![]() She does all this to crush the wraiths’ attempt to form a union at Nadja’s, which pains me personally as a proud card-carrying member of the Writers Guild of America East. ![]() She trades that to some imps for a T-shirt that reads “If you can read this, the bitch fell off!,” which she then trades to the proprietor of a store that looks a lot like some stores I’ve been to in New Orleans that also sell small skulls and squeaky bones. Given her success in both politics and business, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Nadja excels at haggling, trading some tchotchke she found in Nandor’s room (it’s not the djinn’s lamp I went back and checked) for Swedish meatballs at the Valkyrie Ikea. She brags that “my ya-ya once traded just a little bit of her thigh meat for a whole bag of onions, so yeah, I think I know what I’m doing.” Like the actor who plays her, Nadja has roots in the land where the Mediterranean meets the Middle East, home to cultures that traditionally value the ability to, as Nadja puts it, “fuck the other guy before he fucks you” while out shopping. While the guys are busy punching out whatever unspoken tensions are prompting Nandor to ignore his vampire wife and Guillermo to ghost his human lover, Nadja’s busy doing girlboss shit - again, the exploitative kind, because undead monsters - at the night market. There’s a lot of talk about Nandor as a warrior and not a lot of action, so it’s a treat to see Kayvan Novak pick up a broadsword - not to mention Harvey Guillén, who hasn’t done this much fight choreography since the season-two finale. And with the cold shoulder Nandor has been giving his familiar in recent weeks - and the orc comments and the whole “fight to death for my amusement” thing - perhaps Nandor needed to be put in his place a little bit. This isn’t the first time Nandor and Guillermo have come to blows. (To be clear, this is just an observation, not a complaint: They are murderous bloodsuckers from beyond the grave, and sometimes the show reminds us of that fact.) The vampire fight club, where they pit familiars against one another before ripping their heads off for fun, has shades both of dog fighting (the prize is a bag of Kibbles ‘N Bits) and Bumfights, an especially callous series of videos from the early ’00s that should be returning any day now with the way things are going in this country. ![]() The vampires’ callousness is even more exaggerated this week than in “The Grand Opening,” showing them manipulating, mistreating, and neglecting others just because they feel like it. But it took Nandor literally trying to kill Guillermo to get there. (That was his excuse, anyway.) This week, a hint of the old-new Guillermo bubbled to the surface, and not a moment too soon I was starting to get disillusioned with the way the show was regressing and abandoning all the character development of previous seasons. Discovering his latent power as a vampire hunter changed everything for this once-downtrodden character - until the season-four premiere, when he accepted a demotion rather than let nü-Colin starve to death. But she has blossomed into a successful businesswoman and an influential player in vampire politics.īut it’s Guillermo who underwent the most dramatic transformation, from servile familiar to self-assured bodyguard. And Nadja … well, Nadja didn’t learn a goddamned thing. Colin made a friend for the first time in his long, boring life. Every one of them grew in some way: Nandor learned not to take people (familiars, specifically) for granted, and Laszlo to tolerate, and even appreciate, humans. Seasons two and three of What We Do in the Shadows smuggled a good amount of character development into its blood-drunk tales of vampire debauchery.
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