What do you do when the past stops staying the past? When the people you failed, the people you loved, the people who made you what you are, start showing up uninvited, at your shows, in your dreams, on your doorstep dressed as your dead daughter? How do you keep playing rock star when the muses are pulling up chairs?

That is the question of “Detroit,” the premiere of The Vampire Lestat (formerly Interview With The Vampire, currently the best thing on television, hit play and tell your loved ones you’ll see them in an hour), and it is, I suspect, the question of the whole season.

Last year, Lestat was a ghost in Louis’s recollection; selectively summoned, narratively contained, but mostly absent in the flesh. This year, the ghosts are his.

And “Detroit” is an episode about a man discovering that you cannot outrun the past on a tour bus, no matter how loud you make the music.

The Failures

We open not in Detroit but in a flash-forward, at a clandestine auction with a few familiar faces and a host of unsettling new details. Armand (Assad Zaman) is missing an eye and sporting a fashionable eye patch. Louis (Jacob Anderson) is missing a leg. Lestat and Daniel are nowhere to be seen.

The lot being bid on? Lestat’s complete works, including his master recordings, plus a 111-volume collection of him recounting his own history, titled “The Failures“. The auction house has handed us the season’s thesis before the title card even hits, because if you hadn’t guessed yet, this is going to be a season on the mediation of failure.

All of this is a clear roadmap for where we’re going to wind up. Lestat’s life has been distilled into items up for sale to the highest bidder, but the version that survives him is his own. Whatever rock-and-roll counter-narrative he’s about to spend the next seven episodes constructing, it works. Sort of. The world wants to buys it, and the bidders are here. It’s just that what they’re bidding on is, definitively, failure.

This is also our first sign that the framing itself has shifted. Seasons one and two were stories Louis was telling to journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), who could poke holes in any inconsistencies and force Louis to reexamine certain memories from another angle. This season, Lestat is telling us his own story directly onto these records — no interviewer, no journalist sitting across from him, no second opinion in the room. That’s a structural choice. Whoever buys these recordings is getting Lestat’s version of Lestat, unfiltered, and the show is asking us to consider what that’s worth. Literally.

I also have a lot of thoughts about where this cold open is really taking place and why it’s one of the boldest choices in this season premiere (and it’s already a very bold premiere), which you can read over here.

The tour, the band, the documentary

We drop into the actual present (well, the more recent past, but keep up) and meet Lestat mid-tour with his new bandmates: brothers Larry (Noah Reid) and Alex (Seamus Patterson), plus Salamander (Ryan Kattner — already my favorite new addition to the cast this season) and Tough Cookie (Sarah Swire).

Sam Reid, who has always been a tour-de-force in this series, is now playing Lestat like a man truly possessed by the character.

We also meet Jarda, a neanderthal doppelgänger Lestat’s people and some Scandinavian mobsters have apparently tracked down for him. How does a rock star feed nightly without ending up on TMZ? You send this idiot out to be photographed in your place. Amid all the emotional depths Sam Reid is having to mine this season, I love that he also gets to play a complete buffoon on the side, as that surely felt like a welcome reprieve.

Daniel Molloy is also along for the ride, ostensibly making a documentary, but primarily getting high on the blood of groupies and Dee Pharma. He and Lestat have great rapport, clearly amused and annoyed by each other in equal measure, and Lestat insists on calling him “Dan”.

But even while uninterested in the music itself, Daniel is still here for the real story. “Having accumulated profound wisdom and experience through the dark gift of immortality,” he asks, “why have you chosen to waste it singing music no one wants to hear, in pants no one should ever squeeze into?”

I think the show is doing something really interesting with Daniel this season, as for two years, Daniel has been the one person who refuses to be dazzled by any of this, and now that attitude carries even more weight because he’s one of them now. He’s crossed over, seen what immortality actually looks like from the inside… and sure, on the outside, he’s reveling in being able to do drugs without consequences and enjoying a life free of Parkinson’s (and Bogosian is clearly having the time of his life). But immortality isn’t any less lonely or directionless than being human was, and whatever “transformational trauma” Armand left him with, you know it’s going to surface this season.

