By: Alex Tilton
Sticking the landing is hard. I remember at least as many botched series finales as good ones: Roseanne, How I Met Your Mother, Game of Thrones, and Battlestar Galactica are a few famous examples of bad finales. There was a general pattern to it: a decline in quality, a shift in the tone of the show, and an ending that made the audience feel like someone pulled the rug out from under them. Roseanne’s finale famously declared the entire 9th season to be someone’s fantasy, and rewrote the show’s entire canon in a voiceover. Battlestar Galactica made a bizarre tonal shift from space-opera to new-age spiritualism, left a lot of plot threads unresolved, and ended on a lame deus-ex-machina. How I Met Your Mother unceremoniously killed the title character (the Mother) off camera, and then flat out told the audience that the title of the show was misleading. Game of Thrones…ugh.
But What We Do in the Shadows will not have this problem.
The show is steaming happily along doing what it’s always done. It knows exactly what it is, and what it wants to be: a pitch-black horror-comedy for grownups. There’s still half a season left to go but none of the first six episodes give any indication of an unwanted change in tone. The quality is as good as ever. The vampires (and their human bodyguard Guillermo) have all had their personal arcs over the duration of the series, and they’re comfortable with who they are. Nothing about this season suggests that the finale will be a bizarre attempt to rewrite the history of the show, or a sudden tonal shift that clashes with everything else we’ve seen. I don’t know exactly what they’ll do, but it’ll be on brand. It’ll be the What We Do in the Shadows that the audience has come to love.
As for specifics of this season (spoilers ahead) they do a good job setting up the ending. So far Lazlo has confronted the ghost of his father (literally), Guillermo moved out and got a real job (before moving back in), The Guide found a new master to serve that is more to her liking, and Nandor had a mental breakdown, went out and formed an army, then got over it and came home. Colin Robinson and Nadia still need a final episode about them, but we have five left and I have no worries on this account.
The cast and crew must’ve loved this show. They get to say and do pretty much whatever they please, and because they did a great job and people loved it, they got to do it for a long time. And most of all, they knew when to bow out. This show never threatened to overstay its welcome. There is a spinoff called ‘Wellington Paranormal’, but it doesn’t feel like a soulless cash grab. It isn’t great either, but at least they didn’t give it a backdoor pilot. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, that’s when the pilot of a spinoff is technically an episode of the original show, but they just don’t say so.
Anyway, that’s about it for What We Do in the Shadows. I’m looking forward to a brief review of the second half of the final season, but mostly I just want to express my gratitude. The show was awesome, it remained awesome and (so far) it has finished its run equally awesome.
Image Sources: Yahoo.com & RottenTomatoes.com