Here’s my professional, critical reaction to this week’s sixth episode of The Vampire Lestat, titled “Montreal”: AHHHHHHH. AHHHHH!!! OH MY GOOOOOOD. AHHHHH!!
Ahem. Okay. That out of the way, without getting into spoilers — we’ll get that in the recap portion of this article, below — this was another superb, emotionally devastating episode of TV in the way that these Anne Rice adaptations (meaning Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat) do so well. And moreso, despite some extremely tricky subject matter in this week’s episode, the show never backs down or apologizes from what it’s tackling, yet allows the characters to wrestle and deal with their emotions in a way that is searingly real.
And then of course, there’s the end of the episode, which contains a moment that literally made me jump out of my chair and yell (see above for more on that). Don’t worry, if you’re absolutely losing your mind right now, as well you should, there’s a good explanation for what just happened. Yes, I’m being cagey. No, I don’t want to spoil it before the spoiler warning.
However, I will add one talking out of school, external note here. When I interviewed showrunner Rolin Jones a few months back, at that point AMC had only sent me three of the episodes. Jones noted they were sending the other three later for review, but he was considering holding back the finale. Why would he do that? Well, because, though these are not his exact words, as usual there’s a bit of a magic trick going on in the season. And I do think (I have not yet seen the finale) you get a sense of what part of that trick may be here. We’ve known since the premiere that Lestat’s (Sam Reid) music somehow led to the vampire apocalypse. We’ve seen Louis (Jacob Anderson) missing a foot/leg, and Armand (Assad Zaman) missing an eye. And Lestat’s mother Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle) has clearly been holding a lot back, particularly when it comes to Armand’s maker Marius (Christopher Heyerdahl) and Akasha (Sheila Atim), the Queen of the Damned, and mother of all vampires.
How that will all play into the finale is TBD, but the pieces are in place as we head — pun intended — into next week’s final hour. As for this week’s? Well, let’s get to it for a more intimate conversation between Louis, Lestat, and a third character both surprising and upsetting.
Spoilers for The Vampire Lestat Episode 6, “Montreal” past this point.
Trick Or Treat?
We begin with “The Failures,” Album 52, Side A, as the camera slowly pushes in on a cushy coffin, the sun shining over it, day slowly turning into night. Lestat begins to narrate talking about his various lives and identities, and it’s clear when he picks up his phone – still inside the coffin – why we’re doing this: his album is, indeed, a failure, with a 3.1 review score (out of 10, to be clear) and barely charting on the Billboard Top 100.
As Lestat wanders his home in Montreal, “across the street from my vampire band,” he explains they are reworking the album for vampire ears only. And that was Gabriella’s plan all along, right? The goal – or her goal – was to cause The Great Conversion, the mathematical flip between vampires and humans where hell comes to Earth. Lestat’s plan? If he had one? Really just to try and purge his own demons through music, something that only works to a point.
It’s Halloween, again, two years since the band formed, and we see Alex (Seamus Patterson) smoking moodily with a Dracula mask on his head, potentially mourning the surprise death by suicide of his brother Larry (Noah Reid). We know that was caused by Armand last episode, and by the end of this episode it seems clear that Alex likely knows that as well; meaning even future Lestat, narrating via record, is holding back some key info here.
Lestat mind-talks to Alex, telling him he should get an early start on eating as the city is “swamped with vampires.” We’ll later find out this is for the concert, but more interesting is that Lestat has a voicemail from a character we won’t meet until later in the episode: Merrick Mayfair (Sarah Afful), one of the Mayfair Witches, flying in from New Orleans to help out Lestat and Louis. He’s noted her as “Mary Rick” in his phone by the way, which maybe isn’t as clever as “Thomas Pitty He’s A Whore” for Louis last episode, but we’ll let it slide. Also, one other fun detail: the Siri transcript of Merrick’s message is awful, so shouts to the production team for that tiny little hilariously accurate detail.
That message gets interrupted with “Mary Rick” calling Lestat, she’s stuck in customs, but they’re still “on for midnight.” This, by the way, is a classic Interview with the Vampire/The Vampire Lestat plotline: we’re not given a ton of info, we’re already midstream with the plot, and as the episode develops all the info indicates we’re talking about Lestat’s upcoming concert; when instead it’s a very intimate, very upsetting event set up just for Lestat and Louis.