The documentary may be the new interview framework, but it’s not nearly as strict as Louis’ Dubai interview. Or as Lestat puts it, his music is the rewrite, and Daniel’s documentary is the liner notes.  This is Lestat’s story now.

And it is immediately obvious that this is definitely not Interview with the Vampire as we know it, and that Lestat has taken the narrative by the throat and fully made it its own. You’d be hard-pressed to find another show so completely willing to reinvent itself in the third season, and to do so with this much confidence, flair, and guts. At ATX, showrunner Rolin Jones told fans outside the theatre that adapting beloved material requires a certain level of arrogance as a writer, to fully make it your own — and their writing team has clearly approached this season fully prepared to take on that challenge.

How Lestat got a band: a Halloween story

Cut to the past, during a Halloween not too long ago. Lestat and Louis are on speaking terms via iPad (friendly, even, if a little wary of each other) until Lestat discovers that Louis told their story to Daniel and that the book Interview with the Vampire is now out in the world, available at every local bookshop.

Lestat’s relationship with the book is, to put it gently, complicated. He screams to himself about parts he disagrees with (“I know what infinitesimal means!”, “It WAS raining!”) while getting progressively drunker. Reid plays the discovery scene with the specific drunken theatricality of someone who has lost an argument he didn’t know he was having.

But the frustration and hurt is the engine of the whole season. Lestat is not just upset the book exists, he is upset that the book is somebody else’s version of him, that Louis got to define him before he could define himself. Everything Lestat does this season, every song, every tour stop, every leather pant, is an attempt to write back to Louis.

He’s interrupted by trick-or-treaters dressed as characters from the latest horror trend, none other than Interview With The Vampire. Imagine opening your door and finding small children dressed as your dead daughter and your exes on a night when you only learned a few hours ago that the world knows intimate details of your life. It might be my favorite beat in the episode (their tiny little costumes! Arguing with tiny!Louis that his camera isn’t period-accurate!), and it’s also a quiet little gut-punch: Claudia is a Halloween costume now, as Daniel warned Louis in Dubai, and Lestat doesn’t even get the privacy of his own grief.

The past is not just coming due. It is being mass-produced.

Then, mercifully, a distraction arrives. The truly terrible music coming from across the street, courtesy of a band called Satan’s Night’s Out, gives Lestat somewhere to put the rage. He breaks in, picks up a guitar, plays the same chord over and over (the one Larry’s been playing all night), then breaks the guitar and hurls insults at the band. And that is, of course, how Lestat becomes a rock star.

The muses are here, and they brought their luggage

Back in the tour-present, after a performance, Lestat has the first of what will clearly be many hallucinations this season. His past starts bleeding into his present in quick, disorienting flashes: Louis. Nicki. Magnus. The muses have arrived, and none of them seem interested in providing him with any kind of peace.

The shuffle of memories and hauntings aren’t just a stylistic choice, it’s the show telling us that Lestat, for all his bluster about how he wants to tell his story now, is still not fully in control of the narrative he might want to project. His past, his true past, is interrupting him here against his will, at a very inopportune time. For me, it’s the show signaling that the season is less about Lestat doing some self-reflection, and more about the ways he may not want to, but is going to have no choice but to confront his history anyway, on a very public stage.

Seeing them unleashes something in Lestat, who begins manically playing his violin, whipping the crowd and the band into what appears to be an almost supernatural frenzy. Surely nothing bad is going to come from this!

A fan named Baby Jenks comes onstage, and Lestat starts feeding from her. But he loses control and overindulges, partly because he is already spiraling, and partly because Baby Jenks is extremely high, which means her blood gets him high too. He rushes her backstage, where her spirit floats above him long enough to deliver a prophecy: “Everything dies. You die, I die…” Then, motioning to Daniel: “Oh, he dies bad.”

As a Daniel fan I would like to file a formal complaint, and lodge my concern right now for Daniel’s safety.

