What We Do In The Shadows returns to our small screens with a double episode premiere and the familiar dark humour we all love and miss.
True to the documentary style of the show, we start with a quick update on how our favourites’ non-lives are doing. Though their everyday routines are now different (following the developments from the last episodes of the first series), they are also unsurprisingly true to each of the unique characters.
Nandor has enjoyed a relatively quiet summer, as him turning into a cloud of vapours that gets sucked into an air purifier. Meanwhile, Laszlo and Nadja are preoccupied with finding a new familiar, but unfortunately everyone they choose dies in unexplained circumstances.
Guillermo has found himself becoming a vampire killer, as more and more vampires target their house. However, he cannot reveal himself as a vampire hunter, so the additional secret leads to more tension between him and his master in the typical dramatically humorous way. Wonder if or when he will finally snap!
The series continues expanding on its mythology, introducing a plethora of fantastic creatures having to deal with the modern world – from overly friendly zombies wanting a high-five to horny ghosts and necromancers who run sweatshops.
Laszlo and Nadja’s search leads them to Topher, who is a perfect narrative foil to Guillermo, but doesn’t get to spend a lot of time in the house, as he is turned into a zombie and forced into the necromancer’s basement to make miniature license plate key chains alongside other zombies.
The show continues to be rife with the well-loved cemetery humour, as well as the light dramatics of scenes that would normally constitute the culmination of a series, but are actually in the middle of the first episodes.
The second episode introduces ghosts to the house, as the vampires summon their spiritual equivalents and see if they can help them move on.
After Nadja comes across the ghost of her former lover Gregor (or Jeff), she performs a séance to bring back the vampires’ ghosts. While Laszlo has little problem giving a helping hand to his ghost, Nandor and Nadja face a little more trouble.
It has been so long for Nandor that he has forgot how to speak his native tongue, leading to a severe language barrier with his ghost. As they attempt to communicate and finally reunite with his pet horse, Nadja and her ghost hit it off straight away, so much so that she decides to stick around.
Nadja’s ghost finds a mortal vessel in a creepy vintage doll, which they have to hide from the rest of the vampires in the house. The development of that relationship, as well as Jeff/Gregor constantly being interrupted, builds up foreshadowing for something that will surely pay up in laughs and creepiness in later episodes.
Colin’s subplot which involves trying to get someone to say “what’s up dog?” is terribly late to the joke, which somehow makes it all the more hilarious. Just as he tries to the feed onto the embarrassment energy from his joke, he is also creating some in the viewers as they follow his unsuccessful attempts to do so.
With a strong start like this, What We Do In The Shadows continues to carve out a niche of its own, proving there is still not anything quite like it, and that it still has stories to tell that can stand on par with the now modern classic 2014 film of the same name.
