What We Do In The Shadows season 5 finale: You’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead
Guillermo finally gets his greatest wish—at least once WWDITS' chapter-closing two-parter gets the boring stuff out of the way
TV Reviews What We Do In The Shadows
Few shows on TV love a reset button more than What We Do In The Shadows. It’s inherent to the cartoon logic that lets the series go completely bonkers as needed: You can send a character into space, turn another into a child for a year, or otherwise deform your main cast for shits and giggles, because the show is so willing to handwave the whole thing away as soon as the joke has run its course.
Guillermo’s transformation into a vampire was always going to be a trickier beast, though—whether the show ended up sticking with it, or, as it does in tonight’s fifth-season finale, “Exit Interview,” ultimately decides to walk it back. Gizmo’s desire to be a vampire isn’t some one-episode joke, or even a single-season story arc like Baby Colin was last year. It’s a fundamental element of his character and his relationships with everyone else in the Vampire Residence. Just as importantly, it’s always added a darker shading to a character who would otherwise be in occasional danger of crossing the line from sweet to saccharine; he can quibble over the details in his talking-head chats all he wants, but Guillermo has shed a lot of blood in pursuit of what he’s always believed was his heart’s deepest desire. Reckoning with all that, and re-asserting the status quo, was always going to be a tall order.
And, amazingly, “Exit Interview”—one of the best episodes of this season, and one of WWDITS’ best “plot” episodes, period—actually pulls it off: undoing the biggest shift this show has ever made to its cast dynamics, without making the whole thing feel like Lucy is pulling the narrative football away from Charlie Brown for the billionth time.
GRADE FOR SEASON 5, EPISODE 10, “EXIT INTERVIEW”: A
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But before we can dive into all that heady stuff, we must, unfortunately, eat our vegetables—which is to say that we need to touch at least briefly on “A Weekend At Morrigan Manor,” the other component of tonight’s two-part finale and also, apparently, some kind of divine punishment for all the times we’ve expressed out hopes of hearing more from The Guide this season, now that Kristen Schaal is officially in the show’s main cast.
And look: There’s nothing inherently wrong with dropping the vamps into an Agatha Christie murder mystery parody in a creaky old house. (And the episode does get occasional kicks from playing into those tropes, most notably with Colin Robinson’s increasingly Branagh-esque Poirot beard.) But a good mystery parody has to work either as a mystery or as a series of jokes about them—and ideally, both—and “Morrigan Manor” does neither. It’s obvious from the moment The Guide shows up at the fancy mansion the crew has been invited to for the weekend that she’s behind the series of karmic traps that swiftly befall them, but the episode doesn’t try to play that obviousness for laughs until it’s way too late.
The big issue, really, is The Guide herself. Kristen Schaal is a genius, responsible for some of the funniest, and most heartbreaking, TV moments of the last decade. But across this entire season, The Guide has had one joke, told ad nauseum, to her name: She meekly makes a statement about wanting to be included; the other vamps ignore her; she shoots a sad look at the camera. That’s it, and “A Weekend At Morrigan Manor” tells the one joke so aggressively, so often, and with so little variation, that it starts to feel genuinely baffling that the show thinks the gag has this much staying power.
It’s not all joyless: The sequence where Laszlo is trapped by an increasing series of ambulatory fencing dummies is a genuine hoot, with Matt Berry reveling in tossing off swashbuckling puns while his stunt double gives his best Errol Flynn. And once The Guide reveals her actual intentions for the weekend, the episode picks up steam—not least of which because Schaal is a hundred times more fun when she’s deploying actual aggression, as opposed to the passive kind. (The sequence also lets her co-stars play off of her instead of just ignoring her, for once; Natasia Demetriou is especially good as she tries to wheedle her way back into The Guide’s good graces from within the silver cage she’s been dropped in.) Ultimately, Laszlo manages to sweet-talk the crew out of their indefinite imprisonment by showing off footage from the documentary of the vamps praising The Guide (revealed, in the episode’s post-credits scene, to be an attempt to screw with Colin Robinson). By then, though, the real damage has been done: Nandor finds out Guillermo has been transformed into a vampire by his buddy Derek, and, just as everyone promised, he’s now on the warpath over the humiliation.
