Lestat's whole storyline in the finale did absolutely nothing to drive the plot forward, but it was a wonderful epilogue to a character study. For me it was perfect and did what it was supposed to do ASSUMING we get another season to work through the meat of the QOTD plot. I was locked in from beginning to end. The way it was written, the way it was shot, all the surprise appearances at the end.

I really enjoyed the Armand and Louis storyline in the finale too. Absolutely mesmerizing. And while I can come up with half a dozen ways to make sense of it, it didn't necessarily "click" for me the way the rest of the season did. I can make it make sense, but I can't be sure what the show wanted me to take away from it. Maybe it pays off in a future season? Maybe its just cruelty for cruelty's sake? Personally, I read it as Armand making Louis suffer for being the subject of Lestat's affection, mixed in with some pimp/maker trauma revenge, but who knows? Perhaps Rolin Jones is intentionally weaponizing these questions to secure a season 4?

Regardless of the intention, the moment serves as a vehicle for additional characters to make peace with who they are and the harm they've caused, and because of that it felt right as a way to wrap up the season (even if I dont necessarily understand the motivation/trigger/timing).

I want to zero in on one reference I haven't seen mentioned yet to consider Akasha's great monologue in 3x5 and how it and actress Sheila Atim's delivery relate in particular to Beckett's "Not I". (It's a 15-min play; you can watch the whole thing for free on YouTube here - I really recommend - it's a bizarre, trippy, delightful experience)

First, relating to form - Beckett loves stillness and isolation (his characters may be stuck in urns, trash cans, or a sand hill) and this particular play takes place within the extremely restricted frame of a disembodied mouth hanging on stage. This suits a queen frozen on a slab for thousands of years.

Second, content - One reading of 'Not I' (since there are never singular definitive readings of Beckett's play) is that it shows a woman who has gone through a traumatic experience and is caught in a repetitive, dissociative state, re-living it and recounting events that happened to her from a scattered, distanced third-person perspective.

This is the source of the title, 'Not I' -- words which don't actually appear in the play text but are ghosted in the repeated refrain "What? Who? No -- SHE!" It is as though someone has posed the question 'did these things happen to you?' and the speaker is responding 'no, they happened to her!' or essentially, 'Not I!' (Many of the IWTV/TVL characters take a similar approach of misrecognition/disidentification in relation to their own trauma, including Lestat.)

Consider how this format mirrors the similar third-person framing of Akasha's monologue ("And why is she kept? And why is her death prolonged?"); however, unlike Beckett's nameless protagonist, Akasha is eventually able to recognize her experience ("I am the girl! I am the voice! And I am her!)

If these resonances weren't enough, at one point, Not I's protagonist recounts the process of a gradual (metaphorical?) unfreezing, going from: "No part of her moving, that she could feel, just the eyelid", to the return of movement and voice: "She who but a moment before could not make a sound of any kind, and now can't stop; can't stop the stream" (stream as in the steady stream of words currently spewing forth). Sound familiar? (!!!)

Another nice point of connection is the persistent buzzing in Beckett's text: "all the time the buzzing in the ears" (which could be read as the voices of the vampires that Akasha hears.)

Thirdly, delivery: There is a frenetic pace and distance to Atim's delivery of Akasha's monologue and to 'Not I', a 'stream' that makes the 'noiseness' of the words as much a feature of the experience of listening as their meaning. This ties into an absurdist devaluation of language ('scoop!' - but we might even read Lestat's nonsense lyrics in a similar vein -- 'doo doo' 'wa-ah', etc - part of this grappling with meaning - (that's right, I'm justifying the nonsense lyrics with Derrida!))

Finally, we can bring these together with the broader thematic/philosophical resonances of Beckett's work.

These relate to the fundamental existentialist questions: why are we here? What is the meaning of life? -- which we see young vampire Lestat grapple with in the episode-- and I would argue are also the questions that Akasha is posing herself as the answer to. These questions/ideas, also found in Beckett's theatre of the absurd, trace back to philosopher Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus. According to Camus life is inherently meaningless (or absurd), and there are three responses one can have to this realization: physical suicide (think of all the vampires throwing themselves into the flames), philosophical suicide i.e. religion (see Armand, structure, etc.), or acceptance.

Akasha, at the close of her monologue, seems to be posing herself as another answer -- one informed by the context/current of the violence that permeates her speech ("And why is her death prolonged? Why the girl curled?") --- an answer which also contains strong shades of the 'religion' response above: vengeance against the patriarchy that is the source of this violence and subsequent trauma.