Review: What We Do in the Shadows, “A Weekend at the Morrigan Manor” & “Exit Interview” | Season 5, Episode 9 & 10

Back-to-back episodes bring a hit-and-miss season to a satisfying conclusion

Photo: Russ Martin, FX

My family loves games, puzzles, art and design—and the spaces where all four intersect—so in our household we talk a lot about the concept of “Kentucky.” If you’ve never heard the term, Kentucky refers to feeling of satisfaction when one element in a larger pattern fits precisely into the whole. Picture a game of Tetris. When the exact shape you’ve been waiting for drops into an open space and clears multiple rows? That’s Kentucky.

Serialized television in the 21st century tends to avoid snapping pieces firmly and neatly into place, because without a few open ends, where can the story go? What We Do in the Shadows, though, has been a fascinating exception across its five seasons. Concepts and subplots do carry over from episode to episode and year to year, but the writers have been fearless about bringing stories to an end and then wiping their idea-boards clean, so they can start over and head off in any new direction.

So here we are once again at the end of another Shadows season where everything in the show has essentially been reset—and really moreso than usual, because there’s no Baby Colin Robinson or Vampire Guillermo moment to set up Season 6. Every major plot-line from this season—Nadja’s hex, The Guide’s loneliness, and everything to do with Guillermo’s half-vampirism and Nandor’s potential reaction to it—gets wrapped up neatly. And although we here in this review-space and comment section predicted a lot of how this was going to go, I have to say… I didn’t mind not being surprised.

Let’s begin with “A Weekend at the Morrigan Manor,” which on a basic “here’s what happened that matters long-term” level just confirms what we’d already suspected: that The Guide was behind Nadja’s “hex,” using it as a tactic to get her to admit she’s been a shitty friend. But the way the big reveal plays out is clever, on a “here’s what happened that was ultimately inconsequential but still very funny” level.

The episode is essentially a riff on the classic English drawing room mystery, where a bunch of people gather on a lavish estate and then one by one start disappearing. The vampires believe they’ve been invited to the country by the famously reclusive Perdita Morrigan, who has haunted this land since colonial times. (She once slaughtered 23 pilgrims and then blamed their deaths on the brutally cold weather. Legend.)

In reality, The Guide has set them up. After giving them one last chance to prove their friendship by inviting them to view her paintings (of them, as it turns out), she springs her backup plan: using Perdita’s empty mansion as a staging ground for various traps.

The traps are fun. In Perdita’s fencing studio, Laszlo is cornered by foes who keep multiplying. In Perdita’s bat-infested belfry—which Nadja assumes Laszlo is treating like “the local bordello”—The Guide sends Nadja through a broken stair-step and into the dungeon. On Perdita’s hunting grounds, Nandor chases after what he believes to be dozens of naked college athletes—“the most challenging prey!”—but gets tripped up when they turn around and start chasing him. (Nandor, sowing, scoffs that humans are too dumb to attack as a unit; Nandor, reaping, sees the humans heading toward him and says, “They seem to be working as a team!”)

Once The Guide has everyone trapped (aside from Guillermo, who has always been considerate), she imprisons them in individual metal cages. “What is this despicable torture that you have concoc-o-ted?” Nadja cries, to which The Guide explains that she is going to keep them together and yet apart for eternity, to teach them a lesson about letting people into their lives and then keeping them at a distance.

The Guide has a point. When the vampires arrive and get a message from “Perdita” about staying unified in her dangerously tricky home rather than operating as six individuals, a confused Laszlo says, “Six?” In the end though it’s Laszlo who saves the day, in part by admitting to The Guide that vampires can be cold-hearted sometimes and in part by asking the documentarians to pull up some out-of-context footage of him saying The Guide has “a tremendous wit and a fantastic back-siiiide.” So all’s well! Except The Guide lets slip that Guillermo is a vampire. Whoops.

This sets up the season finale, “Exit Interview,” which has a more conventionally scattered Shadows narrative structure—with the exception being that its various pieces are all Guillermo/Nandor focused. The first half of the episode cuts between Guillermo receiving a succession of visitors at his Hav-A-Nap Motel hideout and Nandor staking out a nearby Panera Bread, which he expects Guillermo to return to “like a gazelle returning to his watering hole.” Instead Nandor ends up accosting—and then befriending—Patton Oswalt. (Nandor: “What would I know you from? Do you know John Slattery?”)

