What We Do In The Shadows recap: Everybody nearly dies in a creepy, hilarious outing

Stakes can be a tricky thing for vampires—and not just the ones carved out of wood. What We Do In The Shadows has, over five seasons, mostly made a virtue out of its heroes’ basically unkillable natures, allowing the show to send Nandor, Nadja, and even vamp-murdering wunderkind Guillermo through all sorts of absurdly dangerous situations without having to worry about the peril undercutting the jokes. But what do you do when you want a bit of danger in your vampire sitcom mayhem?

The answer to that question looks very much like “Urgent Care,” a simultaneously hilarious and creepy half-hour of TV that runs our favorite vamps through two tightly delineated plotlines, each carrying a surprisingly serious threat of death. On the one hand, we have Guillermo, whose latest experiments into the nature of his very slow vampiric transformation are finally reaping dividends—and a shattered leg, after Nandor (still not in on the secret) interrupts his first tentative forays into flight. The resulting injury sends Gizmo into the arms of the vamps’ familiar medical infrastructure, producing some all-time dark moments for the series in the process.

On the other side of the episode, Colin Robinson is suffering from a uniquely energy-vampiric affliction: the universe apparently conspiring to make him so g-damn fascinating that he can’t actually drain anybody of their life energy through irritation or dullness. It’s a joke that never stops paying off, honestly, as Mark Proksch expresses ever-escalating annoyance at having one more intriguing detail to add on to every set of events. How’d he pick up that shiner? Well, “unfortunately, it’s fucking remarkable”: a frozen block of piss and shit fell out of an airplane, landed on a sports car, and sent the vehicle’s side mirror right into his kisser.

On almost any other show, a character delivering these kinds of lines would inevitably end up milking them for attention. But Proksch plays Colin’s frustration, and then desperation, totally sincerely here, to the point that, by the time Nandor is coaching him on what to say to royally piss off a convenience store attendant and buy himself a few hours of life, you genuinely feel for the guy. (Said efforts are stymied, of course, as the pair walk in on, and then inadvertently foil, an armed robbery through the power of Colin Robinson’s unstoppable interesting-ness.)

It all builds—after a brief detour into the back of a car driven by Mad Men star John Slattery, gamely playing himself as a man too wrapped up in his own thoughts to ever be drained—to Laszlo’s laboratory, where Nandor ends up serving as an energy donor for Colin. Who then repays the favor, after Laszlo’s whiskey dick machine sucks too much from the poor guy, forcing Colin to give back by revealing that he used to be a man named ASS who used to have sex with Davey Crockett. Such are the building blocks from which heartwarming moments on this series built.

Meanwhile, over the in A-plot: Nadja loads a busted Guillermo into a shopping cart and wheels him into a veterinarian’s office—which turns out to be a front for Familiar Urgent Care, which is actually even more horrific than that sounds. Shot and lit like a horror film, and presided over by a doctor (Wayne Federman) whose advice for any and all familiar ailments is “just put them down,” we see Guillermo briskly sedated and dragged off by cage-headed assistants. Natasia Demetriou is great throughout this whole section, blithely indifferent to the horror of it all—until the doctor reports that there’s something weird going on with Guillermo’s blood, at which point Nadja decides it’d be best for everyone to break him out. (She’s right for the wrong reasons, assuming the issue is the Van Helsing blood.)

The subsequent sequence is the highlight of the episode, as we follow Nadja through multiple grisly scenes in the hospital’s back rooms—including a brief, funny reminder that, yes, Kristen Schaal is main-cast now on this show, now that you mention it—eventually finding a very drugged-up Guillermo strapped to a table. (He won’t stop lovingly describing the vamps as different flavors of “bitch,” which gets a very silly payoff a few minutes later with an Aliens reference.) The doctor-assisted reveal that Guillermo is a vampire now provokes outrage, and, more importantly, a bona fide Nadja fight scene, as she and Guillermo use their vampiric abilities to fend off the doctor, who’s worried that letting an “abomination” like Gizmo out on the streets will lose him his license.

Directed by series vet Yana Gorskaya (who also handled last season’s fight-heavy “The Night Market,” among many other episodes), the end result looks both convincing and nasty. And there’s something almost a little sweet about Nadja putting herself on the line to save Guillermo—even if it’s only so Nandor can have the privilege of killing him somewhere down the line for his “betrayal.”

The great thing about “Urgent Care,” honestly, is that there’s just no fat on the damn thing: The Colin Robinson plotline moves from joke to joke swiftly, while the Guillermo story provides yet another new insight into how hideously dark the vampire-familiar relationship can be. All that and we get the answer to the question on all our minds: “What does a frog injected with Guillermo’s half-vampire blood look and sound like?” The world was demanding to know!

Stray observations

• First and most importantly! Please head over and check out our interview with episode director Yana Gorskaya about her amazing run on this season—including, yes, the mechanics of that sex scene from “Pride Parade.”
• Laszlo is mostly sidelined tonight, but the brief bits we get from him are great—his genuine encouragement of Guillermo is even kind of heartwarming, in a Laszlo sort of way: “Ipso factum, shithead… So can you.”
• To a point, anyway: “What happened to dingus’ foot?” “Who gives a fuck? Tell us what happened to your blackened eye!”
• Colin almost gets a drain off when he reveals that his time in Vietnam was just a biking tour—but he can’t help adding in the moment he saw a dead farmer with an ox’s asshole wrapped around his neck.
• Nadja, proudly, after Laszlo deflects her inquiries into the Guillermo-frogs with a bit of innuendo: “It’s not just a frog… it’s the whole swamp!”
• Demetriou gets to bust out her Matt Berry impression for a moment, mocking Laszlo’s love of science—always a delight.
• Nandor, to the crowd watching after John Slattery runs over Colin’s foot: “Peasants, disperse! Begone!”
• Slattery is low-key very funny as the worst possible victim for Colin to try to drain; for half a second, you suspect he might have some ulterior motive, but no: He just really likes talking about accents.
• Nadja briefly chats with one of the other vamps in the waiting room, commiserating over sending their familiar over the “rainbow bridge.” They confess to taking some comfort imagining her “Having spaghetti, or whatever it is they dream of doing.”
• Harvey Guillén has a lot of fun playing drugged; his little “Hey giiirl” when Nadja busts in is very cute.
• Now that I think of it, Nadja and Guillermo were a great team-up back in last season’s “Pine Barrens,” too; unlike Nandor and Laszlo, she’s just non-delusional enough to occasionally have to engage him on his level.
• Is there an actor on this planet better equipped to declare “Quick, to the laboratory!” than Matt Berry?
• Nandor, after catching one of the Guillermo-frogs and believing he knows what’s going on: “This is precisely what happens when a little birdie sneaks into this house, fucks a mouse, they have a child that grows up that then fucks a frog that looks like you!” (To be fair, he does, in Colin’s words, “have the IQ of a Russian toilet.”)