My recap for episode four ended with a question we’ve all been wondering for quite some time: What the hell happened in San Francisco in 1973?
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We’ve gotten hints here and there throughout the show but it’s all been building toward “Don’t Be Afraid, Just Start The Tape,” an episode that finally flashes us back to the heady, homophile ’70s in that foggy Northern California city where a young Daniel Molloy (Luke Brandon Field) met the dashing vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) and interviewed him in between doing lines of cocaine until…well, we know something happened and that Armand (Assad Zaman) was there. But the details, for both Louis and Daniel are hazy at best. Why might that be?
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Thankfully, we’re given an entire episode to find out!
As Armand and Louis regale Daniel with the “dreamy kind of balance” they’d achieved in Paris, with endless nights spent in reading rooms looking up at the ceiling, you may not be alone in thinking that it’s all gonna get rather boring soon. Alas, Armand is called by his lunch, some crypto douche he’ll unleash on the city and hunt (if he survives he gets paid; but that so seldom happens). That leaves the OG interviewee and interviewer alone.
It’s the chance Daniel has to rummage through his findings (those photos, that enhanced audio from the end of that interview tape) and his memories (so hazy, so jumbled) and figure out what exactly took place all those years ago. What prompted the violence that ended the interview? Why did Daniel survive? Namely: why did Armand spare Daniel’s life?
The year is 1973. Louis, with a period appropriate afro and a matching grin, has brought an adorably moppish journalist named Daniel back to his place. There’s a frisson of seduction at play as the two young men circle around each other, with Louis eventually offering his young guest fistfuls of cocaine that set the stage for his confession: “I’m a vampire.”
Daniel’s response is hilarious: “I’m really interested to know why you think that.”
He really thought he’d stumbled onto one kind of crazy and instead fell instead into a wild story he couldn’t have foreseen. After Louis shows him his fangs he rightly freaks out (“Are you the Zodiac killer?!”) only to realize what Louis wanted all along: an ear, a shoulder, some support.
As he unloaded all of his history with regards to Lestat (though curiously not with Armand), Daniel recognizes in this vampire a very lonely soul: “You were lonely,” he tells him in the present, hoping to take them both back to that boarded up the Divisadero apartment where they may or may not have done more than talk (they didn’t; though Daniel was game).
The discussion they’re having, how heated Louis was when talking about Lestat, how it was clear he was running away from his day to day life then is what sets up the incident that forever changes their fates: “I could be your Claudia. Your Lestat,” a coked up Daniel tells Louis, thinking this is what he wanted to hear. But that only enrages him—it’s what prompts him to bite Daniel, feeling misunderstood yet again.
That’s when Armand bursts in, pushing the two away from each other, a kind of cheating tableau that’s no doubt been played over time and time again. For Louis was, indeed, floundering. Viewers of Interview with The Vampire
Hooked up on all the drugs in Daniel’s system, the usually cool and collected vamp unleashes all his pent up anger. He’s bored with Armand. Bored with their life: “You are boring. Colorless. Dull. You are the softest, beigest pillow,” he says, which is as keen-eyed read as you could come up with. They’ve been through this dance before; Armand seems unconcerned by it all, like a partner who’s seen their loved one say things they didn’t mean in such situations. Will he play the part of good nurse or gremlin tonight, as Louis goads him?
It’s both, of course.
But here’s where we get to the moment in the recording Daniel needs Louis to hear: there’s the fighting, yes, the name-calling, of course. But then there’s a door slam (Louis leaving the apartment). Then another (Armand following him). But then there’s a metal door slamming… where could Louis have gone?
It all comes back rushing: he’d gone upstairs to the roof. In the morning. He’d wanted to kill himself and Armand had saved him, bringing him back and letting him recover from the many burns he’d sustained.
This is all new to Louis. Or it kind of is. He’s slowly remembering but he was badly hurt. How long was he in recovery? How long was Daniel, bitten, bleeding, left in that apartment? What did Armand do to him?
Coming in flashes this is what we learn: Armand kept Daniel alive, listened to their tapes and hoped to figure out why he’d been the one boy Louis hadn’t killed. But Daniel was just an ordinary boy with ordinary sins. And there was pain in that; was this transactional? Did his longtime boyfriend really remain so obsessed with Lestat? Was the book a ploy to lure him back to him?
Armand offers Louis one moment of grace; he’s found Lestat and, if he so wishes, he can contact him and tell him how much the now ailing vampire misses him. They do connect telepathically (“Why are you ill?” Lestat asks) but Armand refuses to utter the words Lestat so wishes to tell Louis: “Tell him I love him.”
Bedridden and addled by drugs still, Louis doesn’t react much and soon Armand cuts off communication with Lestat, leaving the two yet again trying to pick up the pieces of their lives—with a human in captivity (and a killed neighbor to boot).
And so Armand turns his attention to things he can control. The more he tortures Daniel the clearer it becomes that these two vampires had plenty of unresolved issues. Armand has survived all these centuries by becoming aloof and unconcerned (on the surface at least); it’s what may have first drawn in Louis but now it bores him. Might finishing off this reporter do the trick?
Of course not, especially since a burnt to a crisp Louis asks him to spare the young journalist.
That would have been that were it not for the way their shared memories are equally jumbled. Young Daniel gets hypnotized and told he’s been in a drug den for days. That explains why his recollections are so messed up. But then so are Louis’s which suggests… well, it suggests that Armand may have tampered with his memories as well.
All of that is revealed but minutes before, fresh off his hunt, a satiated Armand returns to find that the two he’s left behind have been reminiscing about San Francisco.
And so Louis and Daniel come face to face with the person who so surgically had edited their memories. The close-ups that close out the episode make it clear each have realized the enormity of what’s been unearthed.
Not to echo Daniel but… then what?
- “Grab that” leading to a mini lesson in how we use distancing syntax to run away yet also toward things we’d rather ignore or dispense with? Thrilling. More tension out of what kind of words we use in our everyday speech, please.
- “Bartering with desire? Is that what makes you so special?” may be my favorite line this entire episode—mostly because I love the concept of bartering with desire, which is truly what many of these vamps do.
- Speaking of: Kudos to Luke Brandon Field who had the difficult task of bringing young Daniel to life and made him wholly believable as the kind of game straight boy who’d be down for anything if the price was high enough.
- I’d watch an entire episode of Armand hunting crypto bros who think they’re smart enough to outrun a vampire only to find themselves being made into lunch.