The Ladder

My first time playing through the novel escape room by Hatch Escapes

Last night, we played through The Ladder by Hatch Escapes in Los Angeles. I’ve been vaguely aware of it since we moved to LA, but hadn’t tried any of the Hatch experiences yet. After last night, I can understand exactly why there’s been so much positive buzz around them.

Just to establish where I’m coming from: I’d rank myself as maybe “intermediate” with escape rooms. Definitely not an expert, but I have played through at least a dozen. And immersive entertainment has been kind of like a mechanical bull throughout my career; every so often I’ll be able to get ahold of a contract or an interesting project before it bucks me off and I’m back out of the loop. So I’m tangentially aware of the state of the art, but undeniably behind on seeing the latest and greatest.

By the way, I’m going to keep calling The Ladder an “escape room” even though it’s technically not. One of the things I like about it is that it isn’t as precious about its artistry or innovation like immersive entertainment can sometimes be, insisting that you use the correct terminology for the experience or you’re doing it a disservice. Here, you’re doing 90% of the same type of stuff you’d do in traditional escape rooms: you’re in a group of 4-10, together in the same space, solving thematic puzzles, but your goal is never actually to escape from a room. Instead, it’s tracing a career over the course of several decades, with a light-hearted story — which is genuinely funny and clever throughout — about corporate espionage and back-stabbing.

Until last night, Palace Games in San Francisco were the most technologically advanced escape rooms I’d gone through. The Ladder is extremely ambitious with its technology. I don’t recall any single effect being as dramatic as some of the entire-room transformations as in Palace Games’s best, but The Ladder spreads clever use of tech through every part of the experience. I was especially impressed that Matthew McClain, credited as the “Creative Technologist” for the experience, was selling copies of his book Arduino for Artists in the lobby, encouraging more people to learn how to make creative installations.

At several junction points in the game, the group has to make a choice from a menu, and each one had an ingenious interface that perfectly fit the theme of the room. Even if the rest of the experience had been a disappointment, I was so impressed with the initial room’s selection interface that I still would’ve considered the whole thing a success.

The most unique thing about The Ladder, at least compared to all of the similar experiences that I’ve tried before, is that it’s replayable. And not just in the sense that you can repeat it, but that you might be eager to go back as soon as possible and go through the experience again, so that you can improve your score. Probably the biggest problem I have with escape rooms is that they’re so prone to quarterbacking; one or two players can take over the experience, leaving the rest of the group with little to do.

The Ladder is designed around independent activities with a common theme. There is a main story-based puzzle that you’re working to figure out, but there are also multiple other puzzles or games in each room that you can complete just to improve your team’s score. Our team didn’t accomplish the main story goal, but I get the impression that we would’ve needed to complete the story and earn a sufficiently high score in order to get the best ending(s). And a recap sheet that you’re given at the end of the game reveals the fact that there are several different possible endings.

Our team had four people, which was the minimum number of players allowed in the experience, and frankly isn’t enough to do very well. I’d guess that the ideal number is around 6. The company sets the upper limit at 10 players, but I can’t imagine that many people crammed into the small rooms that make up most of the experience.

I’m being deliberately vague to spoil as little as possible, but if it’s not clear, I highly recommend The Ladder to anybody in southern California that has an interest not just in escape rooms, but theme parks or interactive entertainment in general. It’s really funny, and it’s designed to respect your time and let you have fun. I can’t wait to try Hatch’s other experiences, and especially to see what they do next.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: We Are Belonging

Two tunes from 1984 that felt like anthems

I don’t always understand why my brain makes certain connections, but two of my favorite “one-off” songs from the mid-80s were “Birds Fly (Whisper to a Scream)” by Icicle Works, and “We Belong” by Pat Benatar.

“One-off” meaning they’re not one-hit wonders (I am intimately familiar with “Love Is a Battlefield” and its video, thank you very much), but that I’m not that crazy about the rest of the artists’ songs but would still rank these among my favorites.

There are lot of other jangly guitar and/or percussion-heavy songs that might pair better with “Whisper to a Scream,” but my mind keeps going back to Pat Benatar’s anthem. Which is part of the connection; they both feel like anthems. They’re also both from 1984, and their videos were both filmed on white sound stages where the directors insisted the band play despite hostile if not outright dangerous working conditions.

