You Want Closure? What We Do in the Shadows Will Give You Closure.

Spoilers ahead for “The Finale” of What We Do In the Shadows. In the grand tradition of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King , it could be argued that the series finale of What We Do in the Shadows has too many endings. But it’s okay, because this collection of endings is purposefully about the nature of ending, the complicated demands of fan service, and how difficult it can be to give viewers what they think they want versus what the story needs.

No, Guillermo and Nandor don’t kiss, but it’s better that they don’t and that WWDITS ends in a way that is both incredibly sentimental and, as is so often the case with these vampires, a total rejection of sentimentality. Nandermo shippers might be disappointed, but “The Finale” concluding WWDITS ’s six-season run with a firm grasp on the series’ fluid tonal duality is a more meaningful reflection of its creativity than any liplock could have been. This whole sixth season has felt a bit like a bonus, hasn’t it? WWDITS ’s fifth season, in which Guillermo finally got his 15-year wish of becoming a vampire but realized that so much killing and blood-drinking wasn’t actually for him, after which a sympathetic Nandor restored Guillermo to his human form, could have been a natural narrative endpoint.



Nandor saving Guillermo after all the times Guillermo saved Nandor emphasized the bond between former master and former familiar and put them on somewhat even ground; it was a kind of closure. This ultimate go-round, meanwhile, has mostly prioritized goofs over growth, with a number of late-season-sitcom tropes — a new character in forgotten vampire roommate Jerry (Mike O’Brien); a new workplace for Guillermo, Nadja, and Nandor in finance company Cannon Capital Strategies; a new science project for Laszlo and Colin in the Monster (Andy Assaf) — and a return to certain episode structures that have worked for the series before. The Warriors homage “Come Out and Play” is like an amped-up version of the Staten Island vampires facing down Simon the Devious and his cronies; Laszlo engineering a monster wasn’t dissimilar from how he created all of those animal-hybrid clones using Guillermo’s DNA.

It was slightly surprising that WWDITS , usually so bold in shaking up its characters’ relationships and obsessions with the human world, was reverting to more recognizable formats in its final days. But with hindsight provided by “The Finale,” that approach feels incredibly self-aware, as though WWDITS was purposefully building to an ending that acknowledges that it’s hard to find a closing beat for immortal creatures who can sleep for decades and spend weeks in a “Yes, yes, very well, thank you!” fugue state while deciding how to reorganize their book collection. It makes sense, then, that “The Finale” and its many endings are less about the vampires and how they’ll continue on and more about Guillermo, who for so long has been our entry point into the WWDITS world and who, with his complicated feelings about the vampires whom he alternately loves and can’t stand, has long been the most relatable being living in the Staten Island mansion.

“The Finale” introduces the fact that it’s a finale by finally explaining what’s going on with the documentary crew that has been following the vampires and Guillermo around for six years, and who provided the series with its mockumentary format: They were filming a nonfiction feature about the vampires, and they’ve decided they have enough footage now. In the middle of talking-head interviews with Laszlo and Colin about building a wife for the Monster, and with Nadja and Nandor about the Monster’s feelings for the Guide, the camerapeople announce “We’re done ..

. We have what we need,” and the vampires casually take off their mics, deposit them on nearby furniture, and go about their days. Only Guillermo is shocked: “Don’t you think it’s weird that we’ve been doing this and all of a sudden, poof , it’s just ending?” He then serves a dual role in the episode as himself, the vampires’ sort-of friend who sees in the conclusion of the documentary another chapter of his mortal life ending, and as our audience stand-in, curious about how this is all going to wrap up.

The endings that follow speak to both Guillermo as his own character and Guillermo as us, with some moments that break the fourth wall to address what WWDITS was for its viewers and others that hint at what could happen within the WWDITS world after we stop watching it. In the former category: In a nod to season five, the Guide suggests the perfect ending for the documentary would have been Guillermo becoming a vampire. (It’s too bad, Nandor says, that “we did that already, last year.

” “Really should have finished filming at that point,” Nadja adds.) Nadja, with her typical bitchy flair, hypnotizes all viewers to provide “the most perfect ending you could possibly imagine with your simple little human minds,” which turns out to be a nearly beat-for-beat Usual Suspects– style conclusion with a series-spanning montage of greatest-hits scenes and Colin Robinson serving as Keyser Söze. (“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he was just too boring to listen to.

”) The mockumentary format itself gets a little ribbing with the vampires revealing to Guillermo that back in the 1950s, the legendary Maysles Brothers (who made the documentaries Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens ) filmed them for years and never released the footage — which, unsurprisingly, shows the vampires getting up to earlier, black-and-white versions of all their familiar high jinks, from Colin being hyped for warfare to Laszlo, toothpick in his mouth, fooling Nandor and Nadja with his drawling “Jackie Daytona” disguise . The more things change, the more they stay the same, especially when you can live forever. Guillermo is shook by the degree to which so many of the vampires’ follies and foibles have “happened before,” which is a clever way for WWDITS to acknowledge that such familiarity and recurring cycles of behavior are exactly what sitcoms promise.

But all this meta writing isn’t exactly the sort of warm and reflective farewell expected of a series finale — that’s the domain of the endings that hint at what could happen to these characters after the documentary, and WWDITS itself, wraps up. Colin gives a speech about chosen families, and even though he calls his vampire roommates “stinky turds,” it’s clear he’s actually acknowledging what they mean to him. Laszlo leads the other vamps and the Monster in a “We’ll Meet Again” singalong as Guillermo, sitting on trunks holding the now-unneeded filming equipment, weeps from the emotion of it all.

And the vampires surrounding Guillermo with suggestions about how to find meaning in this ending are gestures of concern that demonstrate how much they see him as one of them, a theme the sixth season hit over and over again as Nadja and Nandor worked to defend Guillermo from his bullying co-workers at Cannon Capital; as Nandor told Guillermo in “The Promotion,” “You’re never gonna be just a normal human guy. You don’t belong with them.” The vampires’ enduring embrace of Guillermo as one of their own reaches an apex in “The Finale” when Nandor tells Guillermo to call him not by “Master” but by his first name.

Acceptance from everyone in the house, whom Guillermo has always prioritized above himself (well, except for that time he stole money from Nadja’s nightclub), is more wholly fulfilling than an individual romance with Nandor, whom we know to be flighty and fickle when it comes to love. Nandor and Guillermo are each other’s person, and even if their crime-fighting, secret-underground-lair plans as the Phantom Menace and Kid Cowboy don’t work out, WWDITS ends with the pair in a place of companionship that suggests they’ll never let the other be lonely again. Has Nandor ever allowed another person into his coffin? Have the vampires ever thought so thoroughly about Guillermo’s feelings? The intimacy of all that! “The Finale” may initially seem disjointed, with its cerebral and earnest tones bumping up against each other.

But as Guillermo himself says, “We need an ending. It has to be good, and it has to mean something.” By overdelivering with a half-dozen or so options, WWDITS found a way to honor both the needs of Guillermo as an individual and the series as a whole.

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