Continuing, the depressed Lestat explains 50,000 vampires are in Montreal to hear him sing live, a “final obligation to the vampiress Gabriella.” And given Lestat looks at some passports, it sure seems like he’s planning on leaving “forever” after the concert is done. And Lestat is done, too, or maybe not.
“I was coming out of a coma,” Lestat says. “Feeling… Alive? Or maybe it was him.”
And that’s when it turns out Louis is in Lestat’s apartment. It’s a jaw-dropping reveal that takes perhaps an entire scene (or more) to buy this is the real Louis, and not another of Lestat’s bifurcating mind conjuring a memory as a taunting ghost. No, this is the real Louis, with Lestat, wandering the apartment and talking about canceling the “bad idea.” It’s clear that Lestat and Louis slept in separate locations (Louis doesn’t sleep in a coffin much anymore), but there’s an easy way the two talk to each other as only ex-lovers can. Louis wants to cancel their dinner, the “bad idea,” and also the concert, but Lestat is a little more concerned that Drake “dropped 50 songs today.”
“I liked him in Degrassi,” Louis says casually.
Lestat wants Louis to call him Sheridan or Clarence, one of his new identities because “Lestat is dead,” but Louis prefers Lestat. He’s the only person who has ever really seen him, right? And he continues to see him, treating him as an equal, versus all the others who merely want to use and abuse him for something – or he wants to use and abuse.
They exit, continuing to talk about how what is coming later is a bad idea, as they wander the streets, Lestat dressed as Death. For fans of AMC’s Immortal Universe (and the Anne Rice books) there’s a wealth of ridiculous info here, including Lestat telling Louis he knows Merrick Mayfair through her Uncle, Cortland Mayfair (Harry Hamlin on The Mayfair Witches), because they were in a book club together. As they walk, Lestat continues to explain that it’s been months since Louis ditched waitress Regina (Delainey Hayles), or Fraudia as Lestat calls her after their vampire daughter Claudia. And the “bad idea” evolved from there.
As they walk, they continue to drop little rewrites for Interview with the Vampire, including Lestat noting how much his book club loved Tom Anderson (Chris Stack on the TV series), and how “Topeka” was Lestat’s “line.” Louis, though, is focused on what’s after, that the vampires in town will “kill half the city” when he’s done singing. Lestat isn’t concerned, it’s happening already – and this emphasizes the difference between the duo. Lestat doesn’t worry about the future, just the now. Louis is always worried about the past and future, and can’t focus on what’s in front of him.
The whole thing continues to be domestic and cute as they walk, to the point Louis wonders why Lestat is being nice. They arrive at Louis’s restaurant, which is near Lestat’s apartment by a “catastrophic coincidence,” and there Lestat is greeted like a god by the vampires (and others) gathered inside. They’re not there for the applause, though… It’s for dinner in the back room with Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian).
“Taylor and Travis, congratulations… Have you set a date yet?” quips Daniel as they enter in a weirdly well-timed line of dialogue. Smash to credits, which ends with a somewhat rude Lestat saying, “Please. Turn Larry down.” Dude is dead, Lestat, leave him alone!
Interview With The Vampires
Okay, back to what one would presume is an Interview with the Vampires, but doesn’t quite play out that way. We cut in with Daniel asking them about Hurricane Odette, the emotionally charged place we (mostly) left Lestat and Louis at the end of Interview with the Vampire Season 2. The two of them play with Daniel – and with fans who wondered what they said to each other – by pretending they can’t remember. Daniel smiles, and explains he needs an ending for his documentary. So what did they say?
“It was enough,” Lestat says, in probably the first honest thing he’s said to Daniel all season long (other than the protracted hypnotization confession of Episode 3), “That he showed up.”
Daniel stops the recorder, and the duo are surprised – but Daniel has seemingly mostly given up, for a reason we’ll come to understand by the end of the episode. Also of note: Daniel seems to be wearing a ton of self-tanner. Hang on to that piece of info for later, as well.