How in THE HELL are we supposed to make music to inspire the youth of today when we’re BURIED under FLYING LEAVES or GAUZY WHITE FABRIC?

One Thing I Like About Hundreds of Beavers

The live-action cartoon is exactly the right kind of so-lowbrow-it’s-clever, especially when it’s acknowledging its own artifice

I only intended to watch a couple minutes of Hundreds of Beavers last night, just long enough to verify that it was included with Amazon Prime video, but I was caught up in it pretty quickly, and I ended up watching the whole thing.

It was released in 2022, and I’ve been hearing people raving about it for the past two years. And it seems very much like something that would’ve blown my mind had I seen it without knowing anything about it. After the opening song, it’s filmed like a silent movie, in grainy monochrome, with a handful of actors and a ton of people in animal suits acting out all the parts of a hyper-violent, adult-oriented Looney Tunes cartoon.

It’s extremely clever, alternating between absurd slapstick, lowbrow humor, and ingenious gags with a rhythm that keeps you engaged far longer than you might expect. (Hence my “accidentally” watching the whole thing!) There were more laugh-out-loud moments than just about anything I’ve seen recently. One of my favorite gags was our protagonist Jean Kayak unsuccessfully using lady rabbit snowmen posed removing their bras, in an attempt to attract a couple of rabbits that turn out to be gay. Another had Kayak joining an experienced trapper with a team of sled dogs; when they camped every night, the humans would lie by the fire while the dogs would sit around a table and play poker. The dogs were picked off one by one, until the only survivor would stand at the table and play solitaire.

But possibly because I went into the movie knowing what to expect, I ended up liking it but not entirely loving it. I love that the filmmakers approached it as a real work of art, and they committed to making something that’s completely unlike anything else being made today. And I love that it felt as if they’d used everything available to get the look exactly right — cartoon drawings, video effects, puppets, overlays, some computer-generated imagery, whatever it takes. The end result is unique and completely true to itself, and also pretty damn corny.

One thing I like a lot is that as the movie progresses, it starts to embrace the absurdity of stuff that it’s spent the last hour asking you to accept as if it weren’t absurd. Throughout the movie, most of the animals are played by humans in animal suits, and as far as the movie’s concerned, they’re animals. Even though they’re walking around on two legs and doing human type stuff. When Jean Kayak manages to kill a raccoon and take it to the furrier, we see the autopsy, which includes pulling out lots of felt intestines and a heart-shaped pillow.

Later, when we meet a Native American trapper, we see that his horse is two men in an even cheaper horse suit, with the face of one of the men clearly visible underneath the misshapen head. A while after that, we see the Native American try to mount his horse, which clearly involves clumsily climbing onto a man’s back and trying to hold on.

By the end of the movie, Jean Kayak is fighting dozens of beavers, and he’s literally knocking the stuffing out of each one. A head will fly off, sending bits of padding and styrofoam peanuts flying everywhere. During one brawl, he picks up the body of one of the beavers and spins it around the room, and it’s clearly just his twirling around an empty suit. Then the beavers retaliate by throwing him into a wall, and it’s clearly an empty human suit.

There’s a rigid set of symbols in the movie, one that it establishes over time. When a character does this, that happens. When we see this shape, we know it means that. It builds up a language of gags over time, as (for instance) we learn what bait attracts which animal, which animals prey on which other ones, etc. So it’s neat that towards the end of the movie, it starts to deconstruct the language it’s been constructing this whole time. The symbols start to fold in on themselves. This guy in a beaver suit represents a beaver, and he is a beaver, except now he’s also a guy in a beaver suit. The Treachery of Furries, maybe?

I don’t think any of that was in the mindset of the filmmakers, or at least I hope it wasn’t. I just think that it’s an interesting side effect that happens when you so completely commit to the bit. From watching Hundreds of Beavers, I learned that the filmmakers have an earlier movie called Lake Michigan Monster that’s also on Prime Video. From the trailer, it seems to be almost as committed to being visually distinctive, and every bit as committed to being unapologetically silly.

Literacy 2025: Book 2: Curse of the Stag’s Eye

Glenn Quigley’s gay bear romance set in a possibly-haunted Welsh lighthouse

Book
Curse of the Stag’s Eye by Glenn Quigley

Synopsis
Skeptic Gaz joins a ghost-hunting tour of a historic Welsh lighthouse, along with an eager young couple and the tour’s handsome host Rhys. Over the course of an evening, they have a series of strange encounters which reveal more of the tragic history of the lighthouse. And as Gaz finds himself growing more attracted to Rhys, he worries how the charming true believer will react once he learns the real reason Gaz signed up for the tour.

