Uh, Is Lestat Orchestrating The Vampire Apocalypse?
The Vampire Lestat adds an apocalyptic twist to Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe.
When the curtain first rose on The Vampire Lestat, it revealed that it was telling the title vamp’s story with the benefit of much hindsight. The multi-album narration that guides us through this new tale was described as “an omniscient history of the events of the 2025 album and supporting tour” put on by Lestat (Sam Reid) himself… but also mentioned that said album and tour sired a few “consequential global catastrophes” in its wake. At first, that sounded like a lot of theatrics — vampires are funny that way — but as The Vampire Lestat pitches further into Lestat’s “Failures,” that throwaway detail is becoming increasingly literal.
If you haven’t been paying attention to every beat of The Vampire Lestat, you might have missed all the little hints that point to one unspoken truth. The looming threat of a vampire apocalypse is one of very few subtle threads in the series, but its latest episode stops flirting with the possibility of global catastrophe and fully commits to it. Not only is the end of the world approaching, but Lestat might genuinely be the key to pushing society over the edge.
Spoilers ahead for The Vampire Lestat Episode 4.
Lestat nearly throws in the towel this week — but the Great Conversion is calling.
Halfway through Episode 4, Lestat gets a visit from the Vampire Armand (Assad Zaman), who’s working through the 12 Steps of addiction treatment and striving to make amends to everyone he’s harmed in his centuries-long life. But his pleas fall on deaf ears where Lestat is concerned, and ditto for his words of warning regarding Lestat’s flamboyant vamp behavior. After using the “cloud gift” (aka the gift of flight and levitation) onstage at last week’s concert, Lestat effectively proved to thousands of normies that vampires do, in fact, exist. His stunt retroactively makes Interview with the Vampire — the tell-all memoir that took great liberties with his life and relationships with Armand and Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) — a real source of vampire lore, but that’s just part of Armand’s concern with Lestat.
Armand wants Lestat to stop his tour prematurely and stop releasing songs, but not only because it breaks the vampiric rule of secrecy. Lestat is also becoming a kind of paragon for vampires. “They believe they can live as I do,” Lestat guesses — and that belief is throwing the global ecosystem out of balance. Vampires all over the world are siring more vampires, and it sounds like the human population might soon be overrun by them. For centuries, vamps have remained hidden for a reason: There can never be more vampires than there are humans. Vampire elders have flat-out refused to turn humans when coven numbers are too high; now that Lestat is flouting the rules, however, he’s emboldening others to do the same. The problem is, they’re imparting the Dark Gift too readily, to the point where the planet can’t support these new numbers.
That imbalance makes a lot of sense. Vampires need human blood to exist — how would they survive if that previously abundant resource were suddenly scarce? Lestat doesn’t seem to care, and neither does his mother, Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle). The vampiress has always believed in the Great Conversion, a long-planned uprising of vampires growing their ranks and refusing to live in hiding. Though it was created specifically for Interview with the Vampire, not inspired by the novels by Anne Rice, it fits pretty seamlessly into the story thus far. And it might also justify the storm Lestat has coming down the pipeline.
The Great Conversion is coming — and so is Akasha
Gabriella convinces Lestat to keep on playing.
Lestat doesn’t take Armand’s words to heart at first, but when he’s shot by a “fan” at the end of this week’s episode, his band leaves him mid-tour, forcing him to throw in the towel. It’s Gabriella who convinces him to try again; together, they listen to the thoughts of vampires all over the world, vampires who are beginning to see him as a kind of messiah. “He was teaching us to be ourselves,” one says. “How to be free.” And so Lestat gets his band back together and starts recording new music... not for his human fans, but to commune with more vampires.
That choice will come back to bite him sooner or later: when Armand visits Lestat, our hero’s omniscient narration gives us a clue about the troubles to come. Armand, Lestat says, “would do more damage than the Queen ever did.” He’s referring to Akasha (Sheila Atim), the first-ever vampire, also known as the “Great Mother” and the “Queen of the Damned.” Lestat had a brush with her in his early days as a vamp: it’s why he’s constantly bragging about having “the blood of Akasha” in him. With Akasha set to appear in The Vampire Lestat, we could soon see how the mother of all vampires met and imparted the Dark Gift to Lestat, making him all the more powerful. But Lestat’s narration hints at a betrayal that’s yet to come.
Lestat’s new lease on life obviously won’t sit well with Armand, who will most likely try to silence him in some way. And though Akasha has been dormant for centuries by the time Lestat goes on his infernal tour, she will eventually reawaken — and she probably won’t take kindly to the vampire uprising that swelled while she was sleeping. The Vampire Lestat is launching into its endgame with Episode 4, teasing not only the end of the world, but a bloody battle between the two schools of vampirism.
