This post contains spoilers for the series finale of What We Do in the Shadows, which is now On Demand from FX and will begin streaming on Hulu tomorrow.
“Things end. And it hurts!”
This is Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak) early in the series finale of What We Do in the Shadows, trying and failing to bring Guillermo de la Cruz (Harvey Guillén) out of his grief from learning that the documentary crew that has been filming Nandor and his vampire housemates for years is packing up and going home.
Choosing to conclude the ribald supernatural comedy with the film crew moving away makes sense on a few levels. First, as Nandor acknowledges later in the episode, Shadows already had two different thematically perfect potential endings in previous seasons: either Guillermo finally achieving his dream of becoming a vampire, or Guillermo realizing that he would prefer to go back to being human. Having stuck around past either of those natural stopping points, the only significant options left would be either for the vampires to finally get their acts together and conquer North America, or for the documentary production to wrap up. And we all know that Nandor, Laszlo Cravensworth (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) are way too incompetent and lazy to accomplish the former. So the documentary, it is!
Just as importantly, though, this plot development allows the finale — titled, simply, “The Finale” — to function as a commentary on the end of the TV show we’ve been delighted to watch for the past six seasons. Guillermo’s hurt incredulity at learning that the filmmakers don’t need any more footage makes him an audience surrogate one last time, letting him stand in for every Shadows fan who just watched this utterly hilarious and inventive final run of episodes and doesn’t think the series has any business going anywhere just yet.
In front of a packed, adoring crowd earlier this fall at New York Comic-Con, Shadows showrunner Paul Simms (who co-wrote “The Finale” with Sam Johnson and Sarah Naftalis) said of the decision, “I think it’s better to go out on top, and better too soon than too late. I don’t want to stay long enough that this auditorium would just have a few people in the front.” Simms has been making comedies for a long time, and he knows that TV history is littered with great ones that hung around a little too long. We don’t think less overall of, say, The Office even though the post-Steve Carell seasons were largely terrible(*), but it’s nice to not have to actively ignore their existence when looking back on the good old days.
(*) “The Finale” included a running gag where we finally start seeing members of the documentary crew, as Colin Robinson tries to figure out which one of them had an affair with Guillermo, starting out with Nate the boom mic operator. This might be a wink at the final days of The Office, which had a universally-disliked episode where we find out that the boom mic guy from that show’s documentary crew had developed a crush on Pam.
Still, it was hard to watch these last 11 episodes and not see a show that continued to fire on every possible comic cylinder. Season Six was banger after banger after banger. There was the precision farce of the episode where all the vampires realized they could hypnotize one another in their sleep. There was the ongoing storyline where Guillermo and Nadja and Nandor all wound up working at an awful financial firm, with Shadows taking one last chance to have fun with the vampires’ struggles to understand and interact with contemporary human life. (See also Laszlo watching his human best friend Sean go berserk while watching the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament and assuming that “March Madness” is a form of demonic possession.) There were note-perfect parodies of Apocalypse Now(*) and The Warriors, and a hilarious spoof of the TV business where Guillermo’s favorite police procedural filmed in the vampires’ Staten Island neighborhood.
(*) Perhaps the most impressive accomplishment of that one is that it somehow made Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” — arguably the most overused soundtrack cut in cinema history — feel vibrant again.
Of course, part of the reason this season was so great was because everyone knew it was the last. Simms also said at Comic-Con that he and the other writers threw in every idea they’d ever wanted to do but never got the chance. That sense of giddy creative abandon was palpable throughout. That also included a startling new development for Shadows: genuine emotion, at least on occasion. The great Steve Coogan guest-starred in one episode as the ghost of Laszlo’s father, who claimed to want to reconcile with his son, but really just wanted to steal his immortal body for himself. Early in the season, Laszlo decided to play Frankenstein — while constantly acting like he’d never heard of the man — by creating his own creature out of stitched-together human remains and Colin Robinson was able to finally acknowledge how lonely life as an energy vampire can be by bonding with Cravensworth’s Monster (Andy Assaf). And at the end of last week’s penultimate episode, Nandor stood up for longtime whipping boy Guillermo, and began talking about him as if they were friends.
That level of sentiment would be tough to maintain if a show about such fundamentally horny, stupid people planned to last for several more years. But as one of the closing notes, it worked beautifully.
“The Finale” summed up so much of what had made this season, and this series, so wonderful. (As a spinoff of Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi‘s 2014 New Zealand film of the same name, it’s way up on the list of best TV shows inspired by movies, along with Buffy, M*A*S*H, Friday Night Lights, Fargo, Hannibal, and The Odd Couple.)
It was, like Shadows so often is, perverted to the nth degree. Recent episodes had established a complicated love rhombus of sorts: Both Nandor and the Monster were besotted with the Guide (Kristen Schaal), the unnamed representative of larger vampiric authorities. But the Guide was barely aware the Monster existed, and wanted no part of the flighty, highly-distractible Nandor, and instead focused her attentions on Jerry (Mike O’Brien), the long-forgotten fifth housemate, recently awoken from a decades-long slumber. But the Monster killed Jerry at the start of the aforementioned Warriors homage, and as the finale begins, Laszlo has proposed the kind of disgusting solution that could only come to him: cut off the Guide’s head and use it as a piece of a Bride of Frankenstein-style creature to marry the Monster, and let Nandor have the Guide’s other, less judgmental body parts all to himself. The plan thankfully never gets very far, but the Monster begins showing his affection for the Guide by detaching his manhood and gifting it to her.
