What We Do In The Shadows channels The Warriors in one of its best episodes in years

I’ve been thinking, more often than not, of this last season of What We Do In The Shadows as a sort of greatest hits collection: a run-through of all the show’s best styles of vampire comedy, whether it’s The One Where We Dive Deep On One Silly Vampire Quirk or The One Where The Vampires Have To Pretend To Be Human. (That last one has gotten a few outings, thanks to the excellent addition of Cannon Capital Strategies to the show’s list of regular locations.) Tonight, though, the show offers up its rarest of episode types: The One Where What We Do In The Shadows Takes This Shit At Least Halfway Seriously. And it produces one of the best half hours the show has ever done.

As the title suggests, “Come Out And Play” isn’t shy about its source material, down to having Colin Robinson explicitly call it out: We’re doing The Warriors. The great thing about riffing on Walter Hill’s classic sprint through the shadow-lit New York streets, though, is that it’s a film both rife for parody—Shadows has a ton of fun tonight with the film’s eclectic collection of gangs, with the writers and costume team spitting out instance after instance of amusingly goofy new vampire sub-groups—and one with an inherently kick-ass story structure. In this version, our Staten Island vamps find themselves on the run when Cravensworth’s Monster goes on a very brief anti-Jerry rampage during an “Eternal Lifetime Achievement” award ceremony for Baron Afanas (which turns out to have been a trap, as Jerry attempts—extremely unsuccessfully—to take control of the community). Their escape from the collective hordes of Vampire New York gives the show a chance to focus, while also serving some of the season’s long-term emotional beats. Sure, we in the audience might never really believe our main characters are in serious danger—even when it plays with adding a little more drama into its fuel mix, this is still never going to be that show—but by putting (most of) its characters in one situation together and then putting on some pressure, Shadows gets to spend some time treating them as people, more than cartoons. (To be clear, I like when the show is cartoon-y, but it’s still good to see Laszlo and Nadja’s relationship, or Guillermo’s alienation from the group, treated with some measure of seriousness for once.)

The episode’s pace adopts the same one as Hill’s film, to excellent effect: moments of frenetic action interspersed with downtime that lets character shine through. Kristen Schaal, for instance, gets her best scene of the entire season, as the show’s least-main main character The Guide deflates Nandor’s crush on her with a mixture of gentleness and blunt rejection. Nadja and Laszlo, meanwhile, end up falling back into the same argument they were having back in “Nandor’s Army,” with Nadja pissed to find out the real reason her husband has been building his homunculus has been to protect her in case anything ever happens to him. This plot-line felt a bit forced for me back in “Army,” but Matt Berry and Natasia Demetriou play it realer here, highlighting Nadja’s weary frustration that her husband can’t seem to wrap his head around the fact that she’s the biggest (non-Guillermo) badass in the group. Their reconciliation, after Laszlo reminds her that his desperate fumbling stems from the fact that he simply can’t live without her, is genuinely sweet—and then Nadja spends a full minute smashing a Graveyard Vampire’s head into goo on a tomb to work out her frustrations. Because it’s important to note that while “Come Out And Play” is a bit more grounded and dramatic than a typical episode of Shadows, that’s still a very relative distinction, and the episode never forgets that this show is a comedy first and foremost.

It’s all enough to make me wonder, if only idly, whether the show could be like this more often: That is, whether I loved this episode as much as I did because it’s a rare break from Shadows‘ generally irreverent approach to plot, or if this version of the show, with the slightest hint of stakes hanging over everything, is just genuinely better. Part of Shadows‘ charm has always been that it applies the comforting sitcom logic that nothing really matters to macabre topics like murder, monsters, and sudden decapitation. (This episode has more than its fair share of severed heads, by the by.) But these occasional reminders that things could be treated with more weight (along with the energy that comes from focusing on a single plot instead of a more traditional A-B structure) can be undeniably seductive. I’m happy to regard outings like this as a bit of a Sometimes Treat, though. “Come Out And Play” is exhilarating but also a bit exhausting, driving forward with an intensity that’s as exciting for the contrast it casts on the show’s typically relaxed pace as anything else. Shadows gets a lot of its undead vitality out of reminding us every once in a long while that its main characters’ idle, goofy lives exist in a context of absolutely brutal violence, and it’s episodes like this one that recharge the battery.

All that and we get Guillermo fumbling around at the batting cages with his cousin Miguel (an always-welcome Frankie Quiñones), which leads to one of the single most delightfully dumb jokes this show has ever done. (It turns out Laszlo can’t say “Bat!” without briefly turning into one, no matter the context.) That’s the real joy of “Come Out And Play”: It never loses touch with the spirit of silliness, fun, and occasional comedic anti-climax that the show’s humor runs on, even as it plays around with action-movie stylings and the lightest traces of character growth. (When they get back to the Vampire Residence, The Baron is already there, faux-cheerfully reminding the crew that there’s actually a very nice above-ground train to Staten Island they could have easily ridden home.) It’s really hard to make something that’s both kind of badass and really funny, but watching our crew dispatch ’80s Music Vampires, or The Baron almost casually reassert his control over the vampire community with another quick head crushing, without ever losing the show’s inherent sense of humor, is part of what makes this one of the best comedies on TV—and this one of the show’s best installments in years.

Stray observations

• • Before you ask: Yes, that’s Alexander Skarsgård in the final scene, adding True Blood to the list of vampire shows and movies Shadows has played tribute to with a quick cameo over the seasons.
• • There’s a good running joke as Nadja gets increasingly annoyed by Colin Robinson’s vampire-based portmanteaus, culminating in an “I will fucking kill you!” when he tries to float “Vampaccino.”
• • Here is, as best as I can assemble, a full list of all the vampire gangs from tonight: The Fly Guys, The Lower East Side Vampire Punks, Hampton Vampires (not Hampires), Manhattan All-Girl School Vampires, Coney Island Carny Vampires, Leatherette Vampires, Rockaway Surfers, JFK TSA Vampires, Bronx Bomber Vampires, The Meatpacking District Vampires, The Confusing ’80s Music Reference Vampires, Graveyard Vampires, and Barista Vampires Artist And Writer Vampires Who Happen To Currently Be Working As Baristas (and Graphic Designer and Personal Essayist Vampires). Oh, and Klaus Nomi is in there, too.
• • Nobody in the group is happy that Jerry gets to introduce The Baron: “Doesn’t seem right; he’s never even sucked him off—let alone been nuts deep.”
• • Mike O’Brien finally gets to have a little fun as Jerry (right before his head comes off), styling his attempted coup as being a “Just asking questions!” guy.
• • There are nice Warriors-esque touches on the soundtrack throughout, including ending on a cover of “Nowhere To Run.”
• • “You know I can’t fly, you dicks!” Colin Robinson doesn’t really get a plot-line tonight, but Mark Proksch gets most of the really good lines.
• • Miguel assumes the documentary about Guillermo is “like Sling Blade but boring.”
• • “Well, what’s with the riverboat gambler guy?” “They lost me there; I’ve got no clue.”
• • Nadja, taunting at the start of a dance battle: “Have you ever seen feet move at this medium pace?”
• • “Well, you hang out in a graveyard, you can expect spooky crap like this.”
• • We lose another cameraman to the Graveyard Vamps.
• • “Do you want a straw?” “Nope.”
• • “Two nights out in a row; Sire’s never going to let me hear the end of this.” I usually do at least two watches of an episode for review—one to take it in, a second for notes—and it feels relevant that I had a big grin on my face at the end of both viewings of this one.