Daniel does have one more question, about love, and whether that’s why Louis and Armand never read his mind back in the first two seasons of the show… Louis says he was trying to respect Daniel, but that sort of gibes with what Lestat said a few episodes back: that Louis was blocking Armand. But it doesn’t connect with something we know, that Armand has been in love with Daniel for 52 years. Suffice to say there’s a lot going on here, and perhaps nobody is quite being on the level, or really knows what happened; the truth, as usual, is somewhere in between.
They discuss The Great Conversion, which Lestat downplays, and explains that what’s next for him is perhaps a cabin next to a forest where he can farm pumpkins and transcribe birdsong. This is my hindsight, end of episode interpretation here, but where Louis and Lestat are relatively calm, Daniel is seething in this scene: he knows what’s coming at the end of the night. Anyway, Lestat continues, thinking he could become a piano bar player at one of Louis’s hotels.
The chef brings in a descendant of the Lioncourt line, who they bleed into small shot glasses as Louis and Lestat watch – and Daniel continues to watch them. “You still fangin’ Sofia?” Daniel asks, and it’s clear he knows that Sofia is really Gabriella, and is taunting Lestat – and Louis, who has never met her – about that.
Lestat asks “what is with the tan, Dan?” and he confesses he’s seeing someone, but they don’t ask who. They toast, and Daniel asks, “ready to eat your own?” as they sip.
Ghosts
After the dinner, Lestat and Louis discuss the meal, and how Daniel was trying to read their minds. As they drive, they pass by a car listening to one of Lestat’s songs – “Cabbage” – and he pops his head out with Louis’s encouragement, singing along and making their night. Louis gives him a little clap as they drive off. After a moment, Lestat asks Louis about how, back in Season 2 of the show, a ghostly version of Lestat followed Louis along the Seine, and haunted him. Lestat casually asks what that was about, but reading between the lines, Lestat is asking for himself: he’s been seeing ghosts, and one could further posit that he passed this particular vampiric quality along to his Fledging, Louis. Further: did he pass it to Gabriella as well?
Louis thinks it was guilt, by the way, and wants to know if Lestat saw Louis. Lestat nods, “no,” but he’s lying. “The songs might have shook loose a bone or two,” Lestat admits after a moment. And this drives Louis a little nuts, because Lestat is never totally honest with him, keeping things hidden. There’s a big hidden thing Louis is about to find out about that will drive home this particular point, but for Lestat it’s less about hiding than living in the moment. They also, in another fan shout-out sequence, talk about how the book made Antoinette (Maura Grace Authari) “smaller than she was” with Lestat adding a very internet “Justice for Antoinette.”
One last important bit here: they casually talk about how Antoinette cut off her own finger because she thought the gift would help her grow it back. It did not.
And while they both laugh hysterically when Louis seriously answers Lestat’s rote “I have the blood of Akasha” with “it’s not the blood, it’s what you do with the blood,” that is Louis speaking truth, again. Lestat later cops to being a “monster,” but it’s not clear whether Louis agrees.
Brutal Love
At the venue, Louis meets “Sofia,” and they both know each other instantly. They sit to watch the rehearsal, where Lestat sings “Dancing With Myself,” a purposefully ironic selection given he has a whole vampire band now, as well as two of the great loves of his life calmly watching him sing. Louis is still very casual about everything, but Gabriella is like a snake, coiled, and ready to pounce. She pointedly mentions that vampires are coming from everywhere, mentioning Paris, Dubai, and Detroit – all cities where Louis has either killed vampires or nearly been killed himself – and warns him that going to Lestat’s concert may not be the best idea.
Louis stands strong, not realizing who he is dealing with. But it’s clear Gabriella is low key threatening Louis, giving him an eventual “you should stand by me. I will protect you.”
Next up, they play a song they’re on the fence with, one that Salamander (Ryan Kattner) calls “dick salt.” Sam Barclay (Christopher Geary), despite being loathed by Lestat, is now part of the band on keyboard, by the way. The song? “Brutal Love,” which Lestat sings directly to Louis, which he may or may not realize. Gabriella does, though, and it’s clear she comes around to realizing it’s not about her as Louis starts to feel the song: it’s Lestat saying he wants Louis, he wants him, their love is written in the stars. And she hates it. Louis? Not sure how to feel, after so many years struggling to leave his feelings for Lestat behind.
