WhenDaniel Molloy(Eric Bogosian ) gets whisk off to a Dubai apartment in the center of the pandemic , we already know something ’s up . It ’s only the first installment of Interview With the lamia , but if you are aVampire Chroniclesfan , there ’s something strange about this characterization .
After thefirst episodeends it becomes even more clear that this apartment , which is made of concrete , isolated , and full of incredible art , feels incorrect for Louis de Pointe du Lac ( Jacob Anderson ) . That ’s because this is n’t Louis ’ flat — it ’s Armand ’s . Theend of season twist / finalerevealed that the exacting and consecrate manservant , Rashid ( Assad Zaman ) , was actually the vampire Armand in disguise . If you ’ve never scan the Quran this might have come out of left over field , but if you were online or aVampire Chronicles fan , this would n’t have been a immense surprisal . One of the adept jokes that ever chance on IWTV Twitter was referring to Rashid as “ Armand - inscribe . ” So the reveal , while shocking and melodramatic in the best of ways , had been clearly choreographed from the beginning , because it was n’t just Rashid that had been Armand - coded … it ’s that the intact season has been Armand - cypher .
If we re - watch the serial knowing that Rashid is the vampire Armand and that he and Louis are in an intimate human relationship together , the whole premise becomes more and more absurd , and , in a path , terrific . Interview With the lamia is , essentially , Louis telling the story of his first opprobrious kinship to a third political party in front of his current fellow , who also may or may not be scurrilous . He call up the worst percentage of his relationship to Lestat ( Sam Reid ) , but also the good parts of his relationship , emphasise over and over the lamia bond that they shared and the obsessive , egotistical , toxic passion they had for each other … again , in front of the lamia he is presently in a kinship with . The motivation to embellish the worst section and understate the good parts is literally standing in the room with him .
Image: Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
On top of that , we have open evidence that some parts of Louis ’ tarradiddle have been practiced , refined , or even editorialized . It happens when Daniel replay the tapes from the ‘ 70s , then when Louis ca n’t recall whether or not it was raining on one particularly crucial night , and then a third time when Claudia ’s ( Bailey Bass ) journal were tampered with . So when it hail to the fact that his potent , peradventure psychopathic , unquestionably magical , 500 - year - old lamia young man is mind in on his conversation , it ’s not a stretch to say that what he ’s saying is filter out through Armand ’s influence .
Then , there are import that Louis colligate that commence to raise some eyebrows . If you ’re a fan of the script , you will call back that Lestat and Louis do n’t have a fight as fell as the one depicted inepisode five . ( They do agitate in the books , by the way , it just is n’t quite that bad . ) But do you make love which vampires really have a knock - down , drag - out fight ? Lestat and Armand . In particular , Louis being dragged along the land is a very clear visual from The Vampire Lestat .
Now , this could just be the show ’s writer taking divine guidance from The Vampire Lestat while writing this season of Interview With the Vampire . They did take bits and slice of lore and mankind - construction and even characterization from six of Anne Rice ’s book ( Interview With the Vampire , The Vampire Lestat , Queen of the Damned , The Tale of the Body Thief , Memnoch the Devil , and The Vampire Armand ) so it ’s not like they ’ve mixed and matched breathing in before . Even the character “ Rashid ” is , for those who do n’t jazz , a minor lamia in 2001 ’s Blood and Gold . So we can choose to imagine that the writers have been urge by additional books , or we can go deeply into this hypothesis and say that this horrific conflict was not accurate because it was Armand - coded .
Image: Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
What could be happening is that Armand , another psychopathic vampire , this time with creative thinker - control capability , has take the worst parts of his own memory and twit them onto Lestat and Louis ’ family relationship . permit ’s say Lestat and Louis did have a brutal fighting , which is objectively true considering that this part of the series is based on Claudia ’s diary , but the specifics of the competitiveness have been affected by Armand because Armand also had a brutal engagement with Lestat . I ’m not strain to excuse Lestat ’s actions or make him seem like he ’s not a behemoth ; he ’s very much an abusive jagweed and a horrible mate , but within Louis ’ retell he might not be portrayed in the most good-hearted light because of Armand ’s influence and Louis ’ leaning to become colligate by the wants and needs of his better half .
go back to the Dubai flat , there were always a mass of hint that this was Armand ’s home and not Louis ’ : retain human retainer for food , the apart nature of the apartment , all of the masses rely to secrecy upon enter . It ’s all very reminiscent of Armand ’s Night Island . In the books , Armand purchase Night Island in purchase order to prevent his fellow , Daniel Molloy ( yes , the same Daniel Molloy currently interview Louis ) from abandoning him . Night Island is a lamia ’s paradise , but it is also Molloy ’s cage . He often runs away only to be dragged back by Armand . The apartment feel like the writers have taken inspiration from Night Island . Louis is ensnare here , ineffective to leave , with nowhere to go , and reliant on Armand ’s money and connector to serve him survive .