After the beloved stand-up comic and Ratatouille star gives some advice about forgiving Guillermo, an enraged Nandor pushes him off a building… and then admits that Patton Oswalt has made a good point. Nandor changes his mind about killing his familiar, and instead invites him to be a full and equal member of the colony. (Nadja: “Booooo!” Laszlo, immediately forgetting what happened at Morrigan Manor: “Where once we were four, we are five!”)

There’s only one problem… well, two actually. First off, Guillermo’s still a half-vampire. But that’s an easy fix. Nandor has him drink some human blood, completing the transformation. The real issue that is that when his housemates take him out for his first hunt, Guillermo discovers he doesn’t have the will to kill and feast. He tells the camera crew that when he leaned in to take a bite out of his first human, he smelled the guy’s shampoo and thought about this poor soul shopping at a CVS and picking out a brand that reminded him of going camping as a kid. Guillermo, a kindly sort, just froze.

And so, inevitably, we push the reset button on the whole Vampire Guillermo story. Nandor kills Derek, which doesn’t kill Guillermo but instead rids him of the vampire curse. (It also gives him a bushy beard. Also his eyesight is bad again, but fortunately Nandor—in a genuinely sweet gesture—has kept his old eyeglasses.) Even the killing of Derek isn’t permanent. Laszlo takes Derek to Wallace the Necromancer (Benedict Wong), who does the “”scatting shit” that Laszlo hates and turns Derek into a zombie.

And if you’re looking for a reason not to hold What We Do in the Shadows at fault for always wiping away any significant plot development, you can take some comfort in the surprising return of The Necromancer, who still has Zombie Topher (Haley Joel Osment) living with him. We’ll almost certainly see Zombie Derek again too, just as we get a scene in the finale with The Djinn (who has to remind Nandor that he’s still out of wishes). And undoubtedly the Guillermo Hybrids will return again—still creepy as hell and still plaintively philosophical.

The point is that while residents of the Residence never really change, the show around them keeps adding new and lasting elements, giving the writers more comic options, week after week and year after year. The more the merrier, I say. There’s room for all. Everything fits.

Stray observations

• Our local Panera Bread closed during the pandemic and has yet to reopen, so while I haven’t had this particular sandwich in a while I will second Patton Oswalt’s assertion that the Turkey Bacon Bravo is surprisingly tasty.

• Even though Colin Robinson didn’t have a season-long arc this year, the writers did a fine job of coming up with new energy vampire gags in each episode. This week’s were festooned with winners: Colin farting loudly while stretching to “realign my chakras” (“That’s gonna happen… means you’re doin’ it right!”); Colin growing a mustache; Colin saying he found Guillermo’s motel by triangulating his location with any nearby Arby’s, party store or sweater shop; and Colin breaking out some classic dorky slang by saying about The Guide’s betrayal, “I did not have that on my 2023 bingo card.”

• One comic element that the writers, directors and cast really ramped up this season was the use of muttered asides, added in the ADR sessions (or at least I assume they were, judging by how they sound in the final audio mix). A great example this week is when the vampires are exiting a room, and Nadja suggests they unwind by watching a movie. Quietly on the soundtrack you can hear Colin Robinson—always looking to drain—proposing The Brothers McMullen.

• I’m sure Zombie Derek will be funny but I will miss Vampire Derek, who was so uncharismatic that he couldn’t hypnotize a cashier into giving him free hamburgers. (“Do you use Venmo?” he asks Guillermo, “Or are you a Zelle guy?”) Derek is also quite gullible, as evidenced by the way Nadja tricks him into revealing Guillermo’s location while she’s disguised as “Detective Policeman.”

• As a physically decaying dude in his mid-50s I have to say I admire Laszlo and Nadja’s unwavering commitment to wanton sexual depravity. At Guillermo’s motel, neither of these two are able to concentrate on what they’d intended to say to him because they just get too horny. First Nadja is distracted by the couple screwing loudly next door (whom she joins) and then Laszlo can’t stop watching the porn on Guillermo’s TV. (“What do you think they’re going to do?” he asks lasciviously before suggesting that Guillermo leave the room.)

• The Necromancer can only be paid with cash or gold coin (or, of course, Zelle).

• “My friend Patton Oswalt, he passed away quite suddenly.”