Lestat Is A Real Motherf**ker
The song done, it’s time to turn to “The Failures,” Album 55, Side A. The rehearsal continues as Louis’s attention has begun to waver to his phone. His boyfriend Lemuel (Moses Sumney) has sent him a video… Lestat digs into him a bit about checking his phone, and Louis leaves for the car: they’ve got an hour to decide about the “bad idea.” Gabriella, meanwhile, stopped by Lestat’s place to drop off her scarf and some books for travelling… Why is she finally acting like a mother to Lestat, after all these years? She’s sending him to, I think they say Cardiff in Wales (honestly hard to tell with the accents), where she’s hoping Lestat will “make more” vampires. She kisses him passionately, and he turns away.
She warns Lestat that Armand is town and will make some sort of a move, but he shoots back that she should “show Alex affection. He could use his mother.” We didn’t see Alex turned, but given Alex, Salamander and TC (Sarah Swire) were all given the dark gift in a studio in New York, it seems likely that Lestat changed the latter two, while Sofia changed the former. She takes it as the insult it’s meant: stop bothering me, Lestat, and instead be a “mother” to someone else.
Back in the car, Louis is watching a video with sex sounds coming out of it, and says, “I think we’ve got to cancel.” He turns his phone to Lestat, who acts confused. It’s Gabriella having sex with Lestat, and he waves it away as a fake. But no, it’s Daniel who released the video, along with a man-on-the-street interview with none other than Armand, who reveals that “Sofia” is actually Gabriella, alongside the video of him boning his own mom.
Lestat laughs, and something that doesn’t come up much on the show is that the character has an uncontrollable laugh that is his reaction to stressful situations like this. Lestat tries to call it an “AI deep fake,” and keeps trying to swerve the conversation while Louis pushes until Lestat vomits up blood, saying, “It’s not one thing, Louis.”
The car stops, Louis gets out, and Lestat chases after Louis while he tries to explain that it’s a “complicated, multi-faceted set of circumstances,” while Louis shoots back “there is no set of circumstances that leads to: oh yeah, I can see why that would happen.” There’s a level where this feels like the writers of the show, in the form of Lestat, having a conversation with viewers (that would be Louis).
Louis compares Lestat to Armand, calling it a “century long lie,” and as the argument gets more heated, Lestat begins screaming and sobbing, explaining that when Louis came to him saying he paid a girl to pretend to be Claudia, he didn’t call it a sickness, he came to help. And Lestat begins to have a panic attack, as Louis watches. The thing is, he’s right: Lestat gave everything to Louis, and things are complicated. Louis is also right: you don’t have sex with the same vagina that birthed you. But what Louis begins to see is that this is part of the essential breaking of Lestat, one of many original sins and abuses that led to the vampire he is today. And it sure sounds like in the middle of the attack, Lestat says: “I love you.”
Louis embraces him, Lestat embraces him back, and they hobble down the street to a local bar, where they put a little blood in their beer. “Ridiculous night,” Lestat says as he drinks.
Louis tries to reset, asking about Sofia/Gabriella, as Lestat explains how her kindness offered him a glimpse at a bigger life. “The cousin who stuck his fingers in me also gave me a dollar,” Louis says. When asked if he had sex with his mother before turning her into a vampire, Lestat takes a sip. So did they have sex pre-vampire? We saw her molest him after the wolf attack, so perhaps that’s what he means. Though also: perhaps not.
And as Lestat puts a little blood in Louis’s beer, there’s a calm, even affection between the two. Again, through all the abuse, the heartache, the arch vampire drama, Louis and Lestat have grown to understand each other. It’s a little silly to say centuries old beings are growing up. But hey, it’s a TV show, we’re watching their character arcs, and that is indeed what is happening.
After a pause, Lestat asks Louis to check his phone and see if the clip has gone viral. Louis tells him that it’s a “week of ridicule” and then it’ll go away, though we viewers know that it’s the first thing that pops up on Lestat’s Wikipedia page – or at least that’s what he told us back in Episode 2. Louis apologizes to Lestat for yelling at him, regardless, and they both decide to cancel the “bad idea.”
