This review contains spoilers for What We Do in the Shadows season 6, episode 11, “The Finale.”
Trying to find the perfect ending for a TV show is a fool’s errand. So leave it to Guillermo de la Cruz (Harvey Guillén) – no stranger to foolishness or errands – to be the one stressing out over the conclusion of the fake documentary at the center of What We Do in the Shadows. He’s the sole mortal among the show’s primary characters, and therefore the only one for whom endings of any kind are significant – or even exist. But this supernatural comedy is too clever and layered to allow Guillermo’s freak out to drive the entirety of “The Finale,” its unceasingly hilarious sign-off. There are emotional highs and sentimental sing-alongs, yes, but there’s also Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak) giving a “goodbyes are hard” pep talk that involves an anecdote about waving farewell to a train for over three hours, only to discover he was actually bidding adieu to “a flatbed truck full of porta potties.” And in its pileup of callbacks (Jackie Daytona! Laszlo’s witch-skin hat!), self-aware musings, and genuine heartache, “The Finale” is all locomotive, no portable toilet.
That nondescript episode title is no afterthought or spoiler-disguising camouflage: Take its definitive article seriously, because in many ways this is the ultimate in series finales, the final bow that does the most and gets the most satisfying results. It goes so far as to drop Guillén and Novak into a pitch-perfect parody of one of TV’s most notorious codas – Newhart’s “It was all a dream” crossover with The Bob Newhart Show – a fun detour for ’shippers and sitcom buffs alike. (Check the “extra hypnosis features” tab on the show’s Hulu page for two more meticulous riffs on memorable endings.) But this is also where “The Finale” can get a little too cutesy, turning a house meeting about giving Guillermo the ending he desires into a pseudo writers’ room brainstorming session. (When The Guide suggests turning Guillermo into a vampire, Nandor shoots it down with a weary “we did that already last year.”)
Far funnier and in-character for What We Do in the Shadows is Guillermo’s confession about why he’s so bothered that the documentary is coming to an end. He delivers it directly to the soon-to-be-departing documentarians while Cravensworth’s monster (Andy Assaf) – Laszlo’s (Matt Berry) scrappy stab at reanimating dead flesh à la Dr. Victor Frankenstein – humps a stuffed bear in the background. As Guillen’s heartfelt monologue about home mingles with his co-stars’ proud, perverse cooing about the monster’s behavior, the out-of-focus-silhouette of Assaf gets freaky with the taxidermy – and the go-for-broke spirit of ”The Finale” is captured in a nutshell.
The same goes for the documentary-within-the-documentary that fires up after Nandor and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) reveal this isn’t the first time they’ve let a film crew into their inner sanctum. You can quibble with the fact that such vain creatures surely would’ve let their previous onscreen experience slip earlier; you may object to Jerry the Vampire (Mike O’Brien) failing to mention working with direct cinema pioneers Albert and David Maysles when he threw a fit about the second documentary at the start of season 6. Whatever. I cackled through the entirety of this black-and-white interlude, a cavalcade of callbacks that temporarily puts Berry back into the persona of Arizona’s most charismatic regular human bartender and gives him a “Yes yes, very good. Thank YOU!” for old time’s sake. The sequence is impeccably paced, ramping up to a panic over Nandor (not for the last time) blowing his and his roommates’ cover in news coverage of a nearby water-main break. The point is that all of this has happened before and will happen again – in conversations amongst the characters, “The Finale” puts in the work to build the illusion that (after)life will carry on after the final credits roll. The committed lunacy of this “abandoned” doc is a welcome reminder that I would’ve happily watched these immortal idiots make the same mistakes for years to come.
Really, all of season 6 felt that way. It’s one of the better sitcom swan songs in recent memory, due in no small part to how it prioritizes laughs. I’ve already praised the delightful spin-out of “Sleep Hypnosis,” but What We Do in the Shadows managed to top itself the very next week with the fake-office hijinks of “The Railroad.” Putting the show’s variety of colorful vampire factions into a send-up of The Warriors must’ve been one of the biggest no-brainer pitches its writers ever threw out; that episode, “Come Out and Play,” scores additional points for closing the loop on Jerry and bringing back Doug Jones for one more commanding portrayal of Baron Afanas. And while the Cannon Capital Strategies subplot never really gathers a full head of steam, Gullermo’s time among the private equity vultures does lay the ground work for both Nandor’s mannequin-festooned, Apocalypse Now-inspired dark-comedy night of the soul in “Nandor’s Arm” and the reconciliation that gives “The Finale” its curtain-closing rush of warm fuzzies.
Of all the wild guesses and concrete answers for why Guillermo might be feeling down about the end of the documentary, this is the most poignant: He already got the ending he thought he wanted, and being a vampire wasn’t all he’d hoped and dreamed it would be. The stint at Cannon renewed his sense of purpose, but as “The Promotion” effectively proved last week, that was just one more situation where he’d be strung along by the promise of a life-altering change – but without the fallback of someone like Nandor who’d grown to respect him. The scenes between Guillén and Novak are the ballast that keeps “The Finale” from completely floating off into Wackyland – they begin the episode wearing low-rent, humiliating superhero outfits but they end it as equals, looking at one another eye-to-eye. It is very What We Do in the Shadows that this precious moment occurs in a coffin, mere seconds before it descends into the imitation Batcave Nandor has dug beneath the vampire residence.
In one of a few head-fake finishes, Guillermo gives the documentarians a pretend “time to move on” ending. But the real deal shows how far he’s come. The guy sitting in that coffin is no longer the meek servant we glimpse in the excerpt from the series premiere shown during the credits of “The Finale.” He’s now a full, active participant in the chaos that defines the episode: Its format-breaking rabbit holes, its expressions of the monster’s natural urges, its VFX-aided capper. And that’s really the best ending that anyone in his situation could’ve hoped for.
