Recap / What We Do In The Shadows S2 E8 "Collaboration"

Laszlo discovers that his musical work has been copied by the mainstream. Meanwhile, an old familiar has returned to Nandor.

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Tropes

• Accidental Misnaming: Celeste appears to have picked up this trait after becoming a vampire, calling Guillermo "Elmo" when she first sees him.
• Acquired Situational Narcissism: Celeste gets hit with this hard as the only familiar we've ever seen actually "graduate" to becoming a vampire themselves, although the narcissism seems to be an unavoidable trait of being a vampire in general. Gets subverted, though, when it turns out that she was faking it the whole time and intentionally playing the role of an imperious vampire aristocrat to see how it felt.
• Actor Allusion: The Reveal of Laszlo's centuries-long musical career is a nod to Matt Berry being an accomplished songwriter in Real Life.
• Actually Not a Vampire: Celeste claims that she was turned for her loyalty and offers the same to the other familiars for a shorter servitude. In reality, she just wanted to pretend while her mistress was away.
• All Witches Have Cats: Celeste recruits a cat familiar named Sam.
• Bait-and-Switch: At the end of the episode, Nandor drops Benjy off at a gas station like he did years ago, making it seem like he wiped Benjy's memories and abandoned him again. But after Nandor leaves, Benjy turns into a bat and flies away, showing that Nandor followed up on his promise to turn him into a vampire after all.
• Been There, Shaped History: Laszlo wrote many popular songs such as "Come on, Eileen", "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" (which was originally called "Stroke, Stroke, Stroke Your Cock" and was much more bawdy), and "Kokomo".
• Benevolent Boss: Celeste tries to prove that a vampire can be one to their familiars, unlike the main trio. It doesn't last, though.
• Bread and Circuses: Celeste appeases her increasingly unruly familiars with hors d'oeuvres, interpretive dance parties, and an attempted orgy.
• Call-Back: To Nadja's karaoke singing in "Baron's Night Out".
• The Cat Came Back:
  • A familiar abandoned 40 years ago in a Delaware gas station returns to his master after recovering his lost memories.
  • In a literal example, Sam the familiar shows up again as a Call-Back to last season's "Manhattan Night Club"; he and Guillermo appear to be the only familiars who survive the massacre at the end.
• Cats Have Nine Lives: Hilariously, this is the second time that an episode has ended in a massive bloodbath with one of the few lucky survivors turning out to be Sam the cat.
• Dainty Combat: One of Celeste's mistress' friends peels off her coat to reveal a leotard and begins doing somersaults as the bloodshed begins— presumably her adopting the persona of a gymnast to go on her Florida Pedo Hunt is a bit of a Take That! at adult men who are into girls' gymnastics.
• Did Not Think This Through: Celeste clearly had no long-term exit strategy from her plan, and best case would've become a pariah in the familiar community after all her friends abandoned her when she broke her promise to vampirize them. (And the worst case was the horrific, brutal deaths of her and everyone she knows, which is what actually happened.) Her final screams of "I just had to know how it felt!" seem to indicate that she had some kind of nervous breakdown when it really sunk in how bad a deal becoming a familiar is.
• Dirty Coward: After her mistress returns home unexpectedly early, Celeste offers her former familiars as a meal to her.
• The Dog Bites Back: Guillermo finally quits his job as Nandor's familiar for a better offer.
• "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune: After The Stinger, the Ending Theme switches to "Vampire Love Song (Up and Down)", as performed by Laszlo and Nadja in the episode, and which is a parody of Matt Berry's actual song "That Yellow Bird".
• Double-Meaning Title: The title refers both to Laszlo and Nadja collaborating as a musical act and to Celeste promising a more democratic, collaborative process between herself and her new familiars.
• Foreshadowing: There's... a lot of signs that Celeste isn't what she claims to be in this episode, aside from our general awareness that nothing ever works out for Guillermo the way he hopes and that no vampire we've seen has EVER kept a promise to vampirize a familiar:
  • When Celeste appears at the familiar mixer, she's wearing a tacky green faux-fur coat as a subtle Shout-Out to Joanne the Scammer.
  • Celeste claims to vape blood instead of drinking it after she's been turned, and says that mere humans would find the smell and taste disagreeable, but when she blows blood-smoke in Nandor's face, it makes him cough just like everyone else.
  • Celeste is holding an iPad to control the music during the preparations for the orgy, even though it was established back in the pilot that touchscreens can't detect undead flesh.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: One of the tracks listed on Laszlo and Nadja's record from the 60's is "Kokomo".
• Gone Horribly Right: Colin signed up Laszlo and Nadja to the open-mic night and told them to do all of their new material first, specifically so that they would bore and irritate the audience. Unfortunately for him, he forgot that they would then go into their old material, much of which had been turned into beloved songs that everyone would have heard of.
• Hidden Depths: Once Guillermo defects to become Celeste's familiar, he turns out to be a very talented sketch artist, an ability that Nandor never knew about because he never bothered to ask.
• Historical In-Joke: Laszlo and Nadja's discography is an endless series of these, the most memorable one being an earnest tribute to Hitler for hosting the 1936 Olympics.