Louis And Lestat And The No Good, Very Bad idea
I’ll just jump ahead a bit here to set the stage: the “bad idea” is to hold a seance for Claudia, ostensibly so they can get closure after Louis’s breakdown over Fauxdia led to him holing up in Lestat’s apartment for a month and a half. And yes, it’s not a great idea, but they don’t really realize the extent of how bad an idea it is until about 15 minutes of show time from now.
Okay, enough skipping around. Merrick Mayfair welcomes them into the room they’ve gotten her, which is outfitted with a slew of lamps and a cornstarch circle on the floor. She’s friendly, but seems to be needling Louis a little bit about her family history, and about killing Claudia. Louis protests, saying he didn’t kill her; but Lestat explains that Merrick is talking about giving her the gift… While Lestat led to her death in Paris.
They have Claudia’s personal items, her diary and the dress she died in, and Merrick will be able to summon her using them. So: she does… Until she senses that Lestat and Louis “brought in a jinx.” She moves the two away from each other, and it’s like two kids getting separated by the teacher.
Anyway, summoning: she does it! And through Merrick’s body, Claudia says, “The fuck you yanking on me, you dumb bitch,” and smashes her head against the desk, knocking a tooth out. They demand Merrick bring Claudia back, no matter the cost, and she does, as Louis tries to explain what happened the night Claudia died. He tells her he wants to say the goodbye he didn’t get to say, and that he hopes she “found a bit of quiet.”
Claudia/Merrick is only looking at Lestat, though, and once Louis apologizes, her spirit jumps into the dress and she returns, her ankles slit just like they were back at the Théâtre des Vampires all those years ago. She finally looks at Louis, feeling the dress on her that her lover Madeleine (Roxane Duran) made for her, noting that Louis hung the dress she burned in on his wall. Louis says it was to “honor you.” But Claudia sarcastically shoots back that yes of course that what she wants to be, “car fuel for your self pity.”
Louis thinks that Claudia was calling to her, but no, she was not. “I would have tripped Armand on the stairs if I wanted you with me,” Claudia says, her form see-through. Don’t worry, it gets worse. “You weren’t even my favorite,” she continues, explaining that Lestat was: he’s her maker. And Claudia continues to dig in the knife, explaining that she knew that there was a slave marking on Louis that let her know he would follow her anywhere “like a dun dog.”
But shouldn’t she thank him for holding back parts of her diary? Telling her story? Of course not. “I hate you,” she screams, listing everyone that ever hurt her, from her mother, to Bruce, to the vampires that burned her alive. “I hate you to the pit of all things… Stop! Saying! My! Name!”
At that, the circle breaks, and Claudia breaks out, and turns her attention to Lestat… Who welcomes it. He wants to be hurt, unlike Louis. And she digs in, playing everything that happened in New Orleans and Paris as part of her own performance, wondering how much Lestat, as part of the Théâtre des Vampires, rehearsed her death. The difference? Claudia wouldn’t have needed a “hug in the hurricane,” she would have been happy to watch Louis die.
“Dress on the wall,” Claudia says. “Song on the radio. Pay some broke witch a pittance to drag me out of my spidery-ass nowhere.”
And did they shed a tear for Madeleine? Did they hug it out for her, too? Of course not. And as Claudia continues, she can’t see her here, and “I can’t find her there. The one good thing in my life… Bleak.. Black… Life. I don’t know where she is.”
Claudia screams and rages as Lestat cries blood tears, Louis stricken with shock and shame. Finally, she disappears, and Merrick closes the gate.
Heads Will Roll
So, that sucked, huh? No vampire puns intended. What’s so stunning about this is that a lesser show would provide closure, a way for Lestat and Louis to move on. Instead, none of them can, including Claudia’s spirit. Lestat and Louis are as stuck as she is, and perhaps knowing that Claudia – or this in-death version of Claudia – hates them with every piece of her soul will allow them to at least figure out what that means next. Claudia, meanwhile, is quite literally in Hell.
Anyway, it gets worse.
Silently, traumatized, they walk through a park, sounds of Halloween all around them. And when they do talk, grimly Lestat answers that at least Claudia “spared us the ambiguity.” And they realize they have some work to do on themselves, something that people didn’t do in the 18th century – or the early 20th century, for that matter.
