What We Do In The Shadows puts its focus on some colossal dicks

Dicks abound in tonight’s installment of What We Do In The Shadows: There’s Fred Armisen’s dickish familiar “Doctor Tom,” who’s put his client, premiere vampire rapper Richie Suck, under his Svengali-esque spell; there’s Laszlo’s dad, whose dickishiness colors our guy’s efforts to raise young Colin Robinson properly; and of course, there’s Nandor’s dick. As in, his penis. Like, his actual junk. There’s a whole subplot about it.

In many other shows, calling out a penis enlargement plotline as the best that an episode has to offer might be seen as damning said effort with faint praise. Here, though, it’s just an acknowledgment of how much fun WWDITS is having by giving Nandor and Guillermo access to unlimited power, in the form of Anoop Desai’s quietly sardonic djinn.

See, Nandor has become concerned that his formerly dead bride/currently alive fiancé, Marwa, has become too perfect after a few djinn-based assists to her, uh, assets. And so, skipping over any trickier questions about self-improvement, he’s jumped immediately to the ultimate fix for any romantic problem: wishing himself to have the largest penis on the planet.

Luckily, Guillermo is on hand to remind his master about every single story ever told about a genie ever, thus preventing the djinn from smugly fulfilling the wish by giving every man on Earth but Nandor a “micro-wang.” The extended dickering (sorry) over the structure of the wish thus takes on the cadence of a sort of very abstract parody of business negotiations, as the djinn tries to talk the pair up into a bigger model, and Harvey Guillen gets to absolutely kill it by taking Guillermo’s “voice of reason” position to the furthest possible extremes of reason. The thoroughness of the conversation is a delight all on its own, but the final, killer punchline is two-fold: First, that Nandor has haggled himself up to a penis only 20 percent bigger than what he was packing anyway, and second, that the djinn (and the ’shippers) have scored a win, by making it so that Nandor is forced to think about Guillermo every time he uses his new equipment.

It is, in other words, that thing What We Do In The Shadows does best: somehow pushing a silly situation to ever more absurdly enjoyable extremes. See also Laszlo’s parenting journeys with young Colin Robinson, who’s now magically grown to be about six or seven years old, and who is growing more tedious by the day. (His current obsessions include musical theater and meticulously categorizing Legos for the entertainment of a total of 2 YouTube subscribers, one of whom, if my squinting freezeframe is reliable, is almost certainly Guillermo.) The basic outline of this arc is totally predictable—Laszlo pushes Colin Robinson, realizes he’s being a jerk, and then accepts him—but the individual beats are still shockingly funny, most especially the abrupt reveal of a little father-son art heisting.

And while I’d quibble at Laszlo’s instinctual hatred of musical theater (“A gutter pantomime, performed by half-wits with painted faces, enjoyed by lower wits”) as slightly out of character for such an inveterate attention-hog, it does get us two major moments: First, a genuinely sweet bit of Laszlo acknowledging how much of his dad’s old baggage he’s had to work through over the generations, and second, the gleefully weird climax of tonight’s episode, in which Baby Colin’s tap-dancing, Shirley Temple-with-a-middle-aged-man’s-head-CGI’d-on-top performance of an old Cole Porter tune manages to save the opening night of Nadja’s vampire nightclub. (It is, of course, called Nadja’s.)

On that topic: It is with no pleasure that I report that Nadja (and Natasia Demetriou) has once again been saddled with the weak link of tonight’s plotlines, as she attempts to get Richie Suck to fulfill his obligations to help get Nadja’s off the ground. Demetriou herself is perfect as ever, oozing disdainful seduction as she tries to remind the rapper (played by Affion Crockett) that he doesn’t need a mere familiar bossing him around and bouncing happily off of The Guide (with Kristen Schaal getting the delivery of the night with “I ain’t a cop, or a narc, or a snitch!”). But there’s nothing in Armisen’s portrayal of Doctor Tom as a sleazy, jazz-obsessed manager that we haven’t seen in a million other parodies of the music business, and Crockett can’t quite sell the star power Richie is supposed to be embodying, even before his ill-advised descent into observational comedy.

In the end, though, all turns out well (at least, for a tap-dancing-baby-reciting-classic-musical-trivia definition of “well”). Sure, it might be, as Nadja—twin tiny hats still immaculate—points out, “creepy and exploitative.” But as his proud papa notes: Kid’s got the groove!

Stray observations

• Richie Suck’s greatest hits: Bitin’ My Style, Sundown Funtown, and, my personal favorite: Throat Juice.
• The wraiths have all been equipped with fake hands for their managerial duties and they’re very silly.
• “Nandor, what are you doing just stood there like a big fat mopey load?”
• “I mean, you should see the modifications we’ve done to her ass.”
  “But…”
  “Ass, butt, whatever you want to call it.” Nandor gets like four different versions of this joke tonight, and each one made me giggle.
• They really are very nice hats.
• Nobody says “What hath the dark lord wrought?!” like Matt Berry, huh?
• “But have you ever seen Rent?”
  “From you? Not a penny!”
• Baby Colin Robinson, describing Laszlo’s laser-dodging moves: “You’re like a big Slinky!”
• Laszlo attempts to toughen Baby Colin up by tossing him in a dumpster to kill some rats—not realizing it was filled with old, abandoned copies of Playbill.
• The screeners I get have temp VFX, so I don’t know if the version of Baby Colin Robinson y’all are seeing is as unsettling as the one I get. But it’s very unsettling.
• The Guide, in the background on distraction duty: “Jazz? What is jazz?!”
• “For my corpsefuckers/
  My bloodsuckers/
  Drain a 4-top at the Fuddruckers/
  I bite necks and write checks/
  Turn into a bat and have flight sex/
  Don’t call me Count Dracula/
  I’ll smack ya up/
  I’m like a crypt disease/
  I’ll attack your blood.” There really is not nearly enough vampire rap in this episode, but what we get is sublime.
• “Now, show me those fangs.”
• “90 percent of my business is penis enlargement.”
• The djinn’s cousin apparently granted Richie Suck’s wish to get 5 Mics in The Source.
• There really is always a Sondheim line, huh?
• “Do you really? Now, why don’t we fuck that off and go see Richie Suck?”
• “Your familiar has a shrewd and incisive mind when it comes to the penis stuff.”