It’s the penultimate episode of the season, and it’s the busiest (and arguably the best) episode of the season thus far.

Nothing in “Montreal” goes the way anyone wanted. Lestat wanted a farewell, and got an ambush. Louis wanted to keep healing. Daniel wanted an ending for his documentary (okay, Daniel may have gotten what he wanted). Claudia was summoned against her will, and provided a closure that no one was ready for, including us.

This is the show teaching all of us a hard truth: the closer we get to the finish line, the further away the finish line moves.

Lestat is tying off loose ends, and that’s never good

We open with a flash-forward. The posthumous album is out (yes, posthumous, because Lestat is officially “dead” after the shooting) and the reviews are not kind. Pitchfork has given it a 3.1, which is lower than they would score even Justin Bieber. The album debuts low on the charts, thanks to Drake dropping 50 songs in one day (which is the bit that Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson referenced Rolin Jones being a prophet about earlier in the press run). Most of humanity has, again, moved on from vampires.

Most of vampire-kind, however, has not. The album is going to play to 50,000 vampires in Montreal, who have collectively decided to read it as a Great Conversion rallying cry. Lestat refers to the concert as his “parting gift” to the Vampiress Gabriella, because everything in Lestat’s life, both dead and undead, circles back to her.

This is all very amusing until you realize what it implies. Lestat is settling things, wrapping things up. He is being gentler to Louis than he has been in months (which Louis even clocks with his “Why are you being so nice? I don’t like it”), and he is wearing a Grim Reaper costume to Halloween dinner.

It’s reading rather alarmingly like a suicide letter.

The newly-turned-vampire band, meanwhile, has fractured around Larry’s “suicide”. They’re still together, but Alex in particular is distant, lingering around Lestat’s apartment. Tonight, he’s wearing a Halloween mask, because it’s two years to the day from when Lestat first berated his way into a band.

Then Lestat gets a call from “Mary Rick”. Hold that thought.

Dinner for three

Lestat and Louis make their way to dinner, to Louis’ new vampire-friendly establishment (a reservation under the name “Sheridan Blackwood”, which book readers will recognize as a Lestat alias). They’re meeting a very tan Daniel Molloy, who is recording the conversation on his laptop. It’s the most Dubai-like we’ve felt all season, just Louis and one of his (ex)lovers sitting across from this journalist.

Daniel is here to get an ending for his documentary. Louis is here because he has, somewhat to his own surprise, been doing better. He hasn’t panicked-called Lestat in months, he has been avoiding “Fraudia” Regina, he and Lestat are friendly again, and he is still casually seeing his boyfriend Lem in a way that suggests Louis has been, against his own established habits, actually moving on.

Daniel, meanwhile, is doing his Daniel thing. He knows Louis is harder to trick now than he was in Dubai, so he’s not going for the gotcha right now. He asks Louis about the “fog of vampiric love.” Was that what kept him from clocking Daniel’s journalistic tricks back then? He also casually mentions that he is, in fact, seeing someone himself these days. The obvious implication is this is Armand, but I am not so certain it’s that simple — and honestly, kind of hope it isn’t, because if the entirety of their “courtship” happened off screen, I am going to be very disappointed.

But even his hardest-hitting question is soft by his standards. He goads Lestat about “Sofia”, with obvious glee, but by Molloy’s standards, it’s practically subdued. Mostly, Daniel is trying to read their thoughts throughout the dinner (and he at least gets in Louis’ head), while simultaneously putting the game pieces on the table.

He has, after all, been learning from the best chess player there is… his Maker.

Something shook loose

The first sign of trouble is that Louis is happy.

On this show, that is basically a death omen.

What follows the dinner looks almost suspiciously normal: Lestat singing through a car window, Louis laughing like someone who has not been drowning in grief for five straight minutes, the two of them actually managing to have a real conversation instead of emotionally fencing each other from opposite corners of a room. For a little while, they almost feel easy together again.

Lestat finally works up the nerve to ask about “dream-Lestat” in Daniel’s book, about whether Louis really imagined him walking beside him and Armand in Paris all those years ago. Louis admits it was guilt. Meanwhile, Lestat says the songs have “shook loose a thing or two” about his own complicated feelings about Louis.