Baby Jenks also hints that someone is coming. Someone who knows Lestat… Gee, I wonder who that could be?

And, for the record, Baby Jenks survives all of this, long enough to wind up in an elevator threesome (then foursome) with Lestat later that night. Honestly, good for her. She may have almost died on stage, but I think she also had the best night of anyone.

Welcome to the Children of Darkness, again

At a hotel afterparty (the venue is named “Immortal Properties”, because of course it is), Lestat is approached by two vampires from the Fang Gang. They are the Children of Darkness (Armand’s old Paris coven) reborn, and they are here to enforce the Ancient Laws, chief among them the one Lestat has been breaking with a guitar in his hand by telling humans all about vampires.

The attack that follows is the biggest action sequence the show has ever staged, a hallway brawl ending with broken glass, vampire speed cranked up , and Lestat catching most of it personally. He’s outnumbered, drunk, and high, and none of that is a great combination. He’s saved only by the timely arrival of Daniel and the Vampire Sam Barclay, formerly of the Théâtre des Vampires, currently a famous DJ.

(I’d also like to note that when we watched this live at the Beacon Theatre in New York, Daniel’s entrance and speed tackle got the biggest cheer of the entire episode).

But saving his own life requires Lestat to do the one thing he’s been avoiding all tour: he reveals to his band and his team that he is not pretending, he is an actual vampire. The cat is out of the coffin.

Mommy issues

Back in his hotel room, Lestat is completely falling apart, vomiting blood into the bathroom toilet after overfeeding and spiraling all episode long. Throughout the hour, he has been texting someone, begging them to come to him, admitting he is not okay. The episode very deliberately wants us to assume he is reaching out to Louis — the great love story, the person Lestat has simultaneously been missing and can never quite quit.

But when the door finally opens, it is not Louis. It’s Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), his mother.

And almost immediately, they start kissing. So yes, the show is very much planting its flag here early. Readers of The Vampire Lestat know the relationship between Lestat and Gabriella has always carried heavy incestuous undertones, even if the books stopped short of making it fully explicit.

But on this show, nothing is there just for shock value. The Vampire Lestat is always interested in what sits underneath desire: loneliness, dependency, trauma, the ways people recreate the relationships that shaped them. And the reveal that Lestat has been reaching for Gabriella all episode completely reframes what we have been watching.

Lestat isn’t reaching for the person he failed, but rather reaching for the person who failed him first.

The loneliness this show keeps circling, the absence Lestat is trying to drown out with stadium volume, doesn’t start with Louis or with Claudia. It starts with the woman who taught him what love was supposed to be, and who has now arrived to remind him that what he learned was poisoned.

By the time Gabriella walks into that hotel room, it’s clear the past has come back to collect Lestat.

Other Thoughts:

• Seriously, this season only works if the music works, and what Daniel Hart and Sam Reid have done is nothing short of astounding. These are full-scale rock anthems, and Sam is managing to carry the voice and the rockstar swagger like he’s been doing it for centuries. The songs don’t feel like television music written to move the plot along; they feel like tracks that could genuinely exist outside the show. Combined with Reid’s magnetic stage presence, they sell the central premise that Lestat is a true rock star instantly.
• Daniel Death Watch: Still really not loving Baby Jenks’ comments… Please don’t kill my boy, show, he’s just a baby.
• I appreciated the vampons shoutout, which are real “vampire” tampons AMC sold on their “Night Market” online shop during two season. I hope we get the return of the Night Market this year, even if my own experiences with the AMC shop are, um, questionable.
• The song Lestat sings before drinking from Baby Jenks is “Black Licorice”, originally a song from composer Daniel Hart’s 2012 album, The Orientalist. It’s been reworked here with some new lyrics, and “don’t wanna learn a fucking TikTok dance” is a lyric that’s going to live rent-free in my head.
• I know a lot of people (myself included) originally thought the voice of “The Failures” was producer Mark Johnson, but it appears to actually be Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin.