Review: What We Do in the Shadows, "The Mall" & "A Night Out with the Guys" | Season 5, Episodes 1 & 2

Two funny episodes get a new season — and new storylines — up and running

Photo: Russ Martin, FX Networks

Welcome to Episodic Medium’s coverage of the fifth season of FX’s What We Do In The Shadows, which returned tonight with its first two episodes. As always, the first review is free to all subscribers, but subsequent reviews will only be accessible to paid subscribers—you can join for only $5 a month. You can find out more by reading our summer schedule and checking out our About Page.

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Greetings, my friends! Welcome back for another season of What We Do in the Shadows. Please follow Nador’s advice to Guillermo and “change into your nicest shitty sweater,” as we settle in over the next two months to scrutinize a sitcom that combines the serialized misadventures of misfit monsters with some of the best “hangout show” vibes of any current comedy.

The titles and the premises for Season 5’s two-episode premiere, “The Mall” and “A Night Out with the Guys,” would seem to suggest that after Season 4’s sprawling, intertwined plot-lines — involving a vampire nightclub, a djinn, a reanimated bride, a long-distance lover and the bizarre growing pains of Baby Colin Robinson — this year we’re going to return to the simpler one-off stories of the earlier Shadows seasons. This week our undead friends go shopping and go out to dinner. Boom. Easy. Let the wacky hijinks ensue.

But it’s pretty nifty how the writers—in this case Marika Sawyer, credited for “The Mall,” and show-runner Paul Simms, credited for “A Night Out”—pick up the dangling threads from Season 4 and begin weaving something new, without getting too mired in setup or trying to cram in too much. It takes both of these episodes to get all the show’s main characters on track with what they’re mostly going to be preoccupied with this year.

We have to start with Guillermo, who ended Season 4 on a cliffhanger moment, asking his nerdy vampire friend Derek to do what Nandor so far hasn’t: Sire him. The writers toy with our curiosity through “The Mall,” occasionally cutting to flashbacks of Guillermo and Derek and having the documentary film crew ask Guillermo to explain exactly what happened.

We’ll get back to all that, because it’s the one storyline that dominates the first two episodes. Otherwise, these two episodes really are about vampires going the mall and vampires enjoying a night out with the guys…sort of.

Because Guillermo would rather not talk about the whole Derek situation, when “The Mall” begins he tries to change the subject to something he feels is more important: The housemates, he says, have been getting sloppy about living incognito among the humans, and are using their hypnotism powers too wantonly to cover for their laziness. (Or for their vanity. In an illustrative flashback, Nandor slips briefly while walking down the steps at a basketball arena and promptly heads down to the floor to brain-wipe the entire crowd.)

Nandor in particular struggles to interact with humans, in part because he knows he can Mesmer his way out of any awkward situation. To his credit, Nandor is trying to improve. He’s been reading an “ancient book of wisdom,” I’m OK—You’re OK, and is trying to apply what he’s learned to discern the real reason Guillermo seems so disgruntled. His guess? Either he’s back to working at Panera Bread (“something all humans do at some point”) or it’s his birthday.

Settling on the latter, the housemates treat Guillermo to a dinner at Red Rock Steakhouse, where we learn what Colin Robinson has been up to since evolving back into a middle-aged man at the end of last season. He’s now pioneering new frontiers in energy vampirism—by working as a waiter. He’s the kind of waiter who greets tables by asking, “What are we thinkin’ about munchin’ on?,” who never writes down an order, who barges in to refill water glasses when customers are in the middle of a serious conversation, and who responds to a reasonable request to put the salad dressing on the side with, “I can ask the chef but it’s probably a no-go.” When Nandor and company agree to order four plates of jalapeño poppers (so they can fit in with the other humans), Colin Robinson returns with veggie dumplings and chocolate pudding. He’s an energy vampire savant.

After dinner the whole party moves to the shopping mall across the parking lot, for some “vampires buy T-shirts, ride carousels and shop at Build-A-Bear” tomfoolery. It’s all very funny; though it’s the kind of schtick this show cranks out easily.

What’s more relevant is the turn the plot takes, as we finally move deeper into the Guillermo/Derek mystery—complete with the kind of formal playfulness that usually occurs whenever this show integrates the documentary crew into the story.

In the flashbacks to Guillermo asking Derek to make him a vampire, the camera crew mostly hangs back, capturing at a distance the clumsy way these two geeky men lunge at each other with teeth bared—either struggling to break the skin or nicking an artery and sending blood spurting all over the convenience store break-room. Meanwhile, occasionally Derek’s manager wanders in to tell him to unclog the toilet…because otherwise, “People just go on top of what’s already there.”

After all that, is Guillermo a vampire? The question remains unresolved even after this week’s second episode. In the “no, not a vampire” column, we have this: Guillermo can eat human food and can go out into the sun; and he can’t transform into a flying bat. On the other hand: Guillermo doesn’t need glasses anymore, and when he says “bat” he briefly has bat ears.

In episode two, Guillermo and Derek pay a visit to the ancient Baron Afanas to see if the sexy old coot has ever heard of a vampire just sort of… half-turning. Afanas has not, but he suggests an experiment. He has recently sired his annoying neighbor Jonathan (who deserved it because he kept using his damn leaf blower all damn day), so he proposes that Derek try siring Jonathan as well, to see if there could be any danger to Guillermo getting re-sired and becoming “a vampire-and-a-half or a double vampire.” Within seconds of running the experiment though, Jonathan explodes. Bad news for Guillermo. And here’s more bad news: When he floats the idea of someone other than Nandor turning him into a vampire, he learns this is one of the biggest betrayals in vampiredom, penalized by death to both master and familiar.

