'What We Do in the Shadows' Season 2 Episode 3 sees a group of vampire hunters court a conflicted Guillermo
Spoilers for ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ Season 2 Episode 3 ‘Brain Scrambles’
You would think that after a dozen episodes, a vampire mockumentary would cease to have fresh material or even half-funny jokes. But ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ Season 2 Episode 3 proves you woefully wrong.
‘Brain Scrambles’ begins with the vampire foursome of Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nandor (Kayvan Novak), and Colin (Mark Proksch) being invited to their neighbor’s place for a Superbowl watch-party. The former three, being really old, obviously don’t know what the Superbowl is and think they had been invited to a “Superb Owl” party. Right off the bat, this otherwise annoying wordplay makes for a terrific joke in the context of ignorant immortals.
A lot of things happen in this surprisingly busy episode. Nadja discovers the old lady in the house used to be her friend when she (the old lady) was a child. Nandor and Laszlo suspect their host of realizing they were vampires and double hypnotize him. The effect is overkill and the host, much like Gilderoy Lockhart from the ‘Harry Potter’ series, forgets almost everything; not just that they were vampires. And Colin, being an energy vampire, bores the other guests with information on TV screen settings and Superbowl trivia to the point where they blackout and urinate in their pants.
But the real star of the episode is Nandor’s familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillén). At the end of season 1, Guillermo discovers that he’s the descendant of the great vampire hunter Van Helsing. In the first episode of season 2, we even saw that his ancestry was definitely visible because he had managed to kill more than a dozen vampires sent by the council to kill Nandor.
Struggling with the two notions -- wanting to be granted immortality by Nandor, by being servile to him, and having the skills genetically embedded in him to finish Nandor and the others, should he choose that -- Guillermo, in this episode decides to concentrate on looking for fresh virgins for his masters. Finding virgins is hard business. He lists his usual targets of joggers and incels, before stumbling upon a group of mosquito collectors. Boy, was he in for a surprise.
The mosquito collection was just a front for the group. They were vampire hunters (who had never really encountered vampires before), and they wanted Guillermo to be their newest member. Imagine that! This motley crew features two superb cameos. One is Craig Robinson of 'The Office' and 'Brooklyn Nine-Nine' fame. The other is Abigail Savage from 'Orange Is the New Black'. The vampire hunters further conflict an already dilemma-ridden Guillermo. On the one hand, this is his destiny. On the other, he really is just a confused chap.
He also realizes, while talking to them, that what he does as a familiar to Nandor has a human cost, further scrambling his brain. He leaves the meeting in a hurry, unsure of whether or not he would return the next Wednesday. But whether Guillermo returns to the group or not, a new episode of ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ Season 2 will return to FX next Wednesday at 10 pm ET/PT.
