Photo: Russ Martin: FX/Copyright 2023, FX Networks. All Rights Reserved.
One tension that remains constant throughout all five seasons of What We Do in the Shadows is the contradiction between the vampires’ supernatural powers and prolific bloodlust and the fact that, beyond the monster stuff, they’re just a bunch of out-of-touch twits who can’t do anything by themselves. Should we be afraid of Nadja, Laszlo, and Nandor? They haven’t given us much reason to do so, either to Guillermo or the audience, in a while. And yet, Guillermo is absolutely terrified of them.
As we open season five, Colin Robinson has returned to his adult form and is now terrorizing customers at the Red Rock Steakhouse at the Staten Island Mall. Nadja has kicked the blood-booze habit. And Nandor is perfectly okay (or so he says) after reading a dusty tome called I’m OK — You’re OK he found on Laszlo’s bookshelf. (The vampires were canonically living in New York City when Thomas Harris’s self-help book was released in 1967; we can only assume that Laszlo purchased it to impress a groovy chick, then shelved it immediately.) Aside from Guillermo — who is indeed acting so weird that even the vampires notice, but we’ll get to that shortly — the only one carrying scars, psychic or otherwise, from the events of last season is Nadja’s doll, who is living her own personal, very stupid Boxing Helena (RIP Julian Sands) after Nadja accidentally crushed her legs in a blood-drunk stupor.
A classic sitcom reset, except that the show’s writers managed to make both and neither of the potential outcomes of last season’s cliffhanger — either Guillermo becomes a vampire or he doesn’t — happen simultaneously. Last we left Guillermo, he decided to go behind Nandor’s back and ask his buddy Derek (Chris Sandiford) to do him a solid and make him into a vampire already. “The Mall” spends the first half of the episode drawing out the reveal of what happened next, which was frustrating at first but eventually revealed itself to be the type of clever structural gambit at which this show excels.
Guillermo’s side of the story is full of tension, which has escalated to the point where he’s so frazzled that he’s no longer playing along with the camera crew’s interview prompts. (This is the most we’ve heard from the camera crew in a while, another way for the show to reestablish the characters and their world as we head into a new season.) Meanwhile, the vampires have concluded that Guillermo must be upset because they forgot his birthday, and since humans are adorably hung up on their birthdays — “Poor creatures only live 200, 300 years tops,” Nandor tells the camera, once again talking about humans the way humans talk about their pets — they’ll sit and watch him eat some human food and everything will be fine.
The vampires sitting around, completely oblivious, laughing at the one human who makes sure they don’t end up as piles of smoldering ash, is a normal state of affairs for this crew. Guillermo having a secret isn’t anything unusual, either: His longing to become a vampire has served as a metaphorical parallel to his coming-out journey over the past couple of seasons. And although Guillermo is now officially out of the closet as a gay man, he’s hiding another secret involving an awkward encounter in the back room of a convenience store. (The staging of the scene where Guillermo and Derek are circling each other, trying to position themselves and asking, “You’ve done this before, right?” read very “baby gay fumbling” to me.)
Now, Guillermo has gotten his wish, he thinks — the transformation wasn’t as dramatic or as instant as he thought it would be, but instead consists of a subtle series of changes that take place over a couple of weeks (16 days, specifically). He can still go out into the sun and eat human food. He doesn’t “feel any sexier,” as he tells the camera crew sitting in the mall optometrist’s office. The only noticeable changes are that he craves rare meat and his eyesight has improved. Even so, he’s afraid to tell the vampires what’s happened — even before they inform him that a familiar being turned by another vampire (cheating on his master, essentially) is one of the few things that a vampire should never joke about.
Nandor seems pretty damn serious when he says that if Guillermo was to do such a thing, Nandor would have to kill Guillermo and then himself. At this point, the only thing keeping Guillermo safe is that the vampires underestimate him so much they can’t conceive of him acting with that level of autonomy, let alone defiance. And so Guillermo is shoving himself back into the closet (coffin?), wearing nonprescription glasses and claiming that he’s not hungry when Colin Robinson — the one server in the entire world who it’s okay to tip less than 15 percent — brings them a platterful of Chinese dumplings and chocolate pudding and no rare steak.
But Laszlo has his suspicions. It makes sense that he’d be the Sherlock of the group, given that his experience raising baby Colin last season forced him to learn how to pay attention to the quirks and shifting moods of others. (He also confessed to being Jack the Ripper in season one, an experience that would have put him in close proximity to Victorian-detective types.) And while that beastly wind chime foiled his surveillance mission at the mall, this dirty dog never met a meaty scrap he’d let go from his powerful jaws. I expect to see more from this subplot as the season rolls on.
In the meantime, the vampires all seem to find the mall extremely amusing, with its Shrek shirts and carousels and tiny rainbow sombreros for mutilated dolls with the ghosts of vampires from when they were still alive inside of them. Taking the vampires out of their regular environment and placing them in the “real world,” whether it be a mall atrium or the cutaway to what looked like a real Brooklyn Nets game toward the beginning of the episode, is a great way to reestablish another of What We Do in the Shadows’s key comedic touch points — the absurdity of placing ancient vampires in the mundane present.
I’m honestly surprised that the show could find a mall that was still functional enough to shoot those location scenes in the year 2023. But that’s another thing we know about vampires: They find out about everything 30 years too late.
• The scariest moment in this week’s episode? The weird robotic legs and smooth crotch on Nadja’s poor doll. Nadja treats her unwilling animatronic performance like a cute hoochie-coochie dance, but I was getting real “skinned Furby” vibes.
• The presence of a store in the mall called Baby Village was pretty unsettling also.
• “If anyone can get to the bottom of it, it’s me. Why? Because I’m the king of bottoms!”
• Matt Berry’s cackle after the above quote notwithstanding, season five’s inaugural Line Reading of the Week goes to Natasia Demetriou for her pronunciation of the word mall, which she says more like “mauuuuurul.”
• “I’m looking for the exact proportions of Venus herself when her pussy was serving bitch’s tea, nipples so hard they’re on the most-wanted list, and a taint that can sign its own checks.”
• In terms of physical performance, one moment that stood out to me this week was Nandor leaning in to block Guillermo from sitting next to him in the booth, and Guillermo obediently fetching a chair to sit in instead. Those two simple movements say everything about the characters’ dynamic.
• I also loved the Evil Dead–esque fountains of arterial blood squirting out of Guillermo’s neck during the transformation scene. It’s great when the show leans into horror like that.
• Nadja and Laszlo’s relationship seems to be going great, based on Nadja’s grin and aw-shucks shrug when her husband describes himself as a real Kim Cattrall who’s “sexy and down to fuck.”
• A little nod to the classic-movie nerds when Nandor quotes Dracula: “Children of the night. What music they make.” He’s talking about a white-noise machine, but whatever.
• Speaking of — noise machines with settings for “rainy night at the leaky castle,” “banshee wails,” and “abandoned orphanage” should be arriving at Target any day now. Readers of these recaps probably already know this, but just in case — it usually only takes a couple weeks after the Fourth of July for the Halloween displays to go up, so start stalking the aisles now if you want to get the good stuff.
