What We Do In The Shadows season 5 finale: You're dead, you're dead, you're dead

Few shows on TV love a reset button more than What We Do In The Shadows. It’s inherent to the cartoon logic that lets the series go completely bonkers as needed: You can send a character into space, turn another into a child for a year, or otherwise deform your main cast for shits and giggles, because the show is so willing to handwave the whole thing away as soon as the joke has run its course.

Guillermo’s transformation into a vampire was always going to be a trickier beast, though—whether the show ended up sticking with it, or, as it does in tonight’s fifth-season finale, “Exit Interview,” ultimately decides to walk it back. Gizmo’s desire to be a vampire isn’t some one-episode joke, or even a single-season story arc like Baby Colin was last year. It’s a fundamental element of his character and his relationships with everyone else in the Vampire Residence. Just as importantly, it’s always added a darker shading to a character who would otherwise be in occasional danger of crossing the line from sweet to saccharine; he can quibble over the details in his talking-head chats all he wants, but Guillermo has shed a lot of blood in pursuit of what he’s always believed was his heart’s deepest desire. Reckoning with all that, and re-asserting the status quo, was always going to be a tall order.

And, amazingly, “Exit Interview”—one of the best episodes of this season, and one of WWDITS’ best “plot” episodes, period—actually pulls it off: undoing the biggest shift this show has ever made to its cast dynamics, without making the whole thing feel like Lucy is pulling the narrative football away from Charlie Brown for the billionth time.

GRADE FOR SEASON 5, EPISODE 10, “EXIT INTERVIEW”: A
Stream it now

---

But before we can dive into all that heady stuff, we must, unfortunately, eat our vegetables—which is to say that we need to touch at least briefly on “A Weekend At Morrigan Manor,” the other component of tonight’s two-part finale and also, apparently, some kind of divine punishment for all the times we’ve expressed out hopes of hearing more from The Guide this season, now that Kristen Schaal is officially in the show’s main cast.

And look: There’s nothing inherently wrong with dropping the vamps into an Agatha Christie murder mystery parody in a creaky old house. (And the episode does get occasional kicks from playing into those tropes, most notably with Colin Robinson’s increasingly Branagh-esque Poirot beard.) But a good mystery parody has to work either as a mystery or as a series of jokes about them—and ideally, both—and “Morrigan Manor” does neither. It’s obvious from the moment The Guide shows up at the fancy mansion the crew has been invited to for the weekend that she’s behind the series of karmic traps that swiftly befall them, but the episode doesn’t try to play that obviousness for laughs until it’s way too late.

The big issue, really, is The Guide herself. Kristen Schaal is a genius, responsible for some of the funniest, and most heartbreaking, TV moments of the last decade. But across this entire season, The Guide has had one joke, told ad nauseum, to her name: She meekly makes a statement about wanting to be included; the other vamps ignore her; she shoots a sad look at the camera. That’s it, and “A Weekend At Morrigan Manor” tells the one joke so aggressively, so often, and with so little variation, that it starts to feel genuinely baffling that the show thinks the gag has this much staying power.

It’s not all joyless: The sequence where Laszlo is trapped by an increasing series of ambulatory fencing dummies is a genuine hoot, with Matt Berry reveling in tossing off swashbuckling puns while his stunt double gives his best Errol Flynn. And once The Guide reveals her actual intentions for the weekend, the episode picks up steam—not least of which because Schaal is a hundred times more fun when she’s deploying actual aggression, as opposed to the passive kind. (The sequence also lets her co-stars play off of her instead of just ignoring her, for once; Natasia Demetriou is especially good as she tries to wheedle her way back into The Guide’s good graces from within the silver cage she’s been dropped in.) Ultimately, Laszlo manages to sweet-talk the crew out of their indefinite imprisonment by showing off footage from the documentary of the vamps praising The Guide (revealed, in the episode’s post-credits scene, to be an attempt to screw with Colin Robinson). By then, though, the real damage has been done: Nandor finds out Guillermo has been transformed into a vampire by his buddy Derek, and, just as everyone promised, he’s now on the warpath over the humiliation.