Notes
Disclaimer that I’m an online acquaintance of the author, so I was predisposed to like this book, and I did. But then, it’s a gay bear ghost story, so I would’ve been predisposed to like it regardless! I hardly ever read gay stories, so this was a novelty. And I get the appeal of fantasy romances now, since it’s a hell of a lot of fun reading a story about the supernatural interrupted with first-hand accounts of two bear guys pointing out all of the physical features they found attractive. The ghost story was pretty creepy as well, which made for great bedtime reading.

This book is part of a series called Haunted Hearts, “an Own-Voices Paranormal Romance Series about love and the things that go boo in the night.” I love the idea of gay romance ghost stories enough that I’m tempted to try the others, although it’ll be difficult to make one more suited to me than one about nerdy ghost-hunting bears.

Verdict
A lot of fun! A romantic ghost story that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but isn’t too shallow, either.

Literacy 2025: Book 1: Hi Honey, I’m Homo

Matt Baume’s collection of essays about queer representation in American TV sitcoms

Book
Hi Honey, I’m Homo: Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture by Matt Baume

Synopsis
A collection of essays about American television sitcoms, from Bewitched to Modern Family, that were notable for their inclusion (or their conspicuous lack of inclusion) of queer representation.

Notes
Similar to Baume’s YouTube videos, each chapter takes a single sitcom and explains how its LGBT characters were significant in the history of representation on American television, putting them in context of what was going on in politics at the time, and giving details about the making of these series to explain the motivation behind the representation. And much like his videos, I find it comforting on some level to be reminded that resistance to LGBT equality is nothing new, that most of us have dealt with it all our lives, that we’ve had victories in the past, and we’ll have them again.

A side effect of the organization is that some of the same key events in the gay rights movement — like the Stonewall riots, or the lawsuits for marriage equality in Hawaii — are mentioned over and over again, as if each chapter were its own self-contained book.

Another side effect of the book’s focus is that it gives the impression that the options on American TV were gradually improving representation, or nothing at all. The series that are chosen for focus are, understandably, the ones who struggled for a benign or positive depiction of gay characters. As I was growing up, though, most of these series were considered too “adult” for me to watch, so I got whatever was left. A few of these are mentioned in the book — Three’s Company, WKRP in Cincinnati, and a gay panic episode of Cheers — and they made a clear impression on me that being gay was something weird and contemptible. On WKRP, simply a misunderstanding about being queer was bad enough to make Les Nesman consider suicide!

Verdict
In addition to the great title, this is a really solid survey of a segment of American TV history, praising the artists who went out of their way to improve the image of LGBT people in the media. It makes a strong argument about the value of representation, and at least I believe it’s a comforting reminder that equality tends to win out as long as people stand up for it.

One Thing I Love About Companion

Companion is so confident and clever that it feels like a fresh and insightful take on some fairly well-worn ideas. Lots of spoilers in this post.

I thought Companion was excellent, and it benefits from knowing as little as possible about it before going in. I’d classify it as a “comedy thriller.” It’s been labeled as a “horror comedy,” but that seems like overkill to me although it is quite violent. If that feels like it’d be up your alley, I strongly recommend seeing it based on that alone.

It doesn’t depend on its reveals, but it is improved by them, and even the trailer feels as if it gives away a bit too much. The magic of it is that it all still works even if you go in knowing the premise. And it still manages to pile on new surprises and new complications, even when they feel obvious in retrospect. Whether you’re getting the shock of the new, or you’re feeling rewarded for being able to pick up on the clues, it all works.

The cast is filled with some of the most appealing actors working today, and every single performance is flawless. The core cast — Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage, Harvey Guillén, and Megan Suri — each gets at least one moment where they transcend their role and make it feel “real.” And there’s a moment with Jack Quaid’s character in particular that I’m calling out as the One Thing I Love. (Last warning: spoilers after this point).

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Del Coronado

A quick post of praise for Walt Disney World’s most underrated hotel, Coronado Springs

We traveled to Georgia over the Christmas break to visit family, and we decided to tack on a few days at Walt Disney World in Florida over the week between Christmas and New Year’s. It was kind of a last-minute trip, prompted by changes in travel plans and by the potential of getting employee discounts on the hotels and parks.

