Interview With The Vampire season 2 finale: A sumptuously riveting hour of television

The line that gives this season finale its title—“And That’s The End of It. There’s Nothing Else”—is said midway through this sumptuously riveting hour of television. That means the very ending which Armand and Louis feel so satisfied in telling Daniel is, quite obviously, not the end of “it.” There’s actually plenty more. For the story of these various vampires was never going to be as neatly tied together as it first appeared.

So let’s start with that initial ending. “Claudia was dead. I could feel it.” That’s where we begin: with Louis unable to hide the grief he was feeling all those decades earlier. For it’s a grief he’s neve r been able to escape. And left as he was in a rock-filled coffin for who knows how long, he had plenty of time to stew in those melancholy feelings. As always, though, Daniel has little patience for this put-upon performance: He’s interested in knowing how Armand was able to eventually free his beloved from that cruel punishment.

As Armand tells Daniel, he was left with all those crummy jobs at the theater, a reminder of the way he’d turned his back on the coven. And as a self-satisfied Santiago put on the plays that had long made them stars in Paris, Armand soon concocted a plan to release Louis. We’re given little information as to how he accomplished it (he took the coffin out himself? carried it out into the sewer?), but it doesn’t matter because all we needed to know was that Louis is given some of Armand’s blood and allowed to escape.

He delves into rage and madness: “My rage had risen,” he says. “Followed closely behind by my madness. They moved from shadow to shadow toward the cemetery in Montmartre.” It’s but one of the moments where the show’s florid dialogue seems to match the tenor of what it’s dramatizing (because, let’s face it, no one really talks that way—not even New Orleans-born vampires with a flair for the dramatic).

That rage and that madness lead Louis to an empty crypt where he begins amassing bodies and devising a plan of his own. He wants to take down the entire coven. It’s why he ignores the telepathic pleas from Armand, who urges him to just leave Paris altogether. In between scribbling on the floor and muttering gibberish to himself, Louis is clearly losing touch with reality—but getting in touch, perhaps, with a ferocious version of himself.

As we’ve known for a while, what Louis is plotting is a fire. We see him draining gas from motorcycles and cars all over Paris (and killing unsuspecting cops who dare to ask him what he’s doing). He does one thing that surprises Daniel: He warns Armand. Armand, after all, was the one who’d helped spare him. He’d used his psychic powers to get the audience to yell out “Banishment!” rather than “Death!” and it was he who helped Louis out of his coffin prison. It’s but yet another example of how these two vamps can’t seem to quit one another. Just as with Lestat before, Louis continues to prove he’s much too lenient, much too forgiving.

“If I’m not with him, I am nothing,” Armand tells Daniel, who rightfully rolls his eyes yet again at such wistful romanticism (all while the journalist continues his stealth conversation with RJ about a possible bombshell of a piece of evidence Daniel cannot wait to get his hands on).

Back in Paris, Louis arrives at the theater with a gas canister, which he pours indiscriminately all over the coffins carrying everyone in the coven. It’s here we get one of those necessary lines that help fill out a plot point. (In this case, it’s about how when a vampire is in their coffin, they’re all but dead to the world. It’s not really like a deep slumber; it’s more like being cut off from all their senses which…sure, fine, okay, if you say so.)

Soon, the entire theater is engulfed by flames. The fire (and Louis’ blade) kills nine in total, and four escape. (That math only works if you realize Lestat and Armand are not part of this equation.) Canny planner that he was, Louis manages to blow up two more vampires as they make an escape on their motorcycles and focuses his attention on luring Santiago his way by taunting him during moments when Louis is arguably the most alive we’ve ever seen him.

Indeed, it is a joy to see Jacob Anderson getting the chance to do more than mope and brood (or, as he does in the present, to remain impossibly stoic). And the actor clearly relishes getting the chance to embrace Louis’ rage and madness with aplomb. The moments when he riles up Santiago (calling him Francis and ribbing him over his initial failures on the London stage and his less-than-average penis size) are some of his best. And then, of course, he gets a great, cruel final moment with that thesp of a vamp: He cuts his head off in one clean swipe and then kicks it down the street with glee.

