What We Do In The Shadows ends on its own glorious terms

Endings feel profound, even when the thing that’s ending isn’t.

That is, ultimately, the takeaway of What We Do In The Shadows self-referential, gloriously self-indulgent series finale, which sees the usual vampire bullshit—Nandor still dreaming of being a superhero, Laszlo and Colin Robinson trying to figure out how to tactfully cut The Guide’s head off so they can make a sex buddy for the Monster—get suddenly truncated when the documentarians announce, six years in, that they’ve finally got enough footage to wrap up their project. The lav mics come off, the vampires cheerfully accept the news—and Guillermo de la Cruz promptly flips his shit.

What follows is a wonderfully funny half-hour of “What the fuck do you actually want from us?” as a show about people who can’t grow and won’t change wrestles with the notion of closure. Utterly ruthless in the face of any back-of-brain impulse to go for an “everybody hugs” moment, Shadows‘ finale instead pays tribute to its history, while thumbing its nose at the idea of deeper meanings lurking in the tall grass, just because the cameras are shutting off. After all, there’ll be another documentary crew along in a minute, right?

Of the many extended digressions in this extra-sized finale, the reveal of the first Staten Island vampire documentary is the one that hits the hardest (including the hilarious revelation that it was directed by the Maysles brothers, filming the vamps for a decade before they decided to focus on slightly less boring subjects for 1969’s Salesman). It’s the perfect way to fill this final episode with callbacks—including the perhaps inevitable “return” of Jackie Daytona and the witches’ skin hat—while still making a more deliberate point about the unending cycles of eternal life. Guillermo (as expertly diagnosed by Nadja, who has a lot of fun being the only emotionally functional person in the room tonight) might be flipping out over the concept of finality, but the vampires understand on a fundamental level that shit just keeps happening regardless. We were never glimpsing rare or unique moments plucked from the ether, as we see beats from “Local News,” “On The Run,” and other episodes play out in monochrome 50 years earlier (complete with an irritated Jerry in tow). It all just keeps happening, and it’ll keep happening after the documentary’s cameras—and, implicitly, Guillermo’s entire life—are gone.

If there’s an occasional whiff of defensiveness to some of this, as the vamps make comments direct to camera about the impossibility of taking a show that runs on gleeful meaninglessness and ending it on a suddenly meaningful note, at least it’s funny defensiveness. (Nadja comments at one point that they really should have ended on the conclusion of Guillermo’s vampire journey last year: “Great out.”) Certainly, there’s no lack of confidence in the episode itself. A lot of TV series might have spent the extra run-time afforded by a finale to do some big elaborate wrapping up, to close character arcs, to deliver satisfaction. What We Do In The Shadows spends three of its precious final minutes on a painstakingly accurate recreation of the finale of The Usual Suspects, for no other reason than that it’s pretty funny to see Kristen Schaal give her best Chazz Palminteri while yelling about “the beige man,” while Mark Proksch and Matt Berry exchange knowing looks in a jalopy.

This is, in other words, a finale on its own terms. Our characters all fail to sum up the series in their own way, each undercutting Guillermo’s unceasing drive for sentiment in a manner that speaks perfectly to their dispositions. And the show itself refuses to be bent to the whims of sympathy, either. You want a big, concluding speech? We’ll give it to our sweetest character, fumbling for some semblance of self-understanding…and then drown it out with the sound of a Frankenstein fucking a stuffed bear in the background. You want to see story arcs get finished? Go watch “The Promotion” again. You need a big action climax? “Come Out And Play” is still sitting right there on Hulu. You need these characters to take a moment and acknowledge how, deep down, they really do love each other? Fuck you: This has never been that show, and it’s sure as fuck not going to start being that show with just 32 minutes left on the clock. “The Finale” is funny, smart, relentless, inventive, and energetic—all those things that have made What We Do In The Shadows such a joy to watch for six years of TV—and if you need it to suddenly be something else, too, what show have we even been watching together?

