of course it came at the price of lestat being heralded champion and it should have been louis at some point but i really really like the way this episode dismantled daniel as an interviewer. for too long people have assumed that daniel is the platonic ideal of a journalist who’s always able to get the answers he wants out of his subject and can craft those answers into the perfect story, but that’s really just not true! the truth is he’s very flawed and very biased, and in particular fixates on trying to make sense of extremely complex narratives by forcing them into white, liberal understandings of race, abuse, trauma, power dynamics, etc. again i do wish the show let him get away with this way less with louis ESPECIALLY regarding louis’ experiences as a black man, but i hope this will also provide some retrospective clarity on his character and highlight some of his really terrible commentary and questions during the dubai interview. because the truth is louis shares the same sort of nostalgia and passion for storytelling daniel does, and they process trauma in similar ways, so it lays this solid foundation for their relationship as interviewee and interviewer that lestat doesn’t share. seeing daniel fixate on the stutter from the jump was always telling, as it became quickly obvious it has little to do with the story lestat wants to tell, but daniel approaches things with this idea that if he can get lestat to admit to his stutter he’ll be able to explain away all of lestat’s trauma and behaviors. and that of course is just not how that works. so to watch lestat play up the stutter and then fool daniel entirely by having a conversation with him in his head was really awesome. tldr we need to torture daniel about not being a perfect journalist more
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