The whole period at the end of December is among the busiest — if not the busiest — times of year for Disney World, and bluntly, I wouldn’t have even considered it if not for the employee main entrance pass. Even as it was, we were blocked out of the Magic Kingdom for the entire trip, and the waits were so long for everything that we went on barely any of the attractions.

On the plus side, though, that did a lot to help us enforce our pledge to make this a relaxing vacation instead of an exhausting one. Being able to head to the parks after sleeping in, and having no set agenda when we got there, meant that we could mostly just enjoy them as parks instead of trying to cram for maximum magic per second ratio. And a big part of what prompted the side trip was that gut punch of an election, after which we both just wanted to escape the real world for a little bit and just enjoy staying at a nice hotel.

Our resort choices at the time I booked (late November) were down to the Port Orleans Riverside and the Coronado Springs resort. I’ve stayed at Riverside before, and I like it fine. Like most of the moderate resorts at WDW, it feels to me like a nice motel. I don’t remember anything particularly remarkable about the Riverside apart from having boat access to Disney Springs, which was convenient.

I’d never stayed at the Coronado Springs before, especially after hearing people from Imagineering complain about being booked there while working on site. The two most common complaints I heard about this one: It was a convention center first and foremost, so the Disney touches were kept at a minimum. And its buildings are so spread out around a huge property that it required a long walk or bus ride to get from your room to any of the facilities.

In 2019, they opened a huge expansion to the resort centered around the Gran Destino Tower. This is a beautiful building inspired by Spanish architecture, named and lightly themed after Destino, the short film collaboration between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney. It’s remarkable how much it makes the resort feel like a “deluxe” resort still charging “moderate” room rates.

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One Thing I Like About Skeleton Crew

How the “least essential” Star Wars series helped remind us why Star Wars is essential

There were a few moments in Skeleton Crew where it seemed like Jude Law was the only human actor in a Muppet movie. I don’t mean that to suggest he was somehow “above” the material, or that he was any better than the other performances, because all the performances were generally great.

Instead, I’m talking about how the best performances by humans in Muppet movies will have them so deeply and completely committed to the part that the uncanny valley gets flipped upside down. The Muppets become real, and you get occasional flashes of eerie hyper-reality from the human. With Skeleton Crew, the end result is a character who’s simultaneously in the middle of a grand adventure and unhappy with the character he’s playing in the adventure.

I don’t believe that Skeleton Crew needs another layer of nuance or interpretation on top of everything else, because it’s a solid, extremely well-made, and most importantly, imaginative piece of Star Wars storytelling. This is a reminder of the early days of Star Wars, when it seemed like every new frame in the movie would show you something you’d never seen before.

When I heard the concept “The Goonies but in Star Wars,” I imagined that it’d be fun and charming, but so slight and derivative that it’d end up being completely forgettable. And the series isn’t at all subtle about its references, but it doesn’t drown underneath them, either: they’re evocative, but the series almost always uses them as a jumping-off point to do something else.

Even the twist that forms the basic premise is clever: the kids come from the mysterious treasure planet! So the journey that would be the basis of another type of adventure story is just a story of them trying to return home. And the orderly suburban homes that were supposed to represent the absolute epitome of dull normality in movies like ET are so out of place in Star Wars that they seem eerie, alien, and somehow threatening.

On the whole, it feels like a series made by people who had a ton of ideas, more than something made to fill a slot in a production schedule. More often than not, stuff happens because somebody wanted it to happen. Not because nobody could think of a stronger idea.

Jude Law is such a natural in Star Wars that it’s kind of surprising he hasn’t already been in it. Over the last two episodes of the series, his character does a heel turn, and it seemed odd to me, like they’d mis-interpreted the tone of the series or his character or something. He kills a defenseless pirate, who deserved it, but it still seemed against the rules. And from that point on, he’s strangely inert: no longer the lovable scoundrel, but not an intensely threatening bad guy, either. He’s cruel but pointedly not deadly, so he’s more or less reduced to standing around making threats and fending off impotent attacks from seemingly every other cast member.

