Interview With The Vampire season 2 premiere: In the woods

The title of the first episode of season two of Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire is titled “What Can The Damned Really Say To The Damned.” It’s a fitting question for the return of what proved to be a deliciously lustful adaptation of the vampire ur text of the last half century. Alas, we have now fled New Orleans, which played such a pivotal role last season and find ourselves now in an entire continent full of the damned toward the tail end of World War II. Claudia (Delainey Hayles taking over from Bailey Bass) and Louis (Jacob Anderson) are ambling around Eastern Europe in search of more vampires like them. But all they keep finding is death and destruction, sadness and madness.

In a way, this pair is damned in their own way, hurting and unable to move through the climactic moments of last season when Louis saw fit to leave Lestat’s body unharmed, a show of weakness in what was otherwise a spectacular betrayal orchestrated by Claudia. If the plan was to rid themselves of Lestat (Sam Reid), that has yet to happen. Louis, in between sleeping in the dirt and feasting on whatever rats they may find (European blood, it seems, is tainted by the very horrors happening in its name) is seeing his old lover wherever he goes. Taunting him as only a disembodied vision of one’s guilt can, Lestat makes Louis as miserable as can be.

“It was a perfect betrayal,” this spectral vision of Lestat tells Louis. “You gave me a death of distinction.” Now, though, and when he comes back to his full powers, Lestat promises he’ll get his revenge. “I’m going to fucking kill you,” he promises. He’s just waiting for Louis to be truly happy. That’ll make it all the sweeter.

He’ll have to wait quite a bit, given how miserable our tortured vampire is these days, especially seeing how bleak the journey with Claudia has been. The two keep searching in vain for any of those ancient vampires that are sure to be somewhere in this old continent. They find scant signs of superstitions that suggest rather than confirm their existence: garlic in doors, coffins unearthed to be shot, crucifixes on windows. It’s all hooey for Louis but proof for Claudia, who’s become adept at learning languages from the men she kills, nimbly able to mouth some Romanian or Hungarian or Russian words to pass through checkpoints where soldiers look at this father/daughter pair with apt suspicion.

If that all sounds rather dull and dreary, you’re not alone. In the present, Daniel (Eric Bogosian) makes no qualms about finding the very tedious descriptions of Claudia and Louis’ trek through Europe rather boring and not all that illuminating. That is, when he’s not openly showing hostility toward Armand (Assad Zaman), a.k.a. not-Rashid: Whenever this centuries-old vampire even opts to add a detail or two to Louis’ tale, Daniel makes sure to nix it from the record and takes the time to scold him in the process. The journalist is not amused, still, by having been hoodwinked into letting Armand sit in on their interview.

Indeed, the vibe in the interview now is a bit off, with Daniel clearly being more on the offensive, hoping to pierce through Louis’ resolve and find something of substance in what he’s sharing from Claudia’s journals that doesn’t feel like laundered PR for these vampires’ tales.

Back in the 1940s, we see how Claudia and Louis arrive at a barricaded enclave where folks are hiding both from soldiers and from…something else. Something older. Something more terrifying. Claudia is convinced it’s a vampire, while Louis seems more interested in chatting with an English lad who gives little credence to such superstitions—proof, for him, of the backward nature of where they’re all at. That is, of course, until Claudia, saddled with playing a young girl still, learns that the kids at this makeshift camp are terrified of something in the woods.

That something proves to be a mysterious creature who feeds on blood and who, despite Claudia’s kind advances, retaliates by hurting her. But it’s enough to have our bold not-so-young-anymore vampire getting Louis to explore the woods at night and setting a trap (a wounded soldier) for this oddest of creatures. “A catfish with teeth” is how Louis describes it, and he’s not far off. It’s ghoulish and gaunt-like and makes little attempts to engage the pair with anything but awkward hostility: He begins attacking them only for another creature (an older female vampire, it seems) to come to his defense. But neither proves a match for Claudia, who tears out the creature’s eyes in one fell swoop, prompting the aging female vampire to moan in pain. She was his mother. He was but a “child” to her. He’s now useless without his eyes. And so she beats him to death and retreats into her home, where a chastened Claudia and Louis decided to follow and encourage her to come with them across the Atlantic where she’ll find better, healthier blood for her and her kin. “Like cream from the top of the bucket,” she says, upon tasting Claudia’s own.

She does admit that there are no more like them anymore. All have been killed, it seems. And as Daciana imagines what her life could be in a new, different kind of land, she allows herself the possibility of a future away from her dying kin: “I will go across the ocean with you and I will tell my story,” she says. That is, until she violently throws herself into the flames, stunning the two vampires watching. It’s a ruinous end for anyone, but in particular for this mothering vampire. And it leaves Claudia, in particular, in a kind of catatonic state. They keep failing.

Remembering all of this is hard for Louis, who is almost in tears by the time the episode ends and finds himself unable to parse memories from fiction, Claudia’s tale from his own—especially given that a pivotal section of her journal remains out of reach for Daniel and himself. By the time the two vampire lovers (Armand and Louis) are tucking themselves in for the night, debriefing over how they may have lost control of the interview, they come to a tacit agreement: Armand will allow Louis to read those ripped-off journal pages and he will sit in, on the record, for the interview. It’s a gamble they hope will throw Daniel astray, but even when the ancient vampire decides to interject during the recorded chat, the ever cranky journalist cuts him off, insistent on first getting Louis’ story before letting Armand get in his way.

Who knows whether the couple can wrestle control back from Daniel…but it’s clear that their stories are about to collide as Louis and Claudia head toward the very place where Armand and his people were during the postwar era. Will that change in scenery and the arrival of this intriguing strange vampire in Louis’ life jolt Interview with the Vampire back into the lustful, thrilling ways of season one? This episode felt a lot like table-setting and so I’m curious what will happen when we get the dynamic set for the kind of triangulated trysts we’d so enjoyed all of last season.

There’s promise in the episode’s final moments, which find Louis talking to Claudia (and to his vision of a bloodied Lestat) as they head toward Paris: “Me and you,” he intones. “Me and you.” It’s them now forever and ever. But which one? And how soon until he’s tasked with choosing between them once again?

Stray observations

• It’s always difficult to step into a part that’s been crafted for over a season by another performer. And so I really feel for Delainey Hayles, who had the tough job of making Claudia her own. You’d think the change in setting and environment would help, but I found Hayles’ take on Claudia rather stiff this first episode, and it’s hard to discern how much of that is in the writing and how much of it is her making her way into this most volatile of characters. I’m curious to see how her Claudia evolves over the course of this season.
• At the end of the episode, after all, she gets a talking to by Louis that could be addressed to actor and character alike: She shouldn’t mope so much. She’s alive. They’re alive: “A shit life beats no life,” he reassures her, and convinced as she is that there must be others like them (good ones like them!) out there, she may well change her tune soon.
• Is it me or was this episode particularly drab? I get it that we’re in the middle (or at the tail end) of a war but even by that measure—and especially compared to the more fiery version of New Orleans we already witnessed in season one—this premiere felt much too dark and muddied.
• What do we make of all this talk of dreaming and of Claudia’s initial inability to do so?
• Are there worse ways of dying than being beheaded while you’re bleeding out of a neck wound? Ask the waif who helped Claudia and Louis and yet found herself the victim of that catfish creature before being able to wed the charming English cad who did the most in trying to save her.
• You really do get to miss Lestat in this episode, which is a testament to the electric chemistry Reid brings to the role and the series in equal measure.