What We Do In The Shadows sinks its fangs into some propertied brothers with the devious "Go Flip Yourself"

One of the great things about What We Do In The Shadows is that it so rarely repeats a joke. With the whole of the undead experience to sink its fangs into, the series is usually willing to go full-tilt into a fresh idea every single week—and “Go Flip Yourself” is, mostly, a great example of that energy. That goes all the way up to the central conceit of the episode, which swaps out the documentary crew that normally records the State Island vamps’ bloody antics with the team behind Laszlo’s favorite home-reno show, Go Flip Yourself.

As hosts Bran and Toby Dalton, Randy and Jason Sklar have been hanging out on the edges of WWDITS all season, building anticipation for the moment when they’d finally, inevitably, come barreling into the deeply busted Vampire Residence, bearing the siren call of a golden toilet to get our heroes on their side. Even so, I genuinely wasn’t ready for just how quickly their home inspection “ambush” of the vampires’ abode would go south tonight, as Nadja wastes almost literally zero time before fatally sinking her teeth into Toby’s neck.

Still, it’s nothing a little vamp hypnosis—directed at Go Flip Yourselves’ cast and crew, plus its editors, editors’ assistants, sound mixers, and some producer’s girlfriend named Wendy—can’t paper over. If only Nandor’s marital problems were so easily dispensed with: New bride Marwa is still operating under the djinn-based directive to like everything Nandor likes, and, as it turns out, Nandor doesn’t seem to like himself all that much these days. (Although he does have a taste for Home Depot wall trash that declares “Home is where the wine is.”) The end result is Marwa doing exactly what her new husband would presumably like to do: Locking herself in her newly crafted “man-cave” and just ignoring the whole situation until it hopefully goes away. (The whole “I like it too!” thing is a cute premise for a joke, but it’s easy to sympathize with Nandor here for being extremely tired of it already.)

Meanwhile, responses by our characters to the home renovation break down along fairly predictable lines, dictated by the varying impulse-control problems on display: Laszlo is in from the jump, of course, quickly adopting a plaid shirt of his very own and treating Bran like his latest best friend. Nandor is easily bribed. Nadja is also easily bribed, after the aforementioned golden toilet is floated…and Guillermo is, of course, also in, once he figures out a way to game the situation to get the seeping sewage out of the “hidey-hole” where he’s still being forced to live. (Baby Colin doesn’t get a vote, or more than about two seconds of screen-time tonight; we don’t even get a new “the thing that crawled out of our dead friend Colin Robinson” descriptor.)

The major joke of “Go Flip Yourself” then—and it’s a good one—is in watching our beloved bloodsuckers through the eyes of the HGTV/Magnolia/etc. audience. The Sklars (especially Randy, who, as Bran, gets stuck with most of the heavy lifting tonight) nail the dead-eyed chipper vibe of a house flipper host, while the show easily adopts the overly branded turns of phrase and cheesy aesthetics of one of these taste-devouring machines. (My favorite small touch: The way every single commercial break cliffhanger is repeated, usually with a slightly different take, when we eventually come back.) Honestly, it’s all good enough that it actually makes me a little sad when it turns out there’s a twist lurking under all those godawful on-screen graphics.

But, credit where it’s due to one of What We Do In The Shadows’ rare recurring antagonists: Simon the Devious finally did something pretty damn devious, at last. As opposed to his last two appearances—in season one’s “Manhattan Night Club” and season two’s “The Return”—where he mostly just threatened or begged to get his hands on Laszlo’s beloved witch-skin hat, this time Nick Kroll’s schemer has come up with a doozy: inventing the entire Go Flip Yourself series, all 150 episodes, all in order to have a pretext to barge into the residence and make off with the accursed headgear. That includes hiring Navy flight instructor and father of three Toby to play his magically faked twin, teaching him all about the fine arts of architecture and house flipping—and, yes, filling out the rest of the show’s crew with his usual coterie of ridiculously named assholes.

Which brings us back to the start of this review, when I noted that “Go Flip Yourself’ is only mostly in keeping with What We Do In The Shadows’ general resistance to repetition. Because once Simon reveals his schemes, he also reveals that he still only has a few basic jokes to his name—his various weirdos, his inevitable comeuppance at the cursed orifices of the hat, and Nick Kroll’s efforts to match Matt Berry in a “saying things in a funny, weird sort of way” competition (speaking of doomed efforts). It’s nice enough to see him, Rapula, Vampire Elvis, and the rest of the team, but it’s not nearly as funny as the original concept of “vampire home makeover show.”

Luckily, we get one last taste of that particular vintage in tonight’s penultimate scene, when our heroes—upon being informed they won’t get their $1,200 appearance fee unless they finish a testimonial about how great a job “Bran” did on the house—are forced to smile through a home that is now, if anything, even more fucked up than it was before. Then Simon manages to blow himself (and some hapless homeowners) up with that damn hat because, well…that’s just one of the things he does.

Stray observations

• I miss the theme song—although the Go Flip Yourself one is also very funny.
• First major laugh of the episode: Nadja flashing a big thumbs up as she looks up, mouth covered in blood, from Toby’s very dead body.
• Nice to see the Jersey Devil’s head is still up from last week.
• Lots of good scenes of Guillermo racing around in the background, trying to keep the yard’s various bodies hidden from the crew.
• Natasia Demetriou has too much fun with Nadja’s hypnosis voice. “A gIrL’s GoT tO eAt!”
• A few quick facts established tonight: The house is 8,474 square feet, and vampires don’t shit.
• As soon as we see the hat pop up during our first half-second Baby Colin scene, you had to suspect where this was all going.
• “Some of us happen to like waterlogged mahogany, and soaking wet pillows that smell of cheese, and moldy stuffed bears, thank you!”
• Guillermo, after Laszlo dubs Bran’s plan to flood the vampires’ home with natural sunlight “perfect”: “I don’t think that’s perfect.”
• That CG mockup of Nadja’s doll is going to haunt my dreams.
• “I will take a shit if I want to take a shit! Stop trying to water down my brand!”
• So…the house is going to completely collapse at the end of the season, huh?
• Guillermo, noting something odd about Nandor’s new “chair”: “Isn’t that a dog bed?”
• “Now, if we eliminate Nadja’s golden toilet—”
  “EAT SHIT!”
• The reveal of the barely-altered house is very funny.
• “So you mean…
  “Yes!”
  “You…”
  “Did I create, pitch, sell, and produce 150 episodes of Go Flip Yourself for the sole purpose of regaining access to your home here in New York City, that I might take what is rightfully mine, this witch’s clit of a hat? Yes. Yes, I did.”
• Simon’s current crew: Big Vlad, Blagvad the Exsanguinator, Gunthraple, Wesley Sikes, the Freak Sisters, Mr. ’50s (who looks a lot less ’50s than he used to), Evil Steve, the “wickedly talented” Adele Dezeem, Freakfest Tony, The Silent One, He Who Shall Not Be Named (a.k.a. Greg), Desdemona the Shrieker, “that guy I still don’t know,” Elvis, Renaldo the Elder, Ken the zombie accountant, and, of course, Count Rapula. (Shockingly few of those are new additions, considering that the last time we saw them Simon’s crew was leaving him to die.)
• Simon apparently showed “a gaping open asshole for ten seconds” on Go Flip Yourself and “never heard a word” from his audience. Laszlo, of course, can name the exact episode.