( As a note AMC , announced viapress releasein April that a digital master titled The Night Island is coming . It ’s “ about an exclusive resort like no other , undefended only from sunset to sunrise , catering to an exclusive clientele of vampire and individual , with strict rules in place that still ca n’t preclude each nighttime from deform into a approximate cataclysm , ” and is base on Anne Rice ’s king of the Damned )
Armand ’s apartment is also fabulously infertile . Full of beautiful graphics , but very minuscule of Louis on display . Really Transformation by Ron Bechet in the dining room is the only slice of art that I can really see being exclusively Louis ’ alternative . The Basquiat in the bread and butter area ? Maybe . But Armand was sell and bought in the 1500s too . In stark demarcation to this sparseness , Louis ’ house on Rue Royal was lush , rough-textured , full of plenteous colors and affectionate light . He never wore black except to his pal ’s funeral . And besides that , perhaps most importantly , he was constantly smother by books ; in every sequence he was reading or was shown with a book in his hand .
call up when Daniel Molloy take in instalment six why Lestat would enshroud the fact that he could fly ? Louis answer that he thought it was so that he — Joseph Louis Barrow — wouldn’t feel substandard to him . In the Dubai flat the only book are kept on shelves that are literally hang from the cap . They are preserve out of Louis ’ ambit , and the only way of life that he would be able to get to any of them is by require Armand to fly up and get them . A constant , unnecessary admonisher of Louis ’ helplessness compared to Armand .
There ’s even a moment in episode one , as Armand is giving Daniel a hitch of the flat , that he advert that the architect was a sentimentalist while motion to a tree that has been establish inside the flat , circumvent by sand , with a assumed Sunday shine down on it . Louis , despite being a vampire and literally ineffective to walk under sunlight , is nevertheless a humans who is constantly seen alfresco . He love to sit in Jackson Square , he takes his daughter for a boat ride in the bayou , but in Dubai — a tike - metropolis , one that is was build up in a desert , that is not besiege by green space so much as it has carefully cultivate its square palm tree and baobab trees among hedgerow — where would Louis go to experience that again ?
If this flat is , like Night Island , a cage and not a paradise for Louis , it makes sense that a sentimentalist would put a Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in the middle of the apartment . It ’s very likely that between Armand ’s influence , the isolated nature of the city , and perhaps even his own fear at being discovered , Louis has not will this apartment in a very , very long fourth dimension .
At the end of the dark , Armand is not to be swear ! It ’s not just that Rashid is Armand - encrypt , but the entire season is Armand - encrypt . Armand is a master operator , a expression of 500 years of traumatic , absolutely batshit harebrained craze behavior , and the boy has fangs the size of the Ottoman empire . Armand takes mansplain , manipulate , malewife to unprescended levels of insanity . Like , I love him , he ’s a weird little gremlin who plays with blenders and starts a podcast , for some intellect , but he ’s utterly out of gourd and willing to do anything to keep everything just how he like it , and that includes Louis .
Who know why Armand allowed — and it ’s decipherable , in retrospect , that Armand has given permission for this interview to take place — Daniel Molloy , a Pulitzer Prize - make headway fact-finding diarist , to come into Louis ’ life and ask probing question , but he has . On rewatch it seems obviously that Armand step in oft , not to stop Daniel , but to verify Louis . Louis has leap from one abusive partner to another , and there ’s no path to tell what part of his story is his write up and what part of it is due to Armand ’s influence .
This whole season has been about the teras that is store , but when you ’re 500 years erstwhile , maybe computer memory makes a monster out of you . Although the signboard that Rashid was Armand were there from the beginning , the signs that the full season has been affect by Armand are really only visible when you rewatch the time of year , which speak to the rather incredible effort on behalf of the writer who absolutely fuck what the fuck they were doing with this horrible little chaos vampire . Interview With the Vampire is Armand - coded , and I ’m sure that time of year two is only fail to reveal more and more ways in which Armand has get it on with Louis , Lestat , and Daniel . I ’m very frantic to watch it hap .
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