Opinion
‘Severance’ & ‘Interview With the Vampire’s Love Stories Share One Devastating Theme
[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for both seasons of Interview With the Vampire and Severance.]
The success of Interview With the Vampire and Severance proves that viewers yearn for high-quality art about devastating romances — and that grief is the primary theme of our current TV landscape. That’s hardly a surprise when coming out of a global pandemic. There are scores of shows that have premiered during the COVID-19 era that center grief in the narrative — WandaVision, Yellowjackets, The Pitt, to name a few — but of these grief-stricken shows currently on TV, Interview With the Vampire and Severance both deploy a narrative device to answer the question of whether life would be better if we could just forget the pain of losing the ones we love most. Both titles also take this idea further by having the antagonist both control this narrative device and exploit it.
WandaVision, which started and ended in 2021, asked the same question. It delivered a poignant answer with the line, “What is grief, if not love persevering?” The difference with WandaVision is, Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) had already lost Vision (Paul Bettany). Interview With the Vampire’s Louis (Jacob Anderson) and Lestat (Sam Reid) and Severance’s Mark (Adam Scott) and Gemma (Dichen Lachman) can still find their ways back to their great loves — and are both charting a course to do so — but they’ll always carry the damage of what was taken from them: time, and their little families. These are soulmates being kept apart by manipulative forces of mind control, but no amount of memory tampering has succeeded in making them forget about their lover. The love exists even if the memories are repressed. Love transcends severance. Mark and Gemma are Louis and Lestat’s closest TV descendants in this regard. And as fate would have it, how this debilitating grief took root is revealed in Season 2 Episode 7 of both shows.
Severance‘s long-awaited Gemma-focused episode debuted on February 28 and revealed that Mark’s very much alive wife has been held prisoner in the depths of Lumon Industries’ high-security basement in the years since her fake death. She’s being used as a guinea pig to perfect the next generation of severance technology. By severing Gemma’s brain several times over, they’re seemingly testing how many times a mind can withstand being split. By forcing Gemma’s innies into different levels of distressing scenarios repeatedly, it appears Lumon wants to sell the removal of pain. Sever your mind with Lumon tech, and you’ll never know pain again. Your innie will. But the physical toll remains. After years of torture and even being told that Mark moved on and had a child with someone new (a lie), the chance to see Mark again is keeping Gemma alive and fighting.
Apple TV+
Interview With the Vampire‘s “I Could Not Prevent It” revealed how Louis and Lestat’s daughter, Claudia (Delainey Hayles), and her lover, Madeleine (Roxane Duran), were murdered. This episode, among other things, furthered the memory-wiping storyline with Armand (Assad Zaman). In Episode 6, after Louis and Daniel (Eric Bogosian) figured out that Armand altered their memories and lied about it, Armand claimed that Louis asked him to erase the memory of his 1973 suicide attempt that was the result of decades of unprocessed trauma from Claudia and brother Paul’s (Steven G. Norfleet) deaths and more past hardships. The Episode 8 finale revealed that Armand built their seven-decade relationship “on a seismic lie.” Armand didn’t save Louis in the trial, Lestat did. Armand directed the show trial designed to kill Claudia and Louis.
We don’t yet know the full extent of Armand editing Louis’ memories, or if he was really asked to wipe the San Francisco memories, but there are clues that he’s done this repeatedly across the decades (and even during the 2022 interview in Dubai) without consent. It’s all done under the guise of “preserving Louis’ happiness even when he won’t or can’t.” On Severance, Lumon is altering minds with the uninformed consent of its participants; if Mark and his colleagues knew the depths of what Lumon was planning (plans that we’re still waiting to be revealed in full), they likely would never have agreed to be severed.
The horror for Gemma and Lestat is knowing the truth and knowing that their lovers — the only people alive who can understand their pain and therefore comfort them — are in the dark with the truth just out of reach. (This makes for a devastating reframing of every single Mark and Ms. Casey interaction in Season 1.) Gemma is powerless to change this (and has no idea Mark works in the same building), but she’s still fighting to break free either by escaping from Lumon or the company letting her go once the trials are over. But as foreboded in Season 2 Episode 9, the completion of Cold Harbor is a death sentence for Gemma.
While it hasn’t been shown in the series yet, The Vampire Lestat novel reveals that Lestat was held prisoner by Armand ahead of the Paris trial and manipulated into participating. There are signs of this in Interview With the Vampire‘s final two episodes of Season 2 with the bruises on Lestat’s hands, the discoloration in his face implying starvation, and his inability to stand up straight near the trial’s end. He also asked to be tried and found guilty himself so he could die with Louis and Claudia. After Paris, Lestat waits for Louis to figure out what he did in the trial to preserve Louis’ agency. After the 1973 “call” from Armand, he assumes Louis is dead. The despair over Louis and Claudia eats at Lestat for decades, leaving him a lonely phantom of his former self when we meet the real him for the first time in the Season 2 finale (he’s also unaware of Armand’s mind tricks, as far as viewers know).
AMC
The horror for Mark and Louis is realizing years later that they’ve placed their trust in the people who orchestrated their tragedies. These shows may be worlds apart in setting and circumstance, but each of their central couples are fated lovers torn apart for agonizingly lonely years by forces claiming to care for their wellbeing. Both couples are haunted by the family they’ve lost. Mark opts to have his mind severed to get a brief daily reprieve from “choking” on his wife’s “ghost,” as he described it in Season 1.
By adopting an Armand-approved personality, and possibly through the nonconsensual manipulation of his mind, Louis’ true self is buried to avoid the depths of pain stemming from Claudia’s murder and thinking Lestat helped kill her. Once Louis and Mark learn the truth — Gemma is alive, and Lestat saved Louis in the trial — both of them jet off to reunite with their past loves. Mark undergoes the dangerous reintegration procedure to find Gemma and save her. Louis leaves Armand and immediately embarks for New Orleans to tell Lestat what he knows so they can finally grieve their daughter together.
Louis and Lestat and Mark and Gemma are destined to be together in every universe. No matter what’s done to their minds to make them forget, they feel love for each other in their bones. And they’re the only people alive who know what it’s like to grieve their families. They are each other’s keepers of the lives they once knew. There is no erasing the damage of these years of pain; only through each other can they learn to live again. They’ve experienced what it’s like to live without each other, and there’s no going to back to that now that they all know the truth.
If given the choice between going through hell together or feeling no pain apart, they’ll choose hell every single time.
Severance, Season 2 Finale, Friday, March 21, Apple TV+
Interview With the Vampire, Season 3 Premiere, TBA, AMC
