Interview With the Vampire recap: Welcome to the world, baby girl

The fourth episode of Interview With the Vampire says, "Oh, you thought Louis was an overly dramatic narrator? Hold my blood bag."

Meet Claudia. She's 14 years old. She'll always be 14 years old. And she's about to make that everyone's problem.

Daniel (Eric Bogosian) first meets Claudia (Bailey Bass) through her journals, which Rashid (Assad Zaman) presents along with gloves for safe handling of the delicate, decades-old paper. Daniel flips through doodle-filled entries, introducing us to the breathless, giddy voice of a teenage vampire racing through the world with her new gifts, her distaste for rules, and her hunger, which is permanently fixed at the metabolism of a ravenous growing girl.

We first see her being rescued from the fiery inferno of her blazing boarding house. The black angel carried her to safety, and the white angel took away the pain of her burned body by drinking her blood and offering his in turn. Although Lestat's reluctant to create a vampire daughter when Louis was close to leaving him, he gives in after a caress of his lover's cheek. And like that, a new predator is born.

Here's where we get the first taste of what this episode does beautifully well: giving us glimpses of Louis (Jacob Anderson) and Lestat (Sam Reid) navigating their tumultuous relationship on the fringes of Claudia's chaotic emergence into vampirism. Their loving and living and fighting is the constant static in the background of Claudia's story.

Claudia adapts quickly to her new life of wealth and blood. When she learns that Lestat can't hear her or Louis' thoughts because he sired them both, she telepathically asks Louis if that makes him the "dumb one?" Ha!

Of course, Lestat's not happy being shut out of their private communication and promises to teach Claudia all the secrets of being a vampire as long as everyone in the family promises not to keep secrets. Let's just get ahead of this now: they all have secrets.

"Daddy Lou" and "Uncle Les" jump into raising their child, with the former advocating for animal consumption only and the latter delighted by Claudia's hunger for humans. And finding victims is so easy when her childish appearance keeps them from noticing the danger until it's too late.

When they bed down, it's Lestat in his coffin and Claudia with Louis in his, and when Claudia asks Lestat who made him and where the other vampires are, it opens up a fight (in French!) that the two men have clearly had over and over: Lestat asks if Louis put her up to asking that, and Louis replies that Lestat's forgotten what it's like to be young.

A third coffin is clearly necessary, so her two dads take Cladia to a funeral parlor to pick out her own. She excitedly stretches out in a white model lined in pink satin, shouting, "It's so soft!" The owner (and his confusion about Claudia's excitement) doesn't survive long.

From her new bed of satin that night, Claudia peeks out as Lestat joins Louis in his coffin, and they murmur about how much they missed each other. It leads to a conversation with Daddy Lou about love between two men and his kinda-open relationship with Lestat. Louis warns her to tread lightly about Lestat's past, which he doesn't like to talk about.

He also reminds her that some killing has consequences — like that time he slaughtered an alderman and kicked off a riot that led to Claudia's injuries and subsequent salvation (or damnation, depending on who you're asking).

At this point in the present, Daniel takes a break from the journals, telling Rashid, "For a killing machine, I kind of like her." Yep, same. Her exuberance and lethal naivete are downright charming.

When Daniel finds Rashid performing his daily prayers, he taunts the man for having a god other than Louis. But Rashid calmly lets it roll off his back, and Daniel returns to Claudia's writing.

The next entries describe a happy time for their little family: "We fight, we eat, we laugh, we sleep, we love." We see them in stitches over F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu and Lestat's imitation of Max Schreck as the cadaverous Count Orlock.

They build Claudia a teenage dream of a bedroom with a wall that rotates between a bed and a coffin. She flops onto the mattress and shouts at her dads to knock coming into her room. They're a family, and she breathlessly describes their happiness.

But there are shadows on the horizon. Louis and Lestat continue to struggle with their relationship in the background, and when Lestat presents her with a jeweled necklace as a birthday gift — it belonged to a marquis who was eventually beheaded by monk — Claudia asks when she'll grow into it. Neither man gives her a straight answer, and life continues.