The rest of “A Night Out with the Guys” is really about two sets of guys, having separate nights out. The Guide returns to hang out with Nadja, who has been in a liquor-blood-induced funk ever since their vampire nightclub flopped. The Guide wonders if maybe Nadja has been hexed, and sure enough she finds a spooky indestructible picture on Nadja’s shelf, with writing around the frame in the language of her native country Antipaxos. (Nadja: “This is a little bit really bad, isn’t it?”)

So the two ladies plus Colin Robinson visit Staten Island’s own “Little Antipaxos” neighborhood, where Nadja is transported to the old country by the proliferation of “cheap crap and old fish.” At “a shitty diner” — just like the kind Nadja remembers from home — they find someone who can translate the picture frame, which says that Nadja can break her hex if she performs acts of kindness.

My theory? The picture is a plant by The Guide, who keeps trying to get Nadja to recognize how rude she’s being to her old business partner. When Nadja complains about having no female friends or support system, The Guide says, “I am here,” to which Nadja says, “Yes yes, but you know what I mean.” In other words: This situation could take a while to resolve.

The other titular “guys” here are Laszlo, Nandor, their neighbor Sean, and Sean’s buddies. (I don’t usually use the word “titular,” but I’m doing so now because it would make Sean laugh.) Essentially the “A” plot of this episode, this night out becomes an extension of the throwaway gags in the premiere about Nandor’s over-reliance on hypnotism—and perhaps an indicator that this will be part of his plot arc this season.

Throughout the night, Laszlo needles Nandor for how bad he is at talking to humans. When Sean observes that the vampires never drink, Nandor haltingly says,  “I drink lots of fluids… red fluids… much like your wine… except it is not wine.” Laszlo leaps to his rescue and says they both pregamed “very heavily” with Red Bull and vodka. (Laszlo adds that they don’t eat because they’re already hammered and don’t want to puke in everyone’s “stupid faces.”) And when Sean’s rowdy buddies draw the attention of the cops, Laszlo makes the police feel heard and respected while Nandor struggles to make up a good story. (“Firstly, there were these guys. This much we know.”)

Ultimately, after the boys get thrown in jail, Laszlo admits that Nandor’s facility with hypnotism can come in handy. Nandor springs them all by convincing the police that he is Captain Sully Sullenberger and Nandor is“the gentleman in the mustache from that cop show that you like” (a.k.a. “Thomas Selleck in Blue Bloods”). Still, Nandor’s poor human relation skills seem likely to be a persistent theme this year.

As for Laszlo, he doesn’t have any particular plot arc introduced in these episodes, though it’s notable that last season he was the vampire who looked after Colin Robinson (in his own half-assed way), and this season he’s the one who finds out what Guillermo’s whole deal is. Last season’s finale began with Laszlo saying, “Baby Colin is miserable, and it’s a mystery to me.” This season’s premiere begins with him saying, “Something is wrong with Gizmo lately.” Of all the housemates, Laszlo’s the sensitive one, and genuinely comfortable around humans—even moreso than Guillermo. We’ll see if that empathy extends to whatever Gizmo has become.

Stray observations

• Weirdly, although Laszlo still doesn’t have his own storyline per se this season (unless it ends up being just “helping Guillermo”), Nadja’s doll does. During her post-nightclub drunken stupor phase, Nadja sat on her dolly and crushed her legs, so they’re now in search of the perfect lower half. The first (bad) choice? A dancing Santa that sings “I Feel Good” while lifting up its dress.

• Nandor interprets the standard settings on his sleep-aid sound machine as something spooky. Rain is “rainy night at leaky castle.” Croaking frogs are “creatures of the night.” The default white noise static is “banshee wail.” And the song “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” is “abandoned orphanage.”

• An example of the formal play in the Derek/Guillermo flashback: After Guillermo insists that Nador cares about him, he tells Derek he’s going to pause for a few seconds to give the documentary editors a chance to insert “a cute montage of all the things he’s done for me.” (They do not.)

• An extra touch of nerdiness from Derek: Rather than shouting “bat” when he wants to turn into a bat, he copies the Wonder Twins from Super Friends and says, “Form of microchiroptera.”

• I don’t know where to begin with the “best Matt Berry line-readings” this week. Maybe I should pick the Sex and the City quiz where Laszlo finds out he is “Kim Cat-rallll,” or maybe I should go for Laszlo quoting a poem during boys’ night and saying it was “written a long time ago by HO-merr.” (Sean’s friends: “D’oh!”) I think I’m going to go though with Laszlo guessing that Guillermo’s real problems are gastrointestinal in nature and that he should stay away from “the breakfast burri-TAS” and the “chilaquiles-uh!”

• If I’m being honest, the real reason I’m favoring that last Matt Berry line-reading is because of the scene in “The Mall” where the housemates crack up imagining Guillermo as a vampire, with big glasses, a “shitty woolen cape,” and diarrhea. (Guillermo: “Why do I always shit in your scenarios?”)

• Laszlo: “Coppers, fuck off!” Coppers: “Yes sir! Thank you, Mr. Selleck!”

• Myles here to say welcome (or welcome back) to Noel’s coverage of What We Do In The Shadows. We’ve come a long way since Noel joined us last summer on this beat, and it’s great to have both him and Zack returning to some of the shows that started it all for us last year. Looking forward to following along with the conversations.