In its earliest episodes, much of the comedy on What We Do in the Shadows came from the contrast between ancient vampires and the mundanity of modern life. Trailers for the first season featured scenes of Nandor and Guillermo under sickly green fluorescent lights at a late-night grocery store, an image that wordlessly communicated the show’s comedic sensibility by having a 750-year-old Persian warrior in a long velvet cape walk through the frozen-foods section. But as Shadows’ internal mythology has grown more complex, it’s shifted toward using these juxtapositions to reveal new sides of the vampires’ personalities — take season two’s “The Curse,†or the season three episode “The Casino†— rather than as absurd jokes in themselves.
With this character-driven focus, the vampire underworld’s uneasy relationship with modernity can still reap great comedic and thematic rewards — as it does in the second part of this week’s two-part season premiere. Two conflicts between ancient and modern drive the plot of “The Lampâ€: First, there’s the Guide’s resistance to turning the Vampiric Council offices into a vampire nightclub, a hesitation that goes deeper than simply not wanting to soak priceless artifacts in the blood from Nadja’s Blade sprinklers. (For his part, Laszlo doesn’t seem too concerned about the Council’s priceless collection of antique pornography, giving his wife a grin and a little wiggle at her excited mention of literal bloodbaths.)
As it turns out, the Guide is resistant to change because she’s burying long-repressed shame in obsessive-compulsive devotion to the Council chambers, and she unconsciously fears that the nightly debauchery of a vampire nightclub might reactivate her long-ago slutty phase. (Based on the naughty cartoons that flash across the screen late in the episode, the Guide was at her exhibitionist coprophiliac wildest during the Rococo period.) She finds this out through analysis sessions with Laszlo, an old cocaine buddy of Sigmund Freud’s who, like all good Freudians, thinks that all of life’s problems are essentially seks-sew-aul in nature.
Here, the clash between the Guide’s fear of the future and Nadja’s blind charge towards it occurs within the vampire community, with a little help from those spooky, inscrutable wraiths. (The faceless specters’ turn towards Looney Tunes pratfalls in “The Lamp†reaped similar rewards as the decrepit floors in “Reunited†— I was especially fond of the classic Wile E. Coyote trick of sawing a hole in a floor for another character to fall through.) But “The Lamp’s†second ancient/modern conflict is between Nandor and 21st-century humanity. Namely, his persistent inability to figure out what modern women want and why it isn’t a marriage proposal at a dog park from a guy who doesn’t even have a dog.
Nandor is, shall we say, rather old-fashioned in his ideas about relationships. We find this out through a happy accident (good thinking, Guillermo!) which brings a new addition to the Shadows universe: A djinn in a business suit with the indifferent attitude of an office worker on a Friday before a three-day weekend. The djinn brings back all 37 of Nandor’s wives — both male and female — to help him remember which, if any of them, he really loved. Through a selfish and superficial process of elimination, he narrows the field down to just one wife: The beautiful and hyper-intelligent Marwa, a mathematician and astronomer who says she’s thrilled to be eternally betrothed to a man with an intellect to match her own.
Now, ob-vi-ous-ly, this is not true about Nandor. Like, at all. He’s a sweetheart and actually something of a hunk, but a scholar he is not. And based on the excuses he makes for turning the rest of his wives into piles of dust, he doesn’t like to be challenged in any way, whether by a male wife’s superior physical strength or by a female one’s lashing tongue. In his own delusional mind, he probably thinks that he is, in fact, Marwa’s intellectual equal. But what will happen when she wants to talk about mathematics, and he gets lost and bored within the first 30 seconds? He’s sent wives to the djinn to collect their gold coin of “re-deadening†for less. And he’s got at least a few wishes left out of his 52 — I figure around ten, based on 36 wives, three hair-color changes, and a couple of random requests early on — so poor Marwa may fall victim to her husband’s insecurity soon enough.
The focus in this episode is solidly on Nandor and the Guide, but an exasperated Guillermo — still the only one around this place with any sort of respect for human life — provides a few clues to where else the second season of Nandor’s self-produced The Bachelor spin-off might go. Addressing the camera directly about something I speculated about in my last recap, he declares that while we all might be thinking that he’s going to be terribly jealous of Nandor’s bride (true), his personal life is actually going well, and no he will not address who that was on the phone just now saying that he missed him.
This is an intriguing complication we haven’t seen in Nandor and Guillermo’s relationship: Guillermo’s always been the one who cares more, even when he protests the opposite. What would happen if this dynamic was reversed? And if that’s the case, why is Guillermo wasting his time schlepping sushi and Target bags up to the vampires’ attic if he’s got a better option on hold? It seems the Guide isn’t the only one who could use some time on Laszlo’s therapy couch, examining their motivations.
Craven Mirth
• Russian Doll fans may recognize Anoop Desai, who plays Nandor’s professionally attired djinn, from his role as Salim on season two of the Netflix series. He was also a contestant on season eight of American Idol and played Dev Satyal on Billions, if that scratches the “where have I seen this guy before?†itch.
• Parisa Fakhri, who appears as the presumably ill-fated Marwa, has fewer high-profile projects on her resume, but she does have an interesting history as a voiceover artist on anime series like Dragon Ball GT, Fruits Basket, and Fullmetal Alchemist.Â
• Line reading of the week goes to Kayvan Novak muttering, “We live in a time of miracles,†when Guillermo points out that modern women have ready access to spoons.
• “I’m just going to ignore all of that and put it down to your female hysteria.†Speaking of antiquated ideas about women … welcome to Freudian psychoanalysis, friends.
• Hear me out: a series of erotic past-life regression courses narrated by Matt Berry.
• Once again, Laszlo’s penis proves to be the hidden arbiter of Western civilization. How many empires have risen and fallen (pun intended) on that undead Englishman’s cock?
• Nandor’s casual attitude toward marrying both men and women does have a historical basis. In 2009, historian Janet Afary published Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, a deep dive into attitudes toward sex and relationships in Iran from 500 AD to the present. Among her findings was a tradition of “romantic bisexuality†with formalized codes of chivalry and courtship; one text from 1082-1083 AD — 180 years before Nandor’s human birth in 1262 AD — reads: “As between women and youths, do not confine your inclinations to either sex; thus you may find enjoyment from both kinds without either of the two becoming inimical to you. … During the summer let your desires incline toward youths, and during the winter toward women.â€
• Fucking shiplap. I’m so sick of shiplap.