Which brings us, blessedly, back to “Exit Interview,” which opens with Gizmo holed up in a fleabag hotel while hiding out from Nandor’s wrath—setting the scene for a series of surprisingly sweet one-on-one conversations with the other residents of the house, each tipped off, in one way or another, to where Guillermo has been hiding himself. (Derek is not a good person to be reliant on for clandestine endeavors, it turns out.) Nadja, Colin, and Laszlo each swing by to say goodbye in their own way—which is to say that Nadja and Laszlo both get promptly distracted by their libidos, while Colin can’t help but get in some bureaucratic needling in the form of the titular interview. But it’s key to WWDITS’ tiny, black heart that each one also manages to give some semblance of a heartfelt farewell. We know What We Do In The Shadows isn’t going to kill off Guillermo. But “Exit Interview” treats the characters’ feelings about the situation as genuine, pretty much every step of the way, and it’s a big reason the episode works as well as it does.

Meanwhile, Nandor is going full Batman mode, perching on rooftops and staking out the Panera Bread where he and Guillermo first met, certain he’ll eventually return (“like a gazelle to a watering hole”). Kayvan Novak clearly has a lot of fun playing Nandor’s dumber and sillier sides, but he’s genuinely great as a version of this character out for blood: focused and smart, without sacrificing the character’s general ability to misunderstand most any modern situation. And he gets a great foil tonight, when he mistakes a Panera-loving passerby for Guillermo—only to reveal that he’s captured comedian and actor Patton Oswalt, playing himself. (“Do you know John Slattery?” is one of Nandor’s first questions upon finding he’s snagged himself an actor.)

As the first of a whole bunch of celebrity cameos that dot “Exit Interview,” Oswalt is a fun presence, gently advising Nandor not to murder his friend—and then providing a lesson in regret after annoying the vampire into kicking him off a roof. That moment of reflection leads to a genuinely scary scene, as Nandor calls Guillermo using his mom’s phone, having manipulated his way into her apartment to look over baby photos/present an implicit threat. Novak and Harvey Guillén play these moments with real animosity, as Nandor pushes on the one boundary that might genuinely provoke Guillermo into killing him. Instead, though, he reveals he’s simply there to reconcile: Guillermo will be accepted into the house as a full vampire because, ultimately, Nandor loves his familiar more than his own pride. He even knows how to defeat that pesky Van Helsing blood that’s been slowing the transformation: feed Guillermo some human blood (the sort of obvious solution that WWDITS loves to throw at a supposedly intractable problem).

Rather than a happy ending, though, what proceeds from here is a series of deft feints, as the show teases us with multiple ways Guillermo’s transformation might ultimately play out. At first, he seems to go full Lestat (or, in Colin Robinson’s terms, a vampire “Cornholio”), levitating off the ground and calling for his new brethren to help him conquer the night. The cut to a restaurant that’s been absolutely savaged by the vamps, corpses all around, suggests Gizmo might even have gone on a full kill frenzy. (Also, has Colin Robinson ever seemed more sinister than he is here, casually draining a woman to death with boring small talk while she’s surrounded by a sea of blood?) But no: Guillermo can’t bring himself to actually kill his would-be victim, despite Nandor helpfully bumping him on the head—citing, in one of Guillén’s best speeches on this show to date, the way the smell of the guy’s shampoo made him realize he’s just some dude trying to live his life.

When he realizes Guillermo’s having second thoughts, Nandor initiates the second big feint in the episode’s bag of tricks: pulling out last season’s magic lamp and summoning Anoop Desai’s Djinn for a welcome (but brief) return. There’s no wishing things back to their old shape here, though, since Nandor’s out of wishes—sending the ever-annoyed Djinn right back in the bottle. With Plan A extinguished, Nandor’s forced to get clever, of all things, arranging a fake “transmogrification” ritual with two purposes: 1.) forcing Guillermo to admit that, deep down, he doesn’t really want to be a vampires, and 2.) getting Derek in position so that everybody can kill him—revealing, in the process, what actually happens if a vampire’s sire gets dusted. When Guillermo can’t drive the stake in himself, Nandor grants the mercy of doing it for him, restoring his familiar’s humanity in the process. We end on a shot of a suddenly human-again Guillermo sitting beside Derek’s corpse, forced to reflect on the costs his selfish desires have wreaked on his poor, dopey, mostly innocent friend.