Louis is equal parts exasperated and charmed that Lestat is finally able to speak more openly about his early years and the parts of himself Louis never truly knew when they were together. “I wanted to live with you like I had been dragged out of the Bayou,” Lestat tells him. “Gills to lungs, for you and you only.”

Louis clearly thinks that’s bullshit, but he is also no longer angry. Against all odds, they feel like two people who might one day become friends again — and perhaps, eventually, something more.

But Louis is also not letting Lestat off the hook, or to rewrite history to make himself easier to forgive. When Lestat starts blaming some of his behavior on the blood of Akasha running through his veins, Louis shuts it down immediately. “It ain’t the blood, it’s what you do with the blood.”

Even as they laugh that off, it is one of the clearest statements the show has ever made about accountability. Akasha’s blood is not an excuse, Gabriella is not an excuse. Trauma is not an excuse. Pain may explain Lestat, but your bloodline does not absolve you, nor define you.

Traaaaaap!

At rehearsal, “Sofia”, aka Gabriella, finally meets Louis. The two most important people in Lestat’s life size each other up, and Gabriella warns Louis off attending the concert tomorrow night. There are a lot of vampires in town, many of them with grudges against Louis from the book, and she would hate to see him hurt. Is this a mother being protective in a way she has never been with her own son? Or is this Gabriella moving a pawn across the board before the final move?

(It is the second one. It is so obviously the second one. Gabriella has been pro-Great-Conversion all season and Louis is, in the calculus she is running, both a complication and an obstacle in the way of her holding Lestat’s full attention.)

Lestat sound-checks with “Dancing with Myself,” which is funny on its own merits and also makes the song’s now infamous “traaaaaaap!” section make a lot more sense when you realize it’s just Lestat goofing off on stage. Plus, you could even read it as a meta-commentary, because Lestat is about to find himself in a trap.

He then sings something else, a love song so plainly addressed to Louis that the rest of the room may as well not exist. Reid pours every aching thing he has into “Brual Love”, and he and Louis share a real moment across the room. It’s a ballad worthy of their tumultuous, centuries-spanning love story, and the season’s first true love song. Daniel Hart’s songwriting cuts straight to the heart of Lestat’s devotion: all-consuming, destructive, and offered without reservation. He doesn’t want an easier love. He wants theirs, in all its painful, brutal entirety. And he would do it all again.

Gabriella watches… and there’s a moment in which she goes from excited, thinking the song is about her, to realizing that there is only one person in her son’s life who could eclipse his love for her: Louis.

Not being needed is something Gabriella will not stand for.

Louis’s phone buzzes.

After Louis leaves to wait in the car, the night takes the first turn. Gabriella reveals where Lestat is going after the Montreal show ends: Cádiz, Spain, with her. The two of them, together, to a room with a view to watch it all from on high, as she puts it — the “it” clearly being the Great Conversion she has been seeding all season and is now ready to actively cultivate. Her cards aren’t fully on the table just yet though, but again, this is so clearly where we are heading.

She kisses him, and this time Lestat is the one who pulls away. He is clearly uncomfortable, but he is also still trying to handle her carefully, still trying to keep her close without fully rejecting her. It is subtle, but you can feel the shift in him.

Earlier in the season, Lestat was desperately throwing himself into this dynamic because he thought it was the only way to keep Gabriella’s attention. Here, though, there is exhaustion, a man going through the motions. He still wants her love, but he is starting to grow tired of the price her version of love always seems to demand.

Motherf*cker

Out in the car, Louis finally watches the video alert he got, a now-public reveal from Daniel Molloy and Armand (yes, Dan’s tan is from Armand teaching Daniel to daywalk, complete with sunglasses-outline tan line). The video reveals everything: Lestat is alive, and has been having sex with his mother, with video proof of the latter.

That video throws a grenade at what had otherwise been a pretty nice evening. Lestat weakly tries to deny it, calls it a deepfake, but Louis isn’t buying this any more than he was buying Lestat’s line about the blood earlier. They have an emotional knock-out brawl, and while no physical punches are thrown, Louis is screaming that this is “all-time Armand-level deceit… a century-long lie,” and says outright that Gabriella is the source of all of Lestat’s sickness.