But more reality creeps in when Louis gets a call that his mother has died. It leads to a tense confrontation with Grace (Kalyne Coleman) and Levi (Christian Robinson), who are not welcoming to Louis' adoptive daughter. They ask Louis to turn over his share of the family house since he and his "white daddy" are doing so well. Louis bristles, reminding them of how easily he kicked in that door a few years ago, but in the end he promises to draw up the paperwork.

Lestat's still training Claudia in the killing arts, and he takes her to lover's lane, where "the meat" are young and swollen with passion. Claudia's hunger is put on hold by the activities of the couple in the back seat, although she's not distracted enough to spare the man's life, of course. When the woman bolts, Lestat grabs her, spins her into a dip, and drinks her dry.

The lesson Claudia took from this encounter isn't to kill both parties when she attacks, but to wonder what she's been missing in her perpetually 14-year-old body. So she kills a woman coming out of a speakeasy, steals her flapper ensemble, and heads out for a solo hunt. In the background, we hear Louis shouting at Lestat for taking Claudia to lover's lane.

If anything, this child has brought the cracks in their relationship to the forefront, although Lestat really does look like a daddy in that sweater vest.

On the town, Claudia overhears a trio of women mocking her appearance and her skin color, but before she can commit (justifiable?) homicide, she's interrupted by Charlie (Xavier Mills), a handsome young carriage driver.

Just like that, she falls hard and fast. She can't sleep, she can't eat, she can't stop thinking about the veins that flow like rivers down his arms. Here, her journals jump into teen-girl hyperdrive as she recounts standing on the balcony of her house as Charlie drives past, saying to herself, "If he looks up, he likes you. If he doesn't…" That is extremely relatable teenage girl with a crush content, and poor Charlie does look up.

As her infatuation deepens, she angers Louis by blocking her thoughts from him, excited to have her own secrets. When she finally convinces Charlie that she's older than she looks, they climb into the back seat of his carriage. But her lust moves from sex to blood, and his racing heartbeat overwhelms her.

She brings his drained body home and frantically asks Lestat to turn him, but it's too late. And Uncle Les is not sympathetic, holding her in front of their backyard incinerator and forcing her to watch the face of her love as it melts in the flames.

"This is why we never get close to mortals, because sooner or later, they end up dead." Poor Lestat, surrounded by young vamps struggling to sever their human ties.

In the present, Louis is finally awake to answer Daniel's question about why he's never seen Claudia's Ann Frank-meets-Stephen King journals before. Louis says they were scattered across the globe during their 1973 interview session, and besides, would Daniel want to share journals that his daughter wrote detailing every way he'd failed her with a reporter he'd just met at Polynesian Mary's?

"Claudia was everything," Louis says. Note the past tense here; Charlie's death burst the fantasy of their happy family. Louis reluctantly agrees with Daniel that Claudia wasn't enough to fix the fundamental problems between him and Lestat.

Claudia's journals confirm this, describing the fights she'd overhear while she waged her own battles against her permanently young body. From inside her coffin, she rages, laughs, cries, grapples with her stuck existence. And eventually she breaks.

The episode ends with Claudia engaging in the vamp-girl version of self-harm: she sticks her arm into a shaft of sunlight, testing her endurance as her skin burns away.

Blood droplets

• Who would've thought that a teenage vampire wasn't the fix that Louis and Lestat needed? This episode-long drop into Claudia's world was a blast, with her dads rattling around in the background, hinting at how not-great things are overall.
• A few things of note regarding Daniel: he's frustrated that Louis unilaterally arranged for his Parkinson's treatments to continue in Dubai, he's dealing with questions from an editor about this mysterious book he's now working on, and his laptop home screen is a frightful mess. I've never related to him more.
• If you were wondering, Lestat was 159 years old when the three of them were living together — not 160, as Louis claims.
• Adaptation note: in the book, Claudia was 5 years old. In the 1994 movie, she was played by 10-year-old Kirsten Dunst. Bass is 19 playing a 14-year-old. While a vicious 5-year-old vampire is shocking and depraved, it makes sense to age her up for an on-screen appearance. And that cusp-of-womanhood frustration will keep simmering and make for juicy conflict to come. Bring it on.

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