And yet this has also always been a series with a tiny, black little heart beating somewhere deep inside its chest, rooted dead center in the space between Nandor The Relentless and Guillermo The Frequently Relenting. And so, that’s where we inevitably end. The show executes one last big fake-out here, with Guillermo admitting that his big “I’m moving on” speech is only for the benefit of the cameras. (This doesn’t stop Kayvan Novak and Harvey Guillén from selling the longing and sweetness of the parting, though.) Our real ending is far goofier, but also far more honest, as Nandor makes literal space for his friend by inviting him to share his coffin with him for the first time ever. It’s the smallest of gestures, a tiny opening—and the payoff to six seasons of slowly paving the way for the idea that a guy as monumentally self-absorbed as Nandor can learn to value another person as a person instead of just a servant or an object of conquest. We then end (before one final, meta stinger) on a final “Fuck it, why not?” moment, as Nandor reveals he really has built that coffin-activated elevator down to his secret superhero lair he’s been musing about all episode. Last week, I joked about how the one thing the finale absolutely wouldn’t be about was Nandor and Guillermo fighting crime together as superheroes, but, like, what the fuck do I know? In six years of watching, this show has never stopped keeping me guessing. Why should it start now?

Stray observations

• • Laszlo’s become very versed in the language of TV documentary, as applied to masturbating Frankensteins: “Stay in the two-shot, please; he’s got his hand in the cookie jaaaaar!”
• • Who’s ready for the adventures of Kid Cowboy and The Phantom…Menace?
• • Nandor’s “blueprints” are a real treasure trove of pause-the-video gags and misspellings. The “Super Compuder” has to be “beeg,” because that’s what makes it “super.”
• • Guillermo repeatedly refuses to do “a little song and dance” for the finale, despite The Guide telling him “You’ve got the best moves!”
• • It is actually, genuinely sweet that Nadja gives a shit that Guillermo is sad about the documentary ending, even if she’d never say it to his face.
• • One last Nandor: “I will fix.”
• • Colin has fun with a run of really obnoxious ending clichés. “Guillermo, you’re Irish, right?” “No!” “Okay, great, then you probably haven’t heard this one…”
• • “I once waved farewell to a departing train for over three hours. And then I realized it wasn’t a train at all. It was a flat-bed truck full of Porta-Potties.”
• • I rewatched portions of the series pilot today to note callbacks—there are a lot of them, including the final sequence of Guillermo putting out all the lights—and it’s very striking how different Novak plays Nandor in that early going. (It feels like he’s trying to channel Taika Waititi from the movie, before finding a much richer version of his own voice as the years have gone on.)
• • “One time I did see Guillermo take a little can of Pringles off the table of snacks that the documentary crew uses, so maybe he’s worried that he won’t be able to steal food anymore?”
• • There’s a lot of speculation about which members of the documentary crew Guillermo might have been secretly fucking. “Or is it Frank the grip that looks a lot like Nandor?”
• • “If you really feel like you need a special ending to this, you have about an hour to make it happen, cap’n.”
• • Colin Robinson is, of course, very prolific in debating TV show endings on Reddit, IndieWire, Deadline, TV Guide, TV Insider, THR, Den Of Geek…. 
• • The Guide has an idea: “Guillermo becomes a vampire!” (“Fuck me.”)
• • The Guide has another idea: anti-immigrant rhetoric and MAGAFV. (“Make America Great Again For Vampires.”) (“We maybe don’t want to end on that note, so….”)
• • Nadja’s hypnosis-induced “perfect” ending is a really fun exercise in callbacks and setting up dumb jokes, like De La Sol’s De La Cruise. (That’s Andy Assaf, Cravensworth’s Monster, as the guy giving Colin back his stuff, by the way.)
• • One last piece of bait for the Guillermo-Nandor ‘shippers turns into a long ramble about how Nandor doesn’t like the smell of the documentary lights because it makes him worry his hair’s on fire.
• • Doug Jones, Marissa Jaret Winokur (who plays Charmaine) and Chris Sandiford (who played Derek) all get credits for this episode, although I don’t think they appear anywhere in it. A nice touch.
• • And that’s a wrap on What We Do In The Shadows. It’s been a delight to laugh along with all of you. There really just aren’t enough comedies this fun and fearless on TV. I picked up this gig halfway through the show, coming on in the footsteps of the great Katie Rife. I hope I haven’t provoked too many “fucking guy“s from you along the way.
• • I’ll end on this, Laszlo’s summation of the series as a whole. Thereare worse epitaphs. “We’ve had lots of laughs. Sucked lots of blood. And then fucked each other senseless.”