Are you ready for the most ice-cold take about television you’ll read today? Here it goes: finales are really difficult to do well. This is especially so for popular series that feature important plot lore and characters viewers are meant to care about. For example, Lost experienced the crisis that befalls all mystery-box shows: cultivating the mystery is always more fun than solving it. Evil was denied the chance to fully conclude its story, so it had to settle for pseudo-resolving some of the plotlines, leaving some characters and their arcs conspicuously suspended. Somebody Somewhere is an exception, potentially because it kept its scope small, but delivering emotional catharsis for its very real-feeling characters is no small feat. What We Do in the Shadows had a delicate line to tread. The series has extensive lore and a sprawling continuity, with many potential threads that need proper resolution. It also has beloved characters that deserve arcs as complete as their characterization. However, What We Do also has a particular tone that straddles sweet emotionality with a vampiric lack of sentimentality. Loving the show as I do, I watched the finale with a little trepidation; can any series hit all those marks without feeling atonal or out of line with all its established?
Spoilers for the series finale of What We Do in the Shadows lie beyond this line.
May the Vampiric Council forgive my doubts, because wow was that a banger of a finale! It turns out, all they needed to deliver a great last episode was a strong sense of meta-humor. In the previous episode, “The Promotion,” the audience was reminded that yes, there are, in fact, in-universe characters operating the cameras that create the mockumentary format the series runs on, and for the finale (titled “The Finale”), What We Do in the Shadows takes that and runs with it. Perhaps because they’ve collected years of footage or maybe because of their precarious situation with Cannon Capital, the film crew has decided they’re finished; they’ve got all they need! That they do so mid-scene/mid-sentence is such a great touch. With very little fuss, the vampires happily throw off their mic-packs and go back to doing their things, but Guillermo is more troubled. Acting as a surrogate for fans, he can’t believe that after six years, it’s all over; it just ends. It’s such that even Nadja recognizes he needs support and even uses his actual name!
Nadja shows a ton of growth in her pretty solid breakdown of Guillermo’s feelings: he’s worried that without the documentary, he’ll lose his purpose and then the past many years have been for nothing. Of course, this brief moment of insight is punctuated by all the vampires speculating about which crew member Guillermo has been “secretly f*cking,” as Colin puts it. This kicks off a wonderful victory lap replete with hilarious character moments, references, and callbacks. This wasn’t even the first documentary that was made about the vampires, but the Maysles brothers didn’t end up releasing it. Colin agrees with me when he says finales are difficult to land, and Cravensworth’s Monster suggests that people want emotional closure. Each vampire in turn offers different lessons or morals that completely skewer the idea that What We Do in the Shadows ever needed a unifying theme.
Which false finale ending did you get when you watched the episode when Nadja hypnotized us all through the screen? I got the Newhart-inspired ending with Guillermo and Nandor doing a riff on this classic finale moment, maybe because Nadja knows what I want. But did you know there are multiple false endings? Check them out on Hulu. For just six minutes of your time, you can get vampire The Usual Suspects and vampire Rosemary’s Baby. They’re hilarious.
Ultimately, What We Do in the Shadows nailed its series finale not by offering emotional catharsis or closure but by being resolutely itself. It’s best represented by Guillermo delivering an earnest monologue to the camera about the roads life takes us down while behind him the Monster f*cks a taxidermied bear and the others applaud. It would’ve felt wrong for the series to end on some kind of romantic moment or overtly emotional beat. I’m glad it went out as it came in: bawdy, rollicking, and hilarious. I will miss this show so very much. What We Do in the Shadows was reliably creative and found evergreen ways of mining greater and more audacious comedy from its simple presence. Natasia Demetriou channeled a fabulously chaotic sex monster and gave me endless joy with her thickly accented aggression. Matt Berry could take any word in the English language and make a feast out of it, not to mention his incredible work as the normal human man Jackie Daytona. Kayvan Novak was a stone-cold hunk as Nandor and found so many different shapes for his confident naivety to take, giving us a memorable goof for the ages. Mark Proksch was deliciously flat and cutting, giving his scenes fantastic little muttered buttons like when he quietly murmurs “bye, bitch” as Guillermo storms out of the room. What We Do in the Shadows is arguably Harvey Guillén’s breakout role, and that’s all the more impressive when you consider how he had to play the straight man to so many of the wacky antics around him. If his work on this show is any measure, he should enjoy a long and fruitful career.
In the end, What We Do in the Shadows thumbed its nose at the idea of closure, but it never thumbed its nose at fans. What we got in this series finale was not anything resembling closure as we’ve come to expect it on TV, but the audience got a better gift instead: a perfect distillation of what the show is. What We Do in the Shadows will be sorely missed, but I’m so happy we got six wonderful seasons with it.