The biggest sign Daniel is not doing well is that there’s no skill to how he’s questioning Lestat. Daniel has always been abrasive, but he’s never just been an asshole and he’s not even really asking him anything. He’s just provoking him. He may as well be saying “and then what?” over and over.
There’s the stuttering question. When he asked Louis if it was raining, it was to remind him that his memory is imperfect and can’t be treated objectively. There are holes in his story. He’s doing it so much with Lestat but never gets anywhere. Shouldn’t he have realised before now that he’s not going to get the whole truth from him? Not ever?
He took Gabrielle’s suggestion of asking about the great conversion so quickly and there was a kind of resignation in the way he asked. He barely made an attempt to get anything from him before that. Lestat has probably worn him down over the last two months, but there was a method with Louis. He was attentive to detail. He caught every little discrepancy. There’s been none of that with Lestat. He’s not even trying at all. I don’t think he can try.
I fear he’s back to being that boy who fumbled over his tape recorder again except now he has all the baggage of fifty additional years of life AND he’s relapsed. He’s off his game more than he’s potentially ever been. No wonder he was so gleeful but getting something out of Lestat. There’s predatory journalism, but Daniel never pushed Louis like that. He pushed him until he was crying, but there was always a point to it. This was nothing. Daniel is unravelling in front of us.
I think there's also a point to consider that the entirety of The Vampire Lestat season so far (other than the few shots we see in black and white, which are from Daniel's film) are ostensibly told by Lestat as the narrator. They're all from his "The Failures" album. So this is Daniel's interviewing as depicted by Lestat. Lestat, who just sees Daniel as a predatory, unskilled journalist whose only goal is to get his subjects to break down (with the manic grin he gets when Lestat shows emotion).