• Hugh Mann: Laszlo and Nadja describe their act as "Laszlo and Nadja, the Human Music Group".
• Insult Misfire: This exchange from Laszlo and Nadja's fight:
  Laszlo: [Going down on you was] [t]he biggest mistake I ever made.
  Nadja: [Gasps] You said I tasted like goat cheese!
  [Laszlo gives an Aside Glance.]
• I Just Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Nandor gets a big Pet the Dog moment when, after trying and failing to win Guillermo back, he quietly tells Celeste "Be kind to Guillermo" and leaves.
• Lovable Sex Maniac: Karen, who seems to be willing to have sex with any of the other familiars who will have her ("You don't even have to do anything!") She's the only one who raises her hand when Celeste proposes her familiars working out their issues with her via orgy, to no one's surprise.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Sam the cat familiar's return plays up the ambiguity over whether as a cat familiar he's sapient and has special abilities or is just a regular cat. He never does anything un-catlike onscreen, but Celeste tells us that he prepared the charcuterie board for the familiar initiation party all by himself ("with his little paws").
• Meet the New Boss: Celeste's new system predictably turns out to be this— after a promising beginning, before long she starts peremptorily snapping at her familiars like slaves, making them scurry back and forth at her whims, and going back on her promise to vampirize them just like any other vampire. What's less predictable is that the whole thing was a scam from the very-much-still-human Celeste just to "know how it felt" to be the master for once, before her scam's inevitable bloody end.
• The New '10s: Celeste is a demonstration of what a vampire's narcissistic upper-class sense of style would look like if actually updated to current trends, with her preference for ultramodern interior design, ambient electronic music, pastel lighting, artistic photography, interpretive dance, etc. Celeste even comments that she prefers a couch to a coffin because "all the young vampires are switching", insists on vaping blood rather than drinking it, and wields an iPad to control her home's settings. (That last one turns out to be a clue that she's scamming them.)
• No-Respect Guy: Guillermo takes up Celeste's offer of servitude after realizing that he has spent 11 years in service without being turned.
• Not Hyperbole: Nadja and Laszlo claim that they killed at Open Mic night... along with taking some lives.
• Oh, Crap!: The familiars' collective reaction when Celeste's mistress shows up at the front door and it dawns on them what's actually going on.
• Really 700 Years Old: Celeste's mistress appears 12, but is at least 160 years old.
• Pedo Hunt: Celeste's eternally-adolescent mistress left her house to hunt for perverts in Florida, much like a few from the movie.
• Pet the Dog: Zigzagged: Nandor abandons his old familiar at a gas station again... after granting him the vampirism that he promised.
  • Save the Cat: Hilariously, Celeste and Guillermo both seem to agree that saving Sam is a higher priority than any of their human friends.
• Pretentious Pronunciation: For some reason Nandor repeatedly insists on saying the word "golf" as "jolf".
• The '70s:
  • The creators seem to like roasting this time period; after the Disco Dan vampires that we met back in "The Curse", this episode gives us a brief Good-Times Montage of Nandor and Benjy's adventures back in the Nixon era. Highlights include Nandor apparently being a staunch supporter of Nixon/Agnew in 1972 at the same time that he was a staunch anti-war protester (which tracks with the amount of political awareness that he has in the present day).
  • Continuing this joke, one of the least popular of the songs in Laszlo and Nadja's act is their tribute to Nandor and Benjy, "Let's Do The Disco".
  • The end credits song is a tribute to '70s classic rock, even though it was written as licensed music for the show in 2019.
• Shout-Out:
  • This episode has a bunch, but one that stands out is Benjy overcoming Nandor's 40-years-old Mind Wipe just by using the Lumosity app.
  • Laszlo and Nadja's song "Vampire Love Song (Up and Down)", which plays as the Ending Theme of this episode, is the same tune as an actual song from Matt Berry's latest album Phantom Birds, "That Yellow Bird".
• Spotting the Thread: Celeste uses blood-infused vape pens, saying that humans would find it disgusting. Guillermo, however is equally bemused by the smoke.
• Stylistic Suck: Everything about Laszlo and Nadja's comedy act, but especially Nadja's shrill, operatic style of singing.
• Treacherous Advisor: Colin urges Laszlo and Nadja with counter-intuitive advice about how to present their music in order to feed off the audience's agitation.
• Unfortunate Names: Celeste's mistress is named "Houston" in the credits, in a mild Take That! toward trendy names for white girls based on place names.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Guillermo knows Celeste because he used to help her out quite a bit when she was first getting used to her familiar duties. This doesn't earn him any special favors from her when she's out looking for new familiars. (But then, getting picked by her as a familiar turns out to be a very, very bad thing.)
• Wild Teen Party: All of the familiars are older than teenagers (one hopes), but this is still the classic scenario that plays out from this trope— Celeste misleads her fellow familiars into thinking that her mistress sired her and then generously gave her the apartment to use as a new lair, but of course her mistress has done no such thing and was just away on business in Florida. And when she returns early to find a bunch of humans making themselves at home in her pad, she's somewhat displeased.

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