The penultimate What We Do In The Shadows is a rare missed opportunity

Penultimate episodes have taken on a distinctive role in seasonal TV over the last few years. They’re the episodes that have The Juice, the ones where Shit Goes Down, the climax whose fallout you need one whole extra finale episode just to process and survive. And if you squint, you can view “The Promotion”—the next-to-last episode of What We Do In The Shadows that we’re ever going to get, as horrifying as that is to contemplate—in something like that context. After all, it dispatches—with an efficiency that borders on rushed—pretty much every remaining running plot-line the show’s had going this season, clearing the board for…whatever the series has planned for its grand finale. (Guillermo and Nandor as superheroes? It can’t be Guillermo and Nandor as superheroes, right?)

In the process (and coming down from the near-series-high of “Come Out And Play” last week), the resulting episode can’t help but feel a little underwhelming, as we apparently finish both the story of Guillermo’s rise at Cannon Capital Strategies and the evolution of Cravensworth’s Monster in one 22-minute chunk. The former gets most of the focus, as Gizmo’s boss Jordan drops his façade of corporate prickishness to reveal the slightly less pleasant kernel of genuine prickishness lurking underneath. Jerking Guillermo around with the promise of promotion (in a deliberate, and name-checked, echo of the way Nandor used to withhold vampirism from him), Jordan manages to provoke Nandor, Guillermo, and the camera crew to righteous fury, with the latter revealing they’ve been helping Gizmo collect receipts of Cannon’s various SEC violations all season. It’s a win, albeit a muted one; the most shocking thing about the whole encounter is that nobody dies. (I remain kind of surprised that Shadows never went full bloodbath with the Cannon crew. A severed Tim Heidecker head would have made a nice complement to all the other decapitated gourds that have been building up all season.) The real goal of it all is to finally, maybe put Guillermo and Nandor on something like an equal footing, and the moments of actual respect between the two—Nandor reluctantly listening when Guillermo orders him not to murder Jordan and conferring the title of fellow “warrior” upon him in the aftermath—are the closest “The Promotion” gets to having a real core to build around.

The Monster plot-line, meanwhile, is much more low-key, as Laszlo and Colin Robinson bicker about the raising of their creation/”cool dude.” These scenes mostly serve as a reminder of what a nice little addition Andy Assaf, who plays the Monster, has been this season: He steals most of the scenes he’s in with the Monster’s attempts at casual party chat and even gets the laugh line of the episode after Lasz and Colin reach détente after realizing that, between the two of them, they’ve made a halfway functional ambulatory corpse. (“Now kiss! Kiss daddies. Now!”) Meanwhile, Nadja is in the utility player slot, as she decides to quit Cannon in favor of some sort of feet-picture-based pyramid scheme, burning all of her bridges with her former co-workers on her way out. As slight as it is, this is probably the most enjoyable runner of the episode, if only because Natasia Demetriou has gotten so good at playing Nadja’s joy and relentless optimism in the face of the growing discomfort of others.

The worst thing you can say about “The Promotion,” though, is that it’s just not a very funny half-hour of TV comedy. Partly, that might be the fault of the setting: The show has been very careful to keep Cannon realistically human, relying on the vamps themselves to bring the absurd and funny material to the office. But tonight’s episode is so mired in the human world, with its bewildered human reactions, that there’s just not much room for jokes to breathe. (Jordan, for instance, is a well-observed Heidecker portrait of a smug asshole, but he’s not weird enough to actually get laughs, even when he’s reacting to Nandor’s double-Guillermo fantasies.) It’s been fun playing on Wall Street for most of this season, but after tonight, I’m happy to be done with corporate shenanigans, leaving the door open for…what?

Laszlo and Colin’s Monster Tour? Nandor and Guillermo, Caped Crusaders? Nadja…doing whatever the fuck she wants? (That last one I’d watch.) There’s something kind of intoxicating about how little “The Promotion” does to set us up for a series finale, just as the incredible elasticity of What We Do In The Shadows‘ reality has always meant it could genuinely go anywhere now that it’s time to tear everything down. But that’s all a matter for next week’s review. For now, we have to sit with this one, a minor piece of table setting with a few nice emotional beats and way too few laughs. Not every penultimate episode is one for the best-of lists, it turns out.

Stray observations

• • There’s a good early moment of physical comedy from Harvey Guillén, as Guillermo tries, and very definitively fails, to eat some rice with chopsticks.
• • Nandor’s cover for returning to the Cannon offices: checking his hand, where someone (i.e., Guillermo) has written down a note reminding him that the former janitor who got fired was his “slow-witted brother.”
• • “I wish I could have two Guillermos, and you could have one, and I could have one. And then the two Guillermos could become friends, or even lovers. And I could say, like, ‘Hey Guillermo, go fuck yourself!’ and then…he could do that.”
• • “Lisa, my favorite. Your voice is incredibly deep and nasal and grating and your whole vibe? It’s like you crave love ‘cuz you never had it as a child, like, where were your parents? You’re very hard to be around.” I could have taken another five instances of Nadja saying goodbye to people.
• • Laszlo doesn’t get many laughs tonight—he’s never all that fun when he’s in alpha mode like this, riding roughshod over the Monster—but we do get “Cocktaaaaail” and “Patrick Swuh-zay” added to the big list of words it’s fun to hear Matt Berry fuck up.
• • Jordan hands out Avengers titles to his crew for his big speech. Guillermo gets a tossed off “I guess Groot? So solid.”
• • Colin, after Laszlo shoots down the “daddies kiss!” suggestion in the elevator: “I mean, we could. We’ve still got seven floors to go.”
• • And…that’s all the funny lines I wrote down while watching! Again, this was a light one, unless you’re really into Guillermo mangling a CVS receipts joke.