The third episode of The Vampire Lestat is kind of — well... a mess. But a lot of that is by design, like the obnoxious hookup between the Vampire Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle) and the hapless Jarda (Sam Reid). That Jarda happens to be the doppelganger of Gabriella’s son, Lestat (also Reid), makes their copulation all the ickier. It doesn’t help that it all goes down while Lestat is regaling Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) with the long-contested details of his origin story — or that literally everyone can hear every second of it.
Mentally scarring as that tryst is, we’ll soon learn that it’s just a drop in the ocean where Lestat is concerned. After a lot of obfuscating, the eponymous vampire finally comes clean about his early days as a creature of the night, and the skeevy bloodsucker from whom he inherited the Dark Gift. But thanks to the scattershot nature of The Vampire Lestat, it’s hard to discern truth from farce, much less to organize the events of Lestat’s life in a cohesive thread. So here’s everything you need to know about his maker, Magnus (Damien Atkins), and the parallels to another fraught dynamic in the Immortal Universe.