His character ends up being the most off-brand possible thing for a roguish space pirate: he doesn’t seem to be having fun at all. And while the action beats of the last episode didn’t really work for me, the thematic beats absolutely did. They picked up the series’s ongoing theme of good guys and bad guys and what constitutes being a hero. They showed how the idea had been seeded in every other episode, with a character showing the kids kindness and helping them along their way. A dark, dangerous galaxy with points of light shining out everywhere.

It seems to be the moment when Jod comes to terms with the fact that he’s not a hero. His story about surviving after Order 66 and seeing the only person who showed him kindness be murdered by the Empire: it certainly seems like a true story, but it also sounds like the justification he’s used for choosing the path he did. I got the sense that this adventure reminded him that at one point, he’d wanted to be the good guy, but he’d abandoned it. To me, it added a layer of resonance to an already-solid adventure story.

One of the things that The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett really drove home was how ruthless the Star Wars universe is. It’s a setting for adventure stories, not for comfortable living. (And in the rare times when it does show people living comfortably, they’re either selfish and awful, or they’re sheltered away and living in fear). I liked that the focus in Skeleton Crew was turned away from larger-than-life heroes or villains, and towards the beauty of lots of individual people helping each other in a dangerous universe.

One Thing I Like About Alien: Romulus

The best sequence in the movie also serves as an illustration of how Alien movies are best when they keep the lore and world-building in service of the cinematic moments. (Spoilers for Romulus and potentially the entire Alien franchise).

When Alien: Romulus first came out, the buzz around it was so good that I was sure I was going to have to do the rarest of rare things in 2024: go see a movie in a theater. But after the initial wave of good vibes, the mood on the internet seemed to sour, with more and more people complaining that the movie was too derivative of Alien and Aliens without significantly improving on the formula.

I finally watched it last night (it’s streaming on Hulu via Disney+), and I thought it was excellent. I can’t say that I loved it, though. There were lots of baffling edits and confusing scenes — I still don’t know exactly how Bjorn or Tyler died, for instance, and it often cut to an odd angle or a weird shot at exactly the wrong moment. Plus there were some clunky moments late in the movie as things started to go off the rails. By the time they hit the inevitable “get away from her, you bitch!” it felt that they’d already exceeded their quota. For whatever reason, the clunky moment I found the most jarring was that after a scene of efficient action movie exposition, Rain stares off into the distance and quietly says to herself, “Andy? Are you there?”

But I disagree with the criticism that it’s too derivative of the other movies. I don’t disagree that it’s derivative; it absolutely is. It feels like the first half is a 2024 take on Alien: it sets up a bleak horror movie inspired by 1970s “hard” science fiction, centered around a bunch of miserable working class people sacrificed to terrible monsters by a terrible corporation. The second half feels like an attempt to plus up the Aliens template, a relentlessly escalating action movie with multiple simultaneous countdowns to doom. In the middle is an exposition-heavy bridge filled with (half-baked) ideas from Prometheus. But I don’t see this as a bad thing. To put it in the most obnoxious way possible: it’s not a bug hunt, it’s a feature hunt.

That’s because Alien: Romulus feels like it’s made by people who understand exactly what makes an Alien movie work, and even more importantly, what doesn’t. This might piss off the hard-core fans of the franchise, but I think the trick is understanding that the Alien universe just ain’t all that deep.

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Literacy 2024: Book 7: The Bullet That Missed

Book
The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman

Series
Book 3 in the Thursday Murder Club series

Synopsis
The gang of retiree cold-case investigators is asked by a local news caster to investigate the death 16 years ago of his good friend, a woman who worked at the station. Meanwhile, an elusive money-laundering tech wizard known only as The Viking has threatened to kill one of the club unless they help him take out a rival.

Pros

  • Charming as ever
  • The book is much better at managing the tone, pulling back right at the point things are about to become too twee or silly
  • The poignant moments baked into the premise still have impact after three books, instead of feeling like iterations on the same idea
  • Does a remarkably good job of maintaining an ever-growing cast of characters, without losing any of them for too long

Cons

  • The ever-growing cast of characters means that the mystery itself has less weight
  • The resolution of the storyline with the Viking was too cutesy for me
  • The relationship at the center of the mystery never felt meaningful; we were told how much the victim meant to this character, but she never felt like a real person

Verdict
It’s impressive that even as these books turn into more of a “catch up and gossip with friends” running series instead of solid mystery stories, they’re getting better at being more grounded and less twee. It’s still often silly to the point of being absurd, but they’re charming in exactly the way you want a cozy murder mystery to be.

