A review of The Vampire Lestat season finale, "The Failures" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I record a song you wash your car to...
Alan Sepinwall
Late in the finale to this mostly amazing season of television, Lestat confronts the spirits of the many people he killed, hurt, or otherwise deeply affected over the course of his long and violent life. He has spent much of the hour being put on trial by the ghosts of his past and present, including versions of Magnus, Louis, Gabriella, Antoinette, and others — perhaps just in his imagination, perhaps conjured by whatever power created the universe(*). They accuse him of many individual sins, but place them all under the umbrella of the word that gives both this episode and Lestat's unreleased recordings their name: failure.
(*) When Louis' brother Paul (more on him in a bit) looks up to the sky to answer his maker, he says, "Yes, ma'am," which I took to either be that the Almighty in Anne Rice's books (which I haven't read) is a woman, or that Rolin Jones and company are tipping their caps to Rice by treating her as the god responsible for all of this.
As Lestat looks out at this crowd of victims, lovers, and friends, he considers the concept of failure. Then he declares, "But if I failed... then that means I actually attempted something. Which is more than I can say for most of those I love the most."