‘What We Do in the Shadows’ Season 5 Premiere: Guillermo Gets His Wish
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This post contains spoilers for the first two episodes of the fifth season of What We Do in the Shadows.
Coming into its fifth season, FX’s vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows has nothing left to prove, and barely anything to improve upon. It remains, pound-for-pound, the funniest show on television, and one of the few live-action comedies we have left with no interest in doing anything but making viewers laugh. Most of what there is in the genre are either half-hour dramas like The Bear, or shows like Ted Lasso and Abbott Elementary that want to give you the feels at least as much as they want to deliver punchlines. There’s nothing wrong with those approaches, but my goodness, what a relief it can be to sit down for a Shadows episode, knowing I will be in the presence of a relentless, filthy, brilliantly stupid joke-delivery system.
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And yet… there’s been one element of the show that had me anxious as I sat down to watch this two-episode season premiere: Guillermo. As played by Harvey Guillen and written by this diabolical creative team, Guillermo is a classic cinnamon roll character: so sweet, pure, and innocent (at least by the standards of this show) that of course he is destined to suffer. Over the course of the first four seasons, we’ve seen his role within the vampire house evolve, most notably when it turned out he was descended from the Van Helsing family, and thus genetically predisposed to fight and kill the undead. But no matter what else was transpiring, his ultimate goal remained the same: to get Nandor to turn him into a vampire so he can live forever.
There’s certainly a version of the series where Guillermo remains unfulfilled all the way to the end. Shadows would be far from the first sitcom to go out of its way to maintain the status quo. Gilligan never got off the island (not until there were some reunion movies, anyway). On Arrested Development, George Michael could never really turn his crush on Maeby into a relationship, even after he found out they weren’t biologically cousins. On Party Down, people’s dreams inevitably get dashed and they remain stuck as cater waiters. So when Guillermo has had near misses in the past — notably when Laszlo kidnapped him, thus preventing Guillermo from going on a road trip with Nandor that was meant to end with a transformation — it felt more or less in that tradition. And the ways in which Guillermo’s dreams were foiled tended to be amusing.
But Season Four ended on a moment that sure felt like the series moment to shit or get off the pot(*) with this story. Guillermo took all the money he’d been embezzling from Nandor and the others, and offered it to struggling new vampire Derek in exchange for Derek turning him into a vamp. Surely, there could be no going back from this, right? Or, if there were, then the series would probably be better off dropping the idea forever.
(*) Please imagine that phrase is being read by Matt Berry. Thank you.
Instead, these two new episodes come up with a fiendishly clever way to have their cake and eat it, too. We spend much of the first episode, “The Mall,” with the documentary crew(*) trying to get Guillermo to say whether or not he’s a vampire now. A frustrated and shy Guillermo keeps deflecting, while also pointing out that their cameras were present when he was with Derek, so they already have their answer. Over the course of the half-hour, we keep cutting back to that scene, and eventually we get our payoff. After dithering for a while over whether he’s actually prepared to take this huge step, Guillermo finally agrees. Derek bites him — leading to a hilariously over the top and graphic sequence where Guillermo’s blood sprays all over the back room of the convenience store — and all of Guillermo’s wishes finally come true, right?
(*) Both in these episodes and the next two, there is a lot more of the documentary guys either appearing on camera, being heard interviewing their subjects, or otherwise making their presences felt in a way they so rarely did earlier in the series.
Well, here’s where we get to the surprising twist: Guillermo is only kind of a vampire so far, in a manner that’s confusing everyone. And, worse, he can’t even tell Nandor about it, because Guillermo unwittingly violated an ancient vampire rule against familiars being turned by anyone other than their masters.
Guillermo keeping his transformation secret would have been amusing enough, albeit something of a rehash of the period where he was hiding his vampire-hunting genes from the others. But this new wrinkle, where Guillermo is stuck in between humanity and vampirism, is so much more surprising and delightful. He gets some benefits, like no longer requiring eyelgasses(*), but when he tries turning into a bat, the best he can do is to give himself human-sized bat ears. It’s not just that “Gizmo” can’t finally assert his place as an equal to the others because Nandor would try to kill him; it’s that he’s this mortifying, useless combination of the two species that has the advantages of neither.
(*) Like Peter Parker when he first became Spider-Man in the comics, Guillermo maintains his secret identity by replacing them with an identical-looking pair that has plain lenses.
The rest of these first two episodes are filled with the usual level of ridiculousness and wordplay. Laszlo early on boasts that he’s going to get to the bottom of Guillermo’s secret, “Because I’m the king of bottoms.” (Instead, Guillermo blurts out the truth to him, when the King of Bottoms assumed his prey just had a case of “the shits.”) Colin Robinson, now adult again after spending last season as a little boy and then a teenager, is enjoying a new career as the worst possible waiter you can have. The doll that houses Nadja’s human soul is angry with the actual Nadja for getting drunk and crushing her lower body, and is mortified to have been rebuilt with modern toy parts. (This also leads to an incredible sequence where Nadja takes the doll to a thinly-disguised version of Build-A-Bear and starts talking about doll taints with a confused employee.) After years of being a reliable recurring player, Kristen Schaal has been promoted to cast regular, which means The Guide is now trying and failing to get the other vampires to let her into their clique. (Even Guillermo is somehow on better standing with them than she is.)
And if these episodes had just featured those kinds of hijinks, they would have been wonderful. But Guillermo’s precarious and weird new circumstance adds a whole new color to Shadows that I can’t wait to see more of.
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