of control.
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I think most would agree that AMC’s Interview with the Vampire is one of those shows which gets better with each new episode. The sixth episode of the second season, “Like the Light by Which God Made the World Before He Made Light,” shows that this continues to hold true, with the tension growing greater with every passing moment (in both the past and the present), as matters hurtle toward their inevitable conclusion. All of the characters in this episode must contend with terrible choices, whether it’s bringing another person into the world of the vampires or whether to sacrifice two so that a third might live.
I wrote a few days ago that Armand is, in his own way, an even more compelling villain than Lestat, and this episode continues to add further complexities and nuance to his character. There’s a haunted look in his eyes during the interview in the present, and whatever else you can say about him, it seems to me at any rate that Armand is genuinely struggling with the ghosts of his past. Whatever happened in Paris and whatever choices he made, it’s clear that he knows he can never truly be absolved, for all that the interview seems to offer some promise in this regard. Even so, he always keeps a part of him locked hidden away, expressed only in the bleakness that always lurks behind his lustrous gaze.
Indeed, it’s clear from the moment that Armand says that the coven offered him a choice that there’s much that he’s not saying. Book readers (and, for that matter, anyone who has seen the 1994 film) know where all of this is headed, that there can be no hope of salvation for Claudia or Madeleine or even, perhaps, Louis himself, who ends the episode beaten and bruised and rendered up to the judgment of the coven. Clearly, Armand thinks that he has done the right thing by offering up Claudia and the newly-changed Madeleine in exchange for Louis’ life, though it remains to be seen whether the coven will go along with this plan. The horrible thing is that you can see where Armand is coming from: he wants and loves and desires Louis more than anything in the world and, knowing that there’s nothing he can do to save Claudia (or Madeleine, after she becomes a vampire) he makes the only choice he can. This isn’t to say that it’s a right or moral choice, only that it’s an impossible situation that is ultimately not entirely of his own making.
Meanwhile, Louis continues to seethe in righteous fury after the revelations from the previous episode, even as he also has to contend with all of the emotional damage and baggage from the events in Paris decades earlier. I don’t know about anyone else, but I was struck by the way that his fury with Armand just seems to radiate off of him in their scenes together in the present. It’s there when they bicker over how they should decorate their walls, and it is certainly there as they get closer and closer to the inevitable moment when they come to the point in their story where Armand betrays Louis and allows him to be taken captive and put on trial by the coven. Anderson acts the hell out of these scenes, and you can feel his deep betrayal, as well as his sense of bafflement when Armand informs him that he asked for his mind to be altered in the aftermath of San Francisco. Now, whether this is true or not is anyone’s guess, but it certainly does throw yet another wrench in Louis’ sense of himself and his relationship to his own past.
Anderson is likewise remarkable in his scenes with Delainey Hayles. One of the best things about this scene is how much it reveals about their changed dynamic. As this season has progressed we’ve watched the gulf between the two of them widen, until it seems that there’s almost nothing that could breach it. It’s only when Louis reluctantly makes Madeleine into a vampire companion for Claudia that the two really seem to reconcile, though their newfound peace is but a brief interlude all too quickly destroyed by Santiago and the other members of the coven. Roxane Duran is also remarkable as Madeleine, bringing new depths and richness to a character who was only barely sketched-out in the novel. Her scenes with Haines are filled with wrenching pathos, which makes their eventual capture all the more heartbreaking, if also more subdued than in the 1994 film version.
And speaking of Santiago…I know that readers of this newsletter are probably tired of hearing me sing Ben Daniels’ praises, but my goodness that man is acting circles around everyone else in the cast. It isn’t that Anderson, Reid, Bogosian, and Zaman aren’t all amazing, because they clearly are. However, there’s just something feverishly intense and piercing about Daniels. Any time he appears on the screen you can’t take your eyes off of him, and even though he’s obviously the villain of the series, as a viewer you can’t help but fall under his spell. His rich, deep voice, his dashingly handsome looks, and his nefarious-but-subtle designs all make him a queer villain who devours everyone, whether Armand, Louis, or the humans who gather to watch him strut across the stage.
All of which brings us to the episode’s chilling finale, in which we finally learn that Lestat is, in fact, alive and ready to take the stage once again. Of course, we’ve always known that nothing could keep him down, and the fact that he reached out to Armand in the 1970s already showed us that he had managed to survive Claudia’s attempt on his life. Even so, I cried out when I saw Sam Reid’s beautiful visage gazing at his own reflection as he prepared to utter the testimony that will no doubt consign one or both of his fledglings to the unforgiving light of the sun. With Lestat, you just never know what he’s going to do,
So, all in all, this was another fantastic episode of one of the best shows on TV right now. In addition to all of the delicious vampire melodrama, we also got some more time from Raglan James of the Talamasca, complete with a little reference to being a body thief. While it’s hard to say just where this season of the series will end up, I know one thing for sure. It’s going to be a finale to remember.