I Still Don’t Know How ‘What We Do In The Shadows’ Ended

Image; Hulu

Endings are tricky to pull off. Whether we are discussing the mixed results of the TV show Lost (2004–2010) or Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009), often, the best premises crack under the weight of their own ideas.

What We Do In The Shadows (2019–2024) was a little different because it was a situational comedy that did not attempt to advance bold ideas. Much of the time, it was an enjoyable meander from premise to premise, resolving major plot threads with little fanfare and sometimes not really at all. If you weren’t aware that season six was the final season going into it, you might have been a little shocked about episode 11, The Finale, where the show just ends.

And not a dramatic ending either, but with the characters more or less where they began the series — sitting around the living room of their Staten Island manor, talking about nothing of much importance. Rather than a heart-pounding or emotional ending, what follows is an entirely meta-commentary on the nature of endings—one that provides the viewer with nothing and everything all at once.

The various endings

The plot of the finale episode is that the unnamed documentary filming the Staten Island vampires— the conceit of the entire show — now has enough material to wrap up filming. “I think we’ve got everything we need,” someone says unceremoniously off-camera.

Their former human familiar, Guillermo de la Cruz (Harvey Guillén), who is at this point living with the other vampires, resists this change because he wants the ending to mean something. As the vampire Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) mocks:

“Guillermo is afraid that he has wasted 16 years of his life serving us, and it has prevented him from growing or changing in any way. The ending of this documentary is giving him a preview of his own, frail human life.”

Yet the show resists his attempts at a poignant send-off. The energy vampire Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) rattles off a series of hackneyed motivational statements. His former master, Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak), is more concerned with looking good in last-minute b-roll footage than attending to his former familiar’s worries. And they all make fun of Guillermo and his quest for meaning as they debate how pointless it is to care.

Much like every other point on the show, it is a meandering conversation on meaning, where each character suggests something that might make sense, only to ruin it at the last minute.

We soon learn this isn’t even the first documentary about the Staten Island vampires. Another camera crew came in the 1950s but ultimately didn’t air anything because the show “didn’t have enough good material.” As a short scene reveals, many of the plot points we experienced on the show happened back then, too—the vampires repeating mundane patterns infinitum.

Perhaps the funniest moment for me is a bored Nadja hypnotizing the viewer into imagining the best possible ending. The show cuts to a scene of almost fan fiction-like quality, where it is revealed that this was all an elaborate dream sequence between Guillermo and Nandor, who in the fiction of the hypnotic vision are a couple. The viewer is given this catharsis only for the show to cut back to the mundane reality of the Staten Island vampires, where nothing changes.

Even Guillermo’s final monologue, where he breaks up with Nandor, saying that it’s time to move on, is another performance. “I just said those things because I wanted to give the documentary an ending,” Guillermo tells Nandor in yet another string of false moments.

There was never going to be a satisfying conclusion because the foundation of this show was always built upon bored supernatural beings utterly divested from existence.

A conclusion

I don’t remember a show ever dicking me around this much and me being so absolutely good with it. When we finally get to the “end” end, where Nandor is bringing Guillermo to his secret lair so they can fight crime, any semblance of reality has left us. We don’t know if the scene unfolding in front of us is real within the show’s universe or some other figment, and it seems it doesn’t matter. Nandor and Guillermo are going on to the next pointless adventure.

The meaning, the show seems to suggest, was never the point. It was always about the ride, and I think I’m okay with that.