It has been said that Rolin apparently built the entire season around this final episode. Hannah said that this was written as a possible series finale. The season has watered down every character for the apparent purpose of redeeming Lestat but many people have stated they dislike him even more. There is no closure for fans of any character. The writers said they have backed themselves into a corner and they don't have a solid plan to get out of it. Who could all of this possibly serve? Well, it serves Rolin Jones.
Rolin has built this entire season around the concept of "failure" and instead of exploring Lestat's past failures in detail, he has centred Lestat's arc around being a failed artist. Lestat was a successful rockstar in the books and he was shown to be a successful theatre actor in S2. If anything, Lestat was consistently presented as a prideful artist - how he separated man from food. I truly believe S1 Lestat, who murdered the tenor for an offending note, would never perform cheap and meaningless music that the culture despises. Lestat's failings have always stemmed from his terrible actions. He never once failed at the arts. Where has this come from?
The decisions with Lestat's character in TVL only make sense to me if I view him as Rolin's self insert. They skipped over Lestat's past like it was a contractual obligation and made Lestat a complete shell of himself to the point he is almost never seen doing anything autonomously. He is no longer a complex character with interesting motivations for flawed action, he is a mouthpiece for Rolin's feelings around creating this show. TVL is not a continuation of the story but it is Rolin's response to IWTV.
We see this through the constant revisiting of events from previous seasons and the changing of their meaning. Louis "lied" about Lestat's scars. Claudia lied about the train. Justice for Antoinette. Lestat never loved Armand. Armand questions if he ever loved Louis. Akasha's blood made Lestat drop Louis. Tom Anderson is a fan favourite. Armand planted the Steins. Claudia actually preferred Lestat. There is hardly any story that serves as character development. It is constantly going back over every crevice of the story and dictating what exactly the audience should feel. Most of this commentary has no purpose other than to undermine what was once the beating heart of the story: it's cast of colour and commentary on race.
In TVL, Louis has been subjected to constant, often anti-black, humiliation both by the narrative and the characters around him. For a character who ended season 2 self assured and happy in himself, this arc for Louis has done nothing but regress his character to a worse place than he started. Armand has been poorly written to violently torture Louis into apologising to him for no reason at all other than to warrant positioning Lestat as the "right kind of love". Claudia has been poorly written to always have despised Louis for no reason at all other than to position Lestat as morally superior. All of this for audiences to end up not being sold on Lestat's supposed redemption. I have to assume that all of this wasn't really for Lestat's benefit. It was always about trampling on what Interview With The Vampire meant to it's audience - the majority of whom are marginalised people.
From this season, it is evident that Rolin prefers disjointed storytelling with snarky and sarcastic humour over linear, detailed storytelling with an empathetic outlook. What if the piece of writing you'll always be known for isn't the style of storytelling you want to pursue? What if your writing never made it into cultural conversation until you wrote something that is the opposite of yourself, your personality and your politics? Would you see yourself as a failed artist?
Watching the writers contort and warp the characters I once adored into nothing but vessels for anti-black rhetoric and abuse apologia has been so frustrating and heartbreaking. But I am sure that Rolin got what he wanted by using this season as a way to work out his insecure relationship to his own art. The ending sequence of his self-insert version of Lestat looking out on a destroyed world is quite the metaphor.
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