Note
Only 7 books read in 2024, which is low even by my standards. I think I’m actually going to skip the Goodreads challenge this year (instead of saying I’m going to skip it and then doing it anyway), since having a target number makes it feel more like a chore than a hobby.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Dance Like Globey’s Watching

Two tunes to have yourself a queery little Christmas

This year we watched the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special, which should be one of everybody’s Christmas traditions. The thing I was most struck with this year is how timeless it seems. I tend to think of it as a time capsule of peak 1990s television, even though it was released in 1988.

I also tend to think of it as this bizarre little one-off gag, making fun of traditional Christmas specials. My 80s brain said that it was a cute joke that they have Frankie and Annette in the cast, and that the locals like Chairy and Conky are given top billing over Oprah and Cher.

But now I can recognize just how much love they put it into it, as if they fully intended for it to still be watched and beloved over 30 years later. Part of that is that the camp — even the playhouse annex being built by buff, shirtless construction workers using fruitcake — isn’t just a sly wink, sneaking gay stuff into a mainstream TV holiday special, during the Reagan era, when the anti-gay “family values” culture war was still in effect. Instead, there’s a real sense of “this is stuff that we love, and eventually, the rest of you will catch on.”

How else do you explain Grace Jones’s fantastic performance of Little Drummer Boy? It capitalized on Jones’s persona as way too outre for the mainstream, made fun of that (“Sorry, Grace, back in the box!”), and then gave it the space to be a show-stopping highlight.

Not to mention defiance of the attempts to gaslight the entire country into believing that it’s always been a Christian Nation of Straight English-Speaking White People, by having Charro perform Feliz Navidad and bringing in Miss Rene for “the Hannukah portion of the show.” (Along with Jewish dinosaurs playing with a dreidel).

The part of the show that I’ve had “a changing relationship with” over the years: kd lang’s wonderful over-the-top version of “Jingle Bell Rock.” (Still the best version of the song ever recorded, IMO).

Back when I first saw the special, I thought it was awkward and tone deaf. Surly teenage me said, “Yeah, kd, we all get that the show is campy, but it’s supposed to be cool as well. You’re a little too on-the-nose.” It was corny, or had I had the word back then, cringe.

Now, of course, I can recognize what an uptight little bastard teenage me was, bundling everything up tighter and tighter for fear of looking uncool. In my defense, it was the 1980s. (And I was still very very much in the closet). Now of course, I can recognize it as someone who was defiantly and confidently asserting her own style, just as much as Grace Jones was, but who’d just recently burst into the peak of her mainstream popularity.

In other words: she understood the assignment exactly, and she delivered a performance that she knew people would still be watching over thirty years later. Or if not, then at least she’d give it everything she could, all while having fun with it.

So I’m wishing everybody Happy Holidays and a very Merry Christmas, and my wish is that we can all live our lives with the unchecked, fearless enthusiasm and joy of kd lang in the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special.

A Sense of Like a Dozen Endings

What We Do In The Shadows had a satisfying end to the series, and then a whole bunch more. Spoilers for the Finale and final season.

What We Do In The Shadows will most likely be one of my top 10 television series of all time. It was never “appointment viewing.” I’m sure there’s a lot that I’ve forgotten, and I probably couldn’t give details of entire seasons, much less individual episodes. But overall, it was relentlessly1Because it does not relent clever, surprising, hilarious, goofy, and as much as I hate to use FX marketing language: fearless.

One of the things that I most respect about the series is that the comedy and the tone were all over the place, but it always felt true to itself. It could be almost unforgivably corny, shockingly daring, and astonishingly clever all within the same episode, and sometimes within the same scene. One episode would feel like a traditional sitcom bottle episode, and the next would have an over-the-top bit of gruesome violence as a punchline, and the next would be a visual effects showcase that seemed far beyond the budget of a 30-minute comedy series.

As an example of how varied its comedy was: the gags that seemed to take hold with viewers the most, like “creepy paper,” Jackie Daytona, or the cursed witch’s hat, were rarely my favorite, but were usually alongside the funniest moments of any television series I’ve seen. I don’t know what the production of the series was actually like, but it sure seems like they would ignore the concept of a “show bible” or a consistent tone or style, instead choosing that anything was fair game as long as it’s funny.