It was also, through Colin Robinson, once again incredibly self-aware. While Guillermo is upset that the documentary crew is leaving because it symbolizes the end of this phase of his life, Colin begins musing about the challenges of making satisfying final episodes of television, observing, “A lot of shows biff it when it comes to sticking the landing.” Eventually, his concern over this infects the other vampires to the point where Nadja decides to hypnotize the audience, so that each of us will see our idealized finale. I can’t speak to what any of you saw, but my hallucination was one inspired by the end of The Usual Suspects, with Colin Robinson as the duplicitous Verbal Kint, the Guide as customs agent Dave Kujan, and Sean (Anthony Atamanuik) as cop Jeff Rabin.
There was also a terrific joke acknowledging how little the vamps have changed over the centuries, as Nadja revealed that this isn’t even the first attempt to make a documentary about them, followed by a clip of a never-before-seen black and white documentary by the Maysles brothers, showing the housemates (Jerry included) back in 1958, having the exact same conversations and arguments we’ve witnessed in modern times. This also provides an excuse for the most shameless and welcome of all callbacks, as we see Laszlo briefly don the trademark dungarees and toothpick that make up his disguise as Jackie Daytona, regular human bartender. (Even Nadja is fooled by it!)
Russ Martin/FX
The fact that the characters are fundamentally so static is another reason to get out while the getting’s good. Fellow FX series It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is among the few comedies ever to have a long and satisfying run without letting its characters evolve much, if at all. Yet the vampires did get to change now and then. There was a whole season where Colin Robinson was a baby, then a child, then a teenager, and ever since, Laszlo has been much more patient, even vaguely warm, towards his former adoptive son. We see Laszlo’s friendship with Sean evolve from a matter of convenience to something where Laszlo cares for this outer borough numbskull even more than he does for wife Nadja.
Most of all, there’s been the evolution of Guillermo, both on his own and in relation to Nandor. Guillermo began the series as the toadiest of toadies, doing menial work for Nandor and the others without any respect or acknowledgment. (Laszlo spends a long time thinking his name is “Gizmo,” and in one episode — cited again here — wonders if his full name is “Mickey Guillermo.”) Even when he turned out to be a descendant of the legendary vampire hunter Van Helsing, and saved the housemates from execution at the hands of the vampiric council, he was still dismissed and mocked at almost every turn. But his secret quest to become a vampire — without waiting forever for Nandor to actually, maybe do it — made him rethink every belief he had about vampirism, and it altered the way the vampires looked at him. Nandor and Nadja spent a lot of time this season working at Cannon Capital — Nandor as a janitor, no less — solely because they wanted to look out for their little buddy.
Which brings us the the climax of “The Finale,” and of What We Do in the Shadows. Guillermo tries to wrap up the documentary’s narrative with an inspiring speech, but he’s upstaged by the Monster choosing that particular moment to molest the stuffed bear in the house’s sitting room. Laszlo leads the vampires in a round of the old standard “We’ll Meet Again,” but Guillermo is too depressed to join in. He decides that this is the excuse he needs to finally move out of the house and get a life entirely of his own.
Nandor’s not having it, though. In the penultimate episode, he came up with the idea of him and Guillermo becoming vigilante do-gooders, and we see here that he’s even come up with costumes. But instead of going with the obvious Batman and Robin motif, Nandor is basically Tuxedo Mask from Sailor Moon and Guillermo is a cowboy. Worse, as Nandor talks about his plans to build an underground lair with a secret coffin elevator, Guillermo realizes that if he goes along with this plan, he will once again find himself doing all the work, forever subject to the whims of his former master.
So Nandor the Relentless — arguably the dumbest, shallowest, most selfish vampire in the house — finds the empathy within himself to reach out to Guillermo and make a real connection with the little guy. He invites Guillermo to call him by his first name, though Guillermo admits that, “You’ll always be ‘Master’ to me.” Guillermo tearfully shuts Nandor inside his coffin, and steps out of the room as the Guy Lombardo version of “We’ll Meet Again” continues, and the documentary cuts to black…
Russ Martin/FX
… but only for a moment. What follows is an unexpected, lovely, delightful coda, where Guillermo immediately lets himself back into the room and admits that he would, in fact, like to be Nandor’s friend, even if he doesn’t want to fight crime with him. Nandor acknowledges, “To be friends would be cool,” but then invites Guillermo to join him in his casket and adds, “But you know what would be really cool?” And suddenly there is a secret panel inside the coffin lining, and when Nandor throws a switch, the trapdoor of the coffin elevator — which Nandor built all on his own, without making Guillermo do a stitch of labor — opens up, and they begin plummeting hundreds of feet below the residence.
There’s a mid-credits scene after, where we see the vampires briefly watching the finished documentary before growing bored and leaving the room. But that shocking descent by Nandor and Guillermo is the proper ending of What We Do in the Shadows, and improbably the right one. This is a show with an incredible core cast, and a deep bench of recurring characters (so many that there wasn’t even room to bring back Nick Kroll’s Simon the Devious this year). Yet from the first time we saw them shopping together for “creepy paper,” Nandor and Guillermo’s relationship was always the heart of Shadows. Guillermo was at various points Nandor’s servant, bodyguard, apprentice, housemate, and co-worker. They never became lovers, no matter how much many fans may have wanted it — and Guillermo was certainly better off for this — and they were barely even fellow vampires for very long. Somehow, though, they are friends. And Nandor has learned just enough about friendship to realize that he has to pick up at least a little of the workload.
Somehow, some way, this unapologetically silly show about how immortality is wasted on anyone selfish enough to get it, managed to end on a beat that was as warm as it was ridiculous. Regardless of what kind of anonymous comments Colin Robinson intends to make about the finale on Deadline, TV Guide, and Den of Geek, this great, explosively funny show in no way whatsoever biffed the landing.
Things end. And it can hurt. But it hurts a lot less when the end is this good.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
