Episode 4 of “Interview With the Vampire” was a gay dad fest

Attention, Rice-a-maniacs: Claudia! Has entered! The chat! (Or, you know, the show.) Iconic demonic 5-year-old *checks notes* tween vampire angel baby, Claudia!

(I mean, look, if I wasn’t 100% fully on board with every change the show is making and definitely only evaluating and loving it on its own merits and not constantly comparing it to the book in my head, I might venture to suggest that aging Claudia up significantly kind of totally leaches the character of her essential perverse strangeness and tragedy. But never mind that!)

OK, so it’s sunrise in Dubai in present day 2022, and Daniel is blah, blah, blahing to his editor on the phone when that snooty alive human servant whose name I can never remember pops up like, “Something something exposition about how sick you are, Daniel, and also here are all of Claudia’s diaries which you’ve never seen before.”

So, basically, instead of Louis telling this part of the story all over again, we’re getting an episode from Claudia’s perspective.

How about we take this to the next level?

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Back in 1917 (I think, still?), Louis saves Claudia from that burning house and takes her back to his and Lestat’s place where he begs Lestat to make her a vahmpeer. At first, Lestat is like, “Thiiiiiis is a bad idea…” But then, realizing he can baby trap Louis into sticking around, he’s like, “OK, fine, let’s have a daughter together!”

So they, two adult men, murder this kid and turn her into a vampire nonconsensually, which is fine because otherwise she would have died anyway. Also, Claudia is pretty psyched to not be fully for real dead and also rich now.

Right away, Claudia and Louis realize they can read each other’s minds, which annoys Lestat because he can’t hear their thoughts for reasons. But instead of dwelling on what a problem that is going to 100% be vis-á-vis their intra-family dynamic, they take Claudia to do her first murder. Only instead of eating the rando schmo they want her to—why does Lestat always pick the boringest doofuses for his devil spawns’ first kills?—she fully murders a cop! Louis and Lestat are like, “Wait no!” But she’s just like, “ACAB MY DUDES!”

And so Louis and Lestat commence doing a great job raising their rambunctious, blood thirsty, extremely inquisitive new teenage daughter, which involves gayly critiquing her clothes:

Buying her her own pretty pink coffin box:

And answering her bazillions of precocious questions:

Back in 2022, Daniel catches Rashid (that’s the alive servant’s name!) praying and for some reason gets all suspicious of him, and I genuinely have no idea what this is foreshadowing. (Like, for real, for those treasured readers who thought I didn’t actually know who Marius was, I really did check the appendix of Lestat Goes to Atlantis Land, a real book that was definitely published, and there is no Rashid, so *shruuuuuugh*?)

Anyway, back to Claudia’s next diary: Everything is going just splendidly for our happy little family of killing machines in 1920-something, until suddenly Louis’s mom dies and he decides it’s a great idea to take Lestat and Claudia to the funeral. Louis’s sister Grace gets all Libs of TikTok on him like, “Who is this teenage child you are suddenly grooming?” But Louis is just like “Don’t worry about it.”

Later, Lestat takes Claudia to murder some straight couples who are making out in their cars in the swamp or wherever. Except this makes Claudia realize that sex is a thing, so she gets all dressed up like a big girl and goes out looking for love!

So, after some white girls are racist to her, she meets this cute boy named Charlie and is immediately 100% crushing on him, and he totally likes her back. Except remember how she is an immortal bloodsucker trapped in a 14-year-old’s body? Well, she accidentally murders him while they are trying to have straight sex, and then goes running to Lestat like, “Help! Make my dead boyfriend a vampire now, please!”

Unfortunately, Charlie is 100% dead, and Lestat gets all tough love on her like, “Dude, calm TF down and get this dead body out of my nice house!”

In present day times, Louis is finally awake again, and Daniel wants to know why this is the first time he’s seeing Claudia’s diaries.

“Ummm, I was not about to give my daughter’s diaries to some dude I met in a gay bar in 1970 whatever,” Louis explains. Also, he admits that Claudia was basically a band-aid on his and Lestat’s sh*tty marriage, and then resumes gazing morosely into the middle distance.

Then the episode ends with Claudia—who I guess is now really 20-something years old?—in her coffin going absolutely nuts realizing that no matter how long she lives, she’s always going to look like she’s here to sell you Girl Scout Cookies. So, she gets up and opens that weird sun hole they have in the ceiling (WHY DOES THIS FAMILY OF VAMPIRES HAVE THAT???) and does some self-harm by burning her arm, and I definitely 100,000% for sure know what that is foreshadowing!