Leading up to the finale, there was an episode inspired by The Warriors where the action was instigated by a character having his head burst like a tick and then ripped off at the neck; and then an unbearably awkward office party at a supremely shitty venture capital2Or is it something to do with lamps? firm, which somehow made me even more uncomfortable. The series will have some of the corniest jokes you can see coming from a mile away, followed up by someone vomiting a torrent of blood or having their entrails spill out onto the floor. And it rarely feels too over the top; always exactly the right amount of excess.

That anything-goes mentality seems to have gone into the finale as well, where they decided to just try every possible ending they could think of. I only just found out that there are even a couple more I hadn’t known about — if you weren’t quite satisfied with the Newhart finale, you can go to the extra features to have Nadja hypnotize you two more times, with two more heavily-referential endings.

The series could have ended with the penultimate episode. It didn’t give closure to everyone’s story, but it was a very sweet and fitting ending to Nandor and Guillermo’s. Gizmo finally realized he was never going to fit into the human world, and Nandor finally started to treat him as an equal partner, and he proposed a new life where they fight injustice.

But it’s probably more fitting that the end of the series is the end of the documentary. It was full of meta-commentary on the series as a whole, in particular calling out the criticism that the series could’ve ended after season five had wrapped up the story of Guillermo wanting to become a vampire. I did appreciate that they explicitly acknowledged that the vampires were just going to keep on living their weird, stupid, after-lives, doing basically the same things over and over again for centuries. But it often felt more like it was giving closure to the writers more than the audience, giving them a chance to say goodbye to the series after six years.

And I’d never blame them for that! But I do think that my favorite aspect of the finale was the documentary crew just stopping the characters mid-interview, saying that they had enough footage. It was so callous and disrespectful that it felt perfectly in tone with this series.

The other thing that’s perfectly in tone with this series is taking it to the line of what’s tolerable, and even past that line, but then knowing exactly when to pull back. They can be so mean, or so gross, or so nihilistic, or so selfish and inconsiderate, or so violent, or so stupid, that the characters seem irredeemable and the writing feels like an overhard attempt to be edgy. But then they’ll have a surprising moment of kindness or cleverness that makes any sentimentality feel earned.

They did exactly that with the end of the series, choosing to have it both ways. They got the tear-jerker where Guillermo says goodbye forever and turns out all the lights one last time… and then they got the adventure-nonsense ending, riding a high-speed coffin elevator down to Nandor’s hidden underground lair. The key wasn’t just the effects — which, again, seem like way overkill for a 30-minute comedy series — but the fact that Nandor and Guillermo got to sit in the coffin together, as adventure pals instead of master and servant.

Now that it’s over, I do have a favorite moment from the entire series. Not the funniest, but the one that sums up exactly what I think is wonderful about the tone of What We Do In The Shadows. It’s in season five, when the vampires’ neighbor Sean is staging a pride parade as he’s running for office. Guillermo has just recently come out, and he’s given a special place in the parade: sitting by himself in a lawn chair on a flatbed truck, holding a sparkler and a piece of poster board reading “GAY GUY.”

It’s a good gag on the surface, because the characters are paying lip service to inclusivity without genuinely getting it. The result was Guillermo going through all the stress and self-doubt of coming out, only to be tokenized and put on display.

(As a side note: I liked how the show treated homosexuality as being distinct from Nandor and Lazlo’s hypersexuality; the series has mentioned the two of them having sex with each other and other men and male vampires plenty of times, but it never describes it in terms of romantic attraction, or as a part of their identity).

What makes the pride parade my favorite moment, though, is what happens as the camera lingers on Guillermo. He initially seems humiliated and miserable, but as the parade goes on, you can see a smile start to take over his face. By the end of the episode, he’s waving the sparkler and bouncing along to the music. Finally happy with himself and proud of the label. In an episode that’s been all about callously and clumsily making a show of pride just to win inclusivity points, it makes a very sweet and even subtle point about how much it means to the participants to be able to be out and open and not afraid of looking ridiculous.

That kind of satire, mockery, or nihilism followed up with a bit of sentimentality or kindness is what elevates What We Do In The Shadows from an extremely funny series to a memorable and even important one. It asserts that you can be smart without being elitist, sentimental without being maudlin, goofy without being pointless, shocking without being shallow, and have a tone that’s all over the place, just as long as you’re funny enough.

  • 1
    Because it does not relent
  • 2
    Or is it something to do with lamps?