In honor of The Bear's final season, get $20 off an annual subscription to What's Alan Watching?, from now through June 28.
A review of this week's The Vampire Lestat, "The Devil's Road" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I'm the 566th-richest man in the world...
Alan Sepinwall
All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again. Time is a flat circle. Hurt people hurt people. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.
Choose your preferred cliché and apply it to "The Devil's Road." The episode is a potent reminder of how cycles of abuse, regret, and other forms of darkness continue through the generations, no matter how aware people are of the pattern, nor how hard they want to break it.
The end of "Toronto" established that Armand had entered a 12-step program. Here, he turns up on the tour to attempt one of those steps: making direct amends to those he has wronged. Unsurprisingly, nobody wants to accept his apology. Daniel has his own history with addiction, and with alienating the people who cared about him. He knows how poorly this step usually goes, and in theory should offer some grace to Armand, both as a fellow addict and because Armand is his maker. Instead, he verbally tears Armand to shreds in the way his loved ones surely did to him once upon a time. He still cares more about getting the story than anything else, and spends much of their conversation continuing to demand the truth about why Armand let things in Dubai go as far as they did. He's just not prepared for Armand's answer: that it wasn't out of his love for Louis, but his love for Daniel himself.