THE VAMPIRE LESTAT: Mommy and Moi!
Lestat invites us to unpack the childhood trauma that led to all his Oedipal smoochery.
Perhaps you recall that last week’s season premiere ended with Lestat (a vampire) and his mother Gabriella (also a vampire) making out in a shitty roach motel in Detroit. And in case you had any doubts about what all that Oedipal smoochery might lead to, our beloved hero cleared all that right up at the top of Episode 2:
“Savage Garden? More like Savage Grace! Vous thought vous were signing up for gay Heated Rivalry but with vampires??? MAIS NON! Welcome to the straight-ish incestuary!”
Having explained that he’d just done sex with his moms and that it’s ok for vampire reasons, Lestat invited us to unpack the childhood trauma that led to all that along with him.
See, it all started in 1770-something Aubergine, France. Back then, Lestat was just a Little Lord Lioncourtleroy squatting with his family in their falling down ancestral castle, which they were too poor to renovate due to having spent all their generational wealth on bad wigs and never doing any work ever. One day, while Olde Lord Fartleroy and his pube goblin adult sons, Don Jr. and Eric, were stuffing chicken carcasses down their faces, a Friar Tuck came to visit because he wanted them to sell wee Lestat to him for education purposes and definitely nothing else untoward. Unfortunately, Olde Lord Lionfarts refused to be parted from his precious youngest-born blonde angel bébe boy even though he hated him probably for homophobic reasons.
But Lady Gabriella Lionfart was from Italy, where all cherubic youths get thrown to the monks as soon as they can say antipasti. Plus, she hated her husband and always wanted to do anything that annoyed him. So, she was like, “I will-a literally a-pay a-you to take-a this bambini away-a from here so I can-a read Joan Collins in-a peace!” And she threw some jewels at the monk, who I guess took Little Lestat off to do Bible studies or whatever.
“She was cold,” Adult Lestat voiceovered, “and I grew HARD by example. GET IT???”
Sadly, monk school didn’t work out for Le Petit Brat Prince, because several years later he was a moody teen and back at Castle Lionfarts getting screamed at by his pops once again because he’d got caught trying to run away with some slutty actors or something. But it was fine because Lady Gabriella just started yelling “CABBAGE!” at her husband and didn’t stop until Lestat was Sam Reid-years-old and all these peasants showed up to beg Lord Leoncorpse to kill some wolves that had been eating all their sheep and blowing down their houses.
Unfortunately, His Lordshank was too riddled with syphilis to do anything about any of that, so it was up to Lestat to go out and do all the wolf-extermination his own self. Except the show didn’t have the effects budget to show much of that, so when Lestat dragged his tattered body back to Castle Leonfarts later, Lady Gabriella was real skeptical.
“Bitch, you did not just kill a whole pack of big bad wolfs!” she said.
“Yuh-huh!” Lestat protested. “Just look at the bloody gashes on my perfectly sculpted pecs!”
Gabriella did look at them, and something untoward stirred in her own de loincourt region. “BTW,” she said, while sponging her son’s crotch, which was definitely not one of the places he was injured, “Have-a I ever a-told a-you about how I-a dream of-a boning down with-a every man in-a de village? Too bad I’m-a currently dying of-a blood-in-hankie-itis!”
This news was so terribly woeful for 1770s Lestat that present- or possibly future-times him could no longer bear to continue being vaguely faithful to the book, so it was back to 2025.
Lestat awoke on his tour bus to find Daniel’s naked Bogosian butt showering in his fancy shower and his whole band freaking out because now they knew he was a for-real murdering vampire. Also, Gabriella was there, but she was telling everyone her name was “Sophia” for no reason.
Patrick from Schitt’s Creek and the rest of the gang had all kinds of questions and qualms about their frontman’s diet entirely consisting of murdering people, so Lestat had to explain that mostly he didn’t do all that much murdering these days because he had a “farm,” which sounded distressingly adjacent to human trafficking, but really it was allegedly just somewhere where poor people donated blood for him to eat, so more like a vampire soup kitchen?
