Interview with the Vampire Episode 5 Review: A Vile Hunger For Your Hammering Heart

Charlie’s death, which concluded “The Ruthless Pursuit of Blood with All a Child’s Demanding,” sets Claudia adrift, and Bass rides every wave. The traumatized too-young vampire giggles her way through her initial killing spree, flirts drunkenly with cops looking for excuses, and plays Louis and Lestat like pinballs on a very tilted board. It is as mischievously fun as it is frightfully suspenseful, building until the audience doesn’t even realize they’re hoping someone is getting away with murder, and a lot of it. Only a hungry teen vampire could try to chalk up 56 bodies as a post-romantic ice cream binge, but Bass adds that topping too. It’s delicious, but not the cherry. After meals, Claudia keeps leftovers, that is such bad vampire etiquette.

Besides being troubled lovers and at-odds parents, Lestat and Louis find themselves as crime investigators, after hearing off-the-record accounts of foul play from, and about, soon-to-be-former associates. They play their good cop/bad cop roles to the hilt. Louis tracks every college death and sees patterns everywhere. Lestat insists the case is closed. To his long-surviving predator instincts, Claudia is more than a menace, she is tacky. Who keeps toes from a kill? One woman’s breast? These are the things which separate vampires from psychos, and Lestat will not slum in such a crowded neighborhood.

Louis abandons his ruthless business life in New Orleans, and Europe apparently wasn’t big enough for a vampire like Lestat. We have to wonder about what we actually learn from the wayward vampire Bruce. Those three pages ripped from the diary are not the only secrets scattered about. Bruce appears to confirm everything Lestat promised Claudia would find in European vampires. But throws dark shade on what brought Lestat to the U.S. in the first place. Was he running, like Louis and Claudia are considering, from a more oppressive, possessive Dark Gift giver? And does it have anything to do with the allusion to vampires scaling Dubai skyscrapers and the “vampire apocalypse” Molloy tosses off in an aside. It is at the heart of the only thing Claudia is looking for, beyond normal anatomical growth: details.

In the book, Louis and Lestat dress Claudia up like a doll, and treat her like one. They avert their attention from her reality, and in the series, this lays bare their own jealousies. Lestat was jealous over the telepathic bond he was excluded from, and every young soldier he finds in Louis’ arms sends a pang which triggers hunger, and he takes his tastes as he finds them. Lestat saves all his sociopathic charm for his jealousies, because his romance, and the vibes of tough love he is emitting, are authentic.

Louis wonders too much about the truth to see it, and deliberately does not accept it when things get too real. His rose-colored glasses shield him from the bloody truths he gets from his maker, his vampire sister, and his real sister, Grace (Kalyne Coleman), who is the first to skip out on Louis. This, however, is the emotional event which realigns Claudia’s perspective. There is a vague racial component in the household buried under layers of the vampiric superiority, but the major block is their contemporary Americanism and whatever is being held back by the foreign object which keeps them captive. Lestat does not want to let go of the operatic relationship he enjoys with Louis, or did. The emotional battles between the three vampire characters leave scars, but the deepest cuts come when they maintain restrained civility.

The slap Molloy lays on Louis is shocking, but wholly appropriate. A major violation occurred, and given the past few times the vampire made his supernatural presence known, it could develop into a pattern in interview sessions. Molloy is a fairly brave character, using insinuation as an interrogative tool, and never letting his empathy get in the way of his endless derisive moral judgements. He can’t possibly be as indignant as he puts forward. Molloy wouldn’t be talking with a multiple mass murderer in the first place if he didn’t have some kind of empathy with the killer. He’s not quite Robert Downey Jr.’s encouraging ratings chaser Wayne Gale in Natural Born Killers, but Molloy is not an innocent bystander taking notes, either.