What We Do in the Shadows Finale Features A Long-Awaited Character Return

This article contains spoilers for What We Do in the Shadows season 6 episode 11.

The best comedy series finales often operate as “greatest hits” compilations of the many beloved episodes that came before them. With the last episode of its sixth and final season, What We Do in the Shadows gets the memo.

The finale, helpfully titled “The Finale,” harkens back to what made this FX vampire mockumentary great for so many years. The plot picks up with the Staten Island vampires discovering that the documentary crew filming them for more than half a decade is abruptly calling it quits, declaring that they have enough footage to work with. While the mortal Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) is devastated by the prospect of this chapter in his life coming to a close; Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), Laszlo (Matt Berry), The Guide (Kristen Schaal), and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) all respond with a shrug.

Nigh-immortal vampires are used to things coming to an end in a way that human beings just can’t wrap their heads around. In an attempt to explain this to Guillermo, Nadja points out that this isn’t even the gang’s first time being filmed for a documentary. They then sit down to watch some footage from The Maysles Brothers 1958 unreleased documentary “Vampires.” There we see that Nandor and company have been having virtually the exact same conversations with one another for decades (mostly about considerate corpse disposal in the household). We also see that Nandor has been unwittingly blowing the vamps’ cover for just as long, granting an interview to a local paper that reveals himself to be ageless.

As the group panics and plans their first of many slapstick escape attempts, viewers are blessed with the most anticipated character return in What We Do in the Shadows history, if not television history.

“Who the fuck are you and how the fuck did you get in here?” Nadja yells at a mysterious chap who appears in their living room shortly after Laszlo exited it.

“What a pleasure to meet you, young lady. My name’s Daytona. Jackie Daytona. And I hail from Tucson. Tucson, Arizoña,” the dandy replies.

Ladies, gentlemen, and vampires: he’s back…albeit 66 years in the past. You will undoubtedly recall Jackie Daytona’s debut in the season 2 episode “On the Run,” in which Laszlo flees his home and then the show unrelatedly picks up with a separate character named Jackie Daytona, a normal human bartender in Tucson, Arizoña. You may even mistakenly remember that Laszlo was Jackie Daytona in disguise. But that’s simply impossible: Jackie Daytona has a toothpick in his mouth and Laszlo does not.

This brief glimpse from the 1958 “Vampires” documentary isn’t the only Jackie Daytona appearance in the episode either. As Guillermo expresses concern that their show’s ending won’t be satisfying, Nadja turns towards the cameras and hypnotizes us, the viewers, into believing we’re watching the “most perfect ending you could possibly imagine.” It turns out that the most perfect ending we could possibly imagine is simply the ending of 1995 crime thriller The Usual Suspects. After meeting with an enigmatic witness named Colin Robinson, Detective The Guide glances at her police corkboard and realizes that the entirety of the story he just told her was improvised by the evidence pinned to it including a Jackson Daytona nameplate.

While viewers get their perfect ending, Guillermo gets an imperfect but still satisfying conclusion. Nandor can’t resolve Guillermo’s fear of the unknown but he can invite him into his coffin for the first time…that now doubles as an elevator down into a subterranean crime-fighting cave with a supercomputer.

Godspeed, The Phantom Menace and Cowboy Kid. And godspeed, What We Do in the Shadows. Please share your thoughts on the finale in the comments, where you’ll undoubtedly be joined by Colin Robinson. He did say we can check him out in the TV discussion threads on certain websites, including some Geek thing.

All episodes of What We Do in the Shadows are available to stream on Hulu.

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