If the reunion with Armand later is a bit anticlimactic (“I will spend my life making it up to you,” Armand insists; “You’ll never make it up to me,” Louis responds) we get one more celebration of their love once the two find Lestat at Magnus’ lair. The plan was to kill him and yet, in one final moment of leniency, Louis merely tells him (in no uncertain terms) that he’ll never have what he and Armand have. He kisses his new paramour and leaves Lestat alone, presumably forever.

“Enjoy him,” Lestat says. “Let’s see how long it holds.”

Daniel catches that line for what it is: a taunt, the kind that unravels this tidy, happy ending Armand and Louis have been building towards. For there is more to the story, as a new piece of evidence is delivered right on Daniel’s lap: an annotated script of that fateful trial play, with notes by Armand himself.

Some canny fact-checking questions are enough to tip Louis into revising precisely what took place at the theater the night Claudia died. It wasn’t Armand who saved him: it was Lestat. Armand wasn’t made to witness the play; he had directed it. Here is a betrayal that no amount of loving decades in between could erase.

We see little of the fight that ensues, though we see its aftermath. Louis informs Armand that he’s not to harm Daniel and he’s to be out of their penthouse by the time Louis returns.

After promising Daniel he’d get the $10 million they’d promised him, he sets fire to his laptop and leaves. When we see the vampire next, he’s arriving in New Orleans during what feels like a quite powerful hurricane. Louis surveys the streets (and even joins a NOLA tour that hilariously recasts his own history with Lestat and their famed final dinner party) and finds his way to where Lestat has been hiding, perhaps for decades.He remains a recluse and a hoarder but he does light up when Louis arrives, finally having realized the truth.

It’s a touching meeting for the two of them. It’s full of unspoken things they’ve harbored for decades. It’s also the most romantic moment of the entire season. Where Armand and Louis had always cast themselves as a loving couple, their honeyed domesticity felt—to Daniel, obviously, but also to me—like it was much too calcified. There was no passion like there was between Louis and Lestat. And so while Sam Reid’s quivering lips may be a bit melodramatic for the scene at hand, the chemistry between him and Anderson is palpable, even if it’s clear something else has calcified in Louis.

As New Orleans battles a hurricane outside, the two embrace before the show cuts to black.

We end then with Louis back in Dubai talking to Daniel, who’s become a bestselling author of the contested memoir Interview With A Vampire. Oh, and a vampire! Guess Armand couldn’t well leave Daniel alone. And he has ideas for a sequel—an opening perhaps for what season three could look like?

Then again, if we do meet Louis past this moment, we will no doubt find him fending off many of those angry vamps who send psychic messages his way threatening his life given how he’s broken many of the great laws and gone ahead and exposed their secrets for the world to know. The final image is of Louis, serene and in his apartment, taunting them to dare come find him.

Is that where Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire goes from here? Knowing that Lestat is coming back in season three (which will be adapted from the vamp’s rock-and-roll days in Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat as well as Rice’s The Queen Of The Damned), that might mean we may not immediately get answers as to what happens with Armand and Louis, but honestly, the thought of a musical-focused next season with Lestat front and center sounds divine.

Stray observations

• I wonder now what other actual fact-checking questions Daniel had for Armand and Louis.
• It’s kind of hilarious that this finale episode would offer an aside about how this French vampiric theater troupe in Paris had decided to produce shows mostly in English during a motorcycle escape that ends in flames. I almost wished the show hadn’t felt the need to further explain that odd bit of lore (or that, had it decided to, it had leaned instead into actually producing a show that wasn’t afraid to have its Parisian characters speaking French while they worked in, you know, France).
• Those final moments in “And That’s The End of It. There’s Nothing Else” of Daniel and Louis chatting telepathically as the former hunts his next prey were very Silence Of The Lambs-coded, no? Or was that just me?
• Which of Santiago’s maniacal ways of repurposing Claudia’s ashes did you find most abhorrent? (My vote? A toss up between sprinkling them on popcorn and wetting them to pleasure himself.)
• Did you catch Claudia’s dress in that final moment when we see Louis at his Dubai penthouse?