Louis isn’t necessarily wrong. Gabriella is Lestat’s original wound. The relationship every other relationship in Lestat’s life has been built around and warped by. And for all of Lestat’s dancing around the subject with her this season — never telling anyone who she really is, never naming the true nature of their relationship — he can no longer avoid it. Much like the Magnus memories he tried to gloss into a music video earlier this season, everything Lestat has spent centuries swallowing down is starting to come back up now, literally. He winds up spitting up blood and stumbling around like the truth itself is poisoning him.

Importantly, though, the show never treats the Lestat and Gabriella relationship like a cheap shock twist. What matters is not the taboo itself, but the damage. The way this relationship hollowed Lestat out long before Louis ever met him. Lestat’s clear shame in it — even though he was the victim — and never having told anyone, his reaction at it being laid bare to the person he loves most.

Eventually, Lestat snaps back. Because from his perspective, Louis does not get to stand there in judgment. Not after paying a stranger to pretend to be Claudia, not after needing Lestat in a hundred ways Lestat has shown up for without question, who spent two months in a frenzy that Lestat talked him down from while Lestat himself was falling apart.

This is the best work Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson have done all season. The fight is ugly, raw, and completely stripped down, both actors letting you see every wounded piece underneath these characters. If Claudia is what’s been eating Louis alive for two seasons, then Gabriella is what’s been eating Lestat alive for 265-ish years. And for maybe the first time, they are fully recognizing that pain in each other.

Eventually, Louis softens, because there was never really another outcome possible for these two. They regroup at a bar afterward, the fury cooling into something quieter and sadder. Louis keeps trying to trace the line backward, trying to understand how Gabriella shaped all of this, but Lestat refuses the idea that you can point at one thing, in this case Gabriella, and call it the source of all pain and trauma in his life.

“I conduct the chaos,” Lestat shrugs. “She’s one of the many chainsaws I juggle.”

I’m also hopeful this marks a real turning point in Lestat’s journey. Despite all the talk about how this is his era and the rock star swagger, Lestat has spent most of this season letting the people he loves walk all over him. He fully admits both the album and the concert are for Gabriella. The whole rebrand has been less about Lestat reclaiming his story and more about Lestat performing a version of himself that he can control in a more favorable light. He finally snapped back at Louis this week, pointing out, correctly, that he’s been there at every step recently and now it’s his turn to be the one in need.

I want more of that. I want an unhinged Lestat next week, finally ready to take what he wants instead of pouring his heart out to everyone who can’t or won’t give him what he needs back.

Stop chasing after the love of “billions” of fans (and your mother) to fix what’s broken inside of you, Lestat, and start fighting to love yourself.

The seance

And then it’s time to call Claudia.

The witch Merrick (“Mary Rick” from the opening) is hosting a seance with Louis and Lestat to call to their dead daughter, in an attempt to try to help them both finally find some peace. Book fans know that this is more or less the fifth book (Merrick) in The Vampire Chronicles.

It doesn’t take long for them to summon Claudia. But if Louis and Lestat were hoping for forgiveness, comfort, or closure, they’re in for a big surprise.

She appears in her yellow dress, ankles still slit from the theatre trial, shuffling around the room in a way that is obviously “wrong” from the start. Delainey Hayles is a force to be reckoned with here, as Claudia wants to make it clear that while Louis (and the audience) have spent two seasons mourning her, she is furious.

She has a litany of bombshells to throw at her vampire parents, each more devastating than the last, including:

• The train scene (the one fans have been arguing about for two seasons, the one Louis told Daniel in season one) was an admitted fiction, a story that Louis was fed.
• She claims that she never wanted Louis and always preferred Lestat. She thought about poisoning Louis instead, but knew she could manipulate him more easily.
• When Louis suggests she should “thank” him for killing Bruce, she’s definitely not interested in offering any sort of gratitude.
• She says that she hates Louis, more than anything or anyone she has ever known.

“Burn the diaries. Burn the dress. Stop saying my name!” she screams at them.

The only thing she is interested in at all is finding out where Madeleine is, which is the most devastating part of this entire, horrible, gut-wrenching sequence. “I can’t find her there,” she sobs. “The one good thing in my bleak, black life. And I don’t know where she is, and I spend every fucking second down there looking for her.”