Still, everyone continued to be gravely a-feared and wanted to kick Lestat out of the band for being a serial killer. But he convinced them all that they were getting much more musically tubular, rock-n-rollwise, and none of them would ever get Harry Styles-famous without him bankrolling them with his vampire millions and also his CHARISMA. So, they all decided to keep being a band with him. All except Alex, who was like, “This is against my religion, which is AA or something,” and walked off into the night and probable obscurity.
Later, Lestat and Gabriella were having a fun mom-and-son night out in Toledo, stalking some business douches all around the town and planning to murder them for dinner. All the while, Lestat was like, “Great plan not telling anyone you’re my mom. Also, let’s stop doing incest for now, cool?”
“Awe, fart noise!” Gabriella leonpouted, so Lestat let her suck his neck blood instead, which is canonically 1000000% better than sex.
Another thing that happened in Toledo was Lestat’s lawyer, Christine, called and said he had to have a meeting with Thomas Pitt (lolzzzz), the owner of the hotel he wrecked whilst clobbering the Tooth Team in Episode 1. But when Lestat showed up to that meeting, it turned out “Thomas Pitt” was just a metatextual pseudonym adopted by his ex-wife Louis, who was v concerned regarding Lestat’s recent shenanigans.
Louise was like, “This is all clearly a cry for help!”
But Lestat just wanted to scream at him for a while about Danielle’s book and Armand and their shared terrible history and the fact that Louis was currently getting his hole ruined by his own foxy vampire lawyer. Then he was like, “Come to my concert later so I can rub your beautiful face in how rock star I’m being!”
Which Louis did, and during one song, Lestat used his vampire powers to freeze the whole entire audience so he could fly up to the nosebleeds seats and throw his copy of IWTV with all his furious scribblings directly at Louis. (One likes to assume that somewhere, Taylor Swift was taking notes.)
Lestat wasn’t the only vampire being annoyed at Louis during the concert. Gabriella was there, natch, giving him the stank-eye. And then there was Daniel Bogosian, who was telepathically like, “Sors not sors about the book! Wanna fight about it?” And Louis was like, “For sures!”
After the concert, Lestat and Gabriella were enjoying the aftermath of flagrantly murdering an entire restaurant full of people.
“You ever tell your sexually gorgeous ex-husbone about me?” Gabs asked.
“Nah, I told him you were dead, just like the rest of our entire family,” Lestat said.
“Hahaha, remember how we murdered them all the night you made me a vampirella?” Gabby laughed.
Lestat did remember, montage-style, about how one time in 18th century times, Gabriella came to Paris basically to do hospice because of all the blood she kept coughing into her hankies, but Lestat was already a vampire by then and instead of letting her die in peace, he dribbled his magical mystery blood all down her gullet so that she could live forever just like him. Then they went back to Castle Leonfart and did a gory massacre on his dad and all his cabbage-fart brothers due to how much Gabriella hated them. Ah, memories!
Meanwhile, Louis and Daniel were not actually fighting at all. They were pretending to have dinner at a shwanksville restaurant, and yucking it up about how mad Lestat was about their book. Louis was just saying how he’d recently been stalking some adult human woman in New York who looked exactly like Claudia, when Daniel was like, “Surprise! Ragdoll James from the Talamascara is here, Bye!”
Raggedy J was like, “Hey, remember how you apparently killed all our guys in Dubai off screen, notably including AGENT TALBOT, a person NOBODY LIKED OR CARED ABOUT1? Could you do that again except on the Tooth Team this time, because they’re a real meth-dealing pain in our behinds? Plus also their leader is that guy Bruce who repeatedly sexually assaulted and tortured Claude back in Season 1.”
“As a father of a daughter, I accept your assignment,” Louis said, and off he probably went to do another revenge massacre next week.
R.I.P. to David Talbot, a major and somehow also pretty much entirely pointless character from the books.