Except What We Do In The Shadows isn’t really that show. So we get one more surprisingly sweet Gizmo-Laszlo scene to round out a season full of them, as Lasz helps his little buddy drag Derek’s body to Wallace the necromancer (a returning Benedict Wong), who raises the poor guy as a zombie. (This comes complete with a cheerful assist from Haley Joel Osment’s Topher, who’s apparently adjusted very well to undead living in the three years since we last saw him in season two’s “Resurrection.”) The end result is a very particular sort of What We Do In The Shadows happy ending: Derek might not be talking much, but he’s finally got some new friends; Guillermo isn’t a vampire anymore, but he seems pretty okay with that. And nobody had to die! (Except for all the people the vamps murdered in that restaurant, and which they’re murdering all the time.)

Looking back over the fifth season of What We Do In The Shadows, it becomes increasingly clear that, while the show clearly enjoys toying with these forays into long-form storytelling, it’s also never going to be a master of them. “Exit Interview” is the payoff to a whole season of teasing, but as enjoyable as it is, it can’t necessarily justify, well, multiple half-hours of being fruitlessly teased. (In fact, you can view tonight’s erratically paced two-parter as a microcosm for the show’s long-form pacing issues as a whole: a whole lot of waiting before the show feverishly unleashes the good stuff.)

Kudos are in order for all involved, though, for finding that rarest of things: an elegant reset button, one that feels both earned and emotionally resonant. And all of these critiques have to come in the context of What We Do In The Shadows itself, which continues, year in and year out, to feature some of the strongest, funniest characters in TV comedy today. Pretty much every character in “Exit Interview,” big-name cameo or no, gets a moment that’s laugh-out-loud funny, while the story zigs and zags in unpredictable ways. What We Do In The Shadows pretty much only ever looks bad in comparison to itself, and when it works—which it did more often than not this season, and especially tonight—there’s very little that’s as fearless or as funny existing in the comedy landscape.

Stray observations

• Vampire socialite Perdita Morrigan apparently holds a “Met Ball after-party so exclusive, no one is invited.”
• “Shades of Bacchus!”
• Nadja, when asked to “take in” The Guide’s portraits: “Aw, you know, I saw some art last year, so I’m good.”
• Nandor thinking Guillermo is a literal bloodhound, complete with barking, is officially the “Nandor too dumb” bridge too far.
• “Aw, fuck it, these can’t all be clever.”
• “I thought you really liked us!”
  “I did…deeply and desperately.”
• Sorry, Colin: Calling out the show doing a clip show doesn’t actually justify doing a clip show.
• Oh, and the hex wasn’t real, just The Guide screwing with Nadja. Some of you for sure called that.
• Matt Berry does some great physical acting from his cage, Laszlo giving increasingly worried head shakes as people embark on bad conversational choices in his presence.
• “Another mystery solved!”
• “Maybe if I wrote him a letter…”
  “Yeah, if you wrote him a suicide note, and actually followed through on it, then that could probably cool him down.”
• “Aaaand she’s joined them.”
• “How did you find me?”
  “Well, I just took a map of Staten Island and laid it over a grid and looked for any motels that shared a square with an Arby’s, a party store, or a sweater shop.”
• The Guide brought some of the hybrids by to say goodbye to Guillermo; they have not gotten any less disturbing.
• Guillermo’s first successful use of vampire hypnosis: stopping his mom from staking Nandor when her hunter instincts kick in.
• Nandor explains that, rather than dying, killing Derek will just cause Guillermo to “get a month older really quickly.”
• Out of all the money Guillermo gave Derek, he “only spent like $250 on ‘vampire clothes’ that he got from Hot Topic.”