They sit down on a park bench to decompress from the traumatic evening, and realize that at least they can do this: sit with each other, and talk, something Claudia doesn’t have. In a weird way, it gives Louis and Lestat a new look on their unlife: they have each other, still.
Louis changes the subject, asking if Lestat thought he would get away with the whole Sofia/Gabriella thing. And the answer is, “I don’t know.” But Lestat does realize he put it out there, by hanging her portrait in New Orleans, by bringing her on the tour bus, by introducing her to Louis. He admits he wanted it known, but he doesn’t understand: why now? Why the night before he goes on stage?
“Why do I actively, manically pursue failure?” Lestat asks, basically laying out the theme of the season.
Louis posits that this may just be what vampires do: if there’s no end in sight, what is life about? “Maybe it’s just how you keep your nights straight,” Louis says.
After a pause, Louis asks a question that has been hanging over the whole season as well: “The songs are about me?” he asks.
Lestat smiles sadly. “Most of them,” he admits.
…But also, Louis opened a restaurant two blocks away from Lestat’s house; it’s not just the latter that’s still holding a torch for the former.
After a pause, Louis throws out a hypothetical: what if it was just the two of them again, like it was back at the beginning in New Orleans? Lestat, you can almost feel his heart quickening, if it still beat, hoping that Louis will say the words he’s been hoping he’d say for nearly a century. Louis talks about them moving into a trailer park, moving to the desert together. They look at each other, considering the scenario, their hands barely touching.
In the midst of this moment, Louis notices a “thrift store Dracula peeping” on them, and when Lestat looks over, it’s Alex. He raises his mask, and takes a drag of his cigarette. And with two quick cuts, someone decapitates both Lestat and Louis, their heads sliding off of their necks.
As they bleed out, it’s revealed the assassins are Daniel and Armand, each wearing masks of their own. And we’re left with the image of Louis and Lestat’s heads on the ground, their bodies still sitting next to each other on the park bench.
To reiterate what I said up top: AHHHHHH.
But also, don’t worry. Or rather, there’s a way out of this… Maybe. Back in Episode 3, Dr. Fareed Bhansali (Gopal Divan) explained that death by decapitation doesn’t necessarily work for vampires. “A study done in Budapest had two class B vampires surviving separation for nearly two hours,” Fareed said. “A vampire of Lestat’s breeding could last four to five times–“
He was cut off (no pun intended), though later in the episode we got to see this in action when Louis decapitated a much lesser vamp.
So assuming both Louis and Lestat can survive at least eight to ten hours, that’s… Well, it’s still a huge problem. But they’re likely not dead yet. As for how they get their heads back on their bodies, given as we mentioned earlier, cutting off a finger does not make that finger grow back, we’ve got one more episode to find out. We know Louis survives, though he’s down a leg. Lestat? We don’t know, though given we have a lot of balls in the air between whatever Armand, Alex, and Daniel are up to, what Gabriella is up to, and perhaps even the rise of Akasha (Sheila Atim), the Queen of the Damned? Well, no need to lose your head over this.
We’ll see you next week for the final stop on Lestat’s tour, “The Failures.”
The Vampire Lestat Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
New episodes of The Vampire Lestat premiere on Sundays on AMC and AMC+, starting June 7, 2026. The episodes premiere at 9 pm ET on AMC and 9 pm ET / 6 pm PT on AMC+.
Here’s the full list of episodes in The Vampire Lestat with expected premiere dates:
Sunday, June 7, 2026: The Vampire Lestat, Episode 1, “Detroit”
Sunday, June 14, 2026: The Vampire Lestat, Episode 2, “Toledo”
Sunday, June 21, 2026: The Vampire Lestat, Episode 3, “Toronto”
Sunday, June 28, 2026: The Vampire Lestat, Episode 4, “The Devil’s Road”
Sunday, July 5, 2026: The Vampire Lestat, Episode 5, “New York”
Sunday, July 12, 2026: The Vampire Lestat, Episode 6, “Montreal”
Sunday, July 19, 2026: The Vampire Lestat, Episode 7, “The Failures” *Season Finale*
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