With that, she is gone.

There is no resolution to be found here. No closure, no apology on either side, no daughterly forgiveness, no quiet release. Just a girl (who may or may not have really been Claudia, fans have been arguing about that for 20+ years) who has been alone in the dark for decades, who came back furious and grieving for the only person who ever loved her the way she wanted.

What it is, though, is a wake-up call to both Louis and Lestat that it’s time to move past their grief, because Claudia has no use of it.

Claudia does not want to be preserved forever inside their guilt and mourning. That is not helping her. If anything, it is trapping all three of them in place.

As Lestat puts it on the walk home, at least “she spared us the ambiguity.”

A bench and a machete

Afterwards, Louis and Lestat sit alone together in a place they’ve sat countless other times together: a park bench. Throughout every century together, they’ve found each other sitting together in parks just like this, on benches just like this. They talk about how maybe the path forward is just learning to be okay with carrying this, to know Claudia is not at rest, to accept that and let her hate them, and try not to ruin anyone else’s life with it.

Their hands brush. There is definitely a moment.

And again, anytime happiness approaches is when you know something is lurking in the bushes. In this case, it’s in the form of bandmate Alex in that Halloween mask, watching them from across the park, and Armand and Daniel behind them, machetes drawn, as they slice Louis and Lestat’s heads clean off.

That’s how you do a cliffhanger.

Before you panic, here’s what we already know: the season opened with a flash-forward of Armand and Louis at an auction, so Louis at least very much makes it out alive (and so does Armand, albeit with a missing eye). And as noted in episode three by Dr. Fareed Bhansali, a normal vampire could last two hours without their head, while a vampire of Lestat’s pedigree could last four to five times that. That was very obviously foreshadowing this exact moment, and I’m also very certain that two-time Pulitzer-winning journalist Daniel Molloy remembers that comment.

(Also, is Armand an idiot and there were surely many other options to get Louis and Lestat alone to convince Lestat not to sing in front of 50,000 vampires and hype them up, possibly leading to the end of the world for both humans and vampires alike? Yes! Absolutely! But you will not convince me that he isn’t ultimately on the right side of history here for once. And if you think he wasn’t, are you really telling me you’re Team Gabriella?!?!)

See you on the other side, for the Great Conversion.

Other thoughts:

• For the most part, I think the breakneck pacing this season has worked, but I really don’t love that the implication here is that Armand and Daniel could be together now (or, if we take that comment in a more literal sense and assume he just means spending time together and working together) in basically a throwaway comment. I still absolutely think the show is holding back larger reveals about what Armand and Gabriella have been doing all season, especially since it very clearly feels like we are heading toward some kind of collision between their respective factions as The Great Conversion ramps up and Akasha wakes up. So maybe next week we’ll dive more into this, but there’s also a lot of plot still to get through with only one episode to go. When last we left Daniel, he was literally saying he would never love Armand, and even putting aside my shipper goggles, that feels like the sort of character turn this show would normally spend real time unpacking instead of skipping right past. Which makes me suspect there is still much more to this story we have not seen yet… and if not, honestly, I almost wish some of these developments had been held for next season, when the show might have more room to breathe and more space to devote to this storyline. But we shall see. I do trust Rolin Jones and Hannah Moscovitch to have something amazing up their sleeves.
• Did you catch that the signal to Armand and Daniel was Alex lighting a cigarette, the same as Armand lighting a cigarette to signal to the Theatre des Vampires to kidnap Louis, Claudia, and Madeline last season for the trial? Armand has a playbook.
• The single most unbelievable part of this episode (and this entire season) is that Daniel’s YouTube video lists him as “Best Selling Author”. Girl, please. Daniel would have put “Two-Time Pulitzer Winner”.
• Daniel Death Watch: Still very, very high. He possibly got a boyfriend and is in “the fog of vampiric love”? As we all know, the second you’re happy, disaster strikes.
• Louis being a Degrassi fan… Who on the writing team added this? I’m choosing to believe it was Hannah Moscovitch, the show’s resident Canadian.
• Lestat calling Regina “Fraudia” is *chef’s kiss*