Which brings us, blessedly, back to “Exit Interview,” which opens with Gizmo holed up in a fleabag hotel while hiding out from Nandor’s wrath—setting the scene for a series of surprisingly sweet one-on-one conversations with the other residents of the house, each tipped off, in one way or another, to where Guillermo has been hiding himself. (Derek is not a good person to be reliant on for clandestine endeavors, it turns out.) Nadja, Colin, and Laszlo each swing by to say goodbye in their own way—which is to say that Nadja and Laszlo both get promptly distracted by their libidos, while Colin can’t help but get in some bureaucratic needling in the form of the titular interview. But it’s key to WWDITS’ tiny, black heart that each one also manages to give some semblance of a heartfelt farewell. We know What We Do In The Shadows isn’t going to kill off Guillermo. But “Exit Interview” treats the characters’ feelings about the situation as genuine, pretty much every step of the way, and it’s a big reason the episode works as well as it does.
Meanwhile, Nandor is going full Batman mode, perching on rooftops and staking out the Panera Bread where he and Guillermo first met, certain he’ll eventually return (“like a gazelle to a watering hole”). Kayvan Novak clearly has a lot of fun playing Nandor’s dumber and sillier sides, but he’s genuinely great as a version of this character out for blood: focused and smart, without sacrificing the character’s general ability to misunderstand most any modern situation. And he gets a great foil tonight, when he mistakes a Panera-loving passerby for Guillermo—only to reveal that he’s captured comedian and actor Patton Oswalt, playing himself. (“Do you know John Slattery?” is one of Nandor’s first questions upon finding he’s snagged himself an actor.)
As the first of a whole bunch of celebrity cameos that dot “Exit Interview,” Oswalt is a fun presence, gently advising Nandor not to murder his friend—and then providing a lesson in regret after annoying the vampire into kicking him off a roof. That moment of reflection leads to a genuinely scary scene, as Nandor calls Guillermo using his mom’s phone, having manipulated his way into her apartment to look over baby photos/present an implicit threat. Novak and Harvey Guillén play these moments with real animosity, as Nandor pushes on the one boundary that might genuinely provoke Guillermo into killing him. Instead, though, he reveals he’s simply there to reconcile: Guillermo will be accepted into the house as a full vampire because, ultimately, Nandor loves his familiar more than his own pride. He even knows how to defeat that pesky Van Helsing blood that’s been slowing the transformation: feed Guillermo some human blood (the sort of obvious solution that WWDITS loves to throw at a supposedly intractable problem).
Rather than a happy ending, though, what proceeds from here is a series of deft feints, as the show teases us with multiple ways Guillermo’s transformation might ultimately play out. At first, he seems to go full Lestat (or, in Colin Robinson’s terms, a vampire “Cornholio”), levitating off the ground and calling for his new brethren to help him conquer the night. The cut to a restaurant that’s been absolutely savaged by the vamps, corpses all around, suggests Gizmo might even have gone on a full kill frenzy. (Also, has Colin Robinson ever seemed more sinister than he is here, casually draining a woman to death with boring small talk while she’s surrounded by a sea of blood?) But no: Guillermo can’t bring himself to actually kill his would-be victim, despite Nandor helpfully bumping him on the head—citing, in one of Guillén’s best speeches on this show to date, the way the smell of the guy’s shampoo made him realize he’s just some dude trying to live his life.
When he realizes Guillermo’s having second thoughts, Nandor initiates the second big feint in the episode’s bag of tricks: pulling out last season’s magic lamp and summoning Anoop Desai’s Djinn for a welcome (but brief) return. There’s no wishing things back to their old shape here, though, since Nandor’s out of wishes—sending the ever-annoyed Djinn right back in the bottle. With Plan A extinguished, Nandor’s forced to get clever, of all things, arranging a fake “transmogrification” ritual with two purposes: 1.) forcing Guillermo to admit that, deep down, he doesn’t really want to be a vampires, and 2.) getting Derek in position so that everybody can kill him—revealing, in the process, what actually happens if a vampire’s sire gets dusted. When Guillermo can’t drive the stake in himself, Nandor grants the mercy of doing it for him, restoring his familiar’s humanity in the process. We end on a shot of a suddenly human-again Guillermo sitting beside Derek’s corpse, forced to reflect on the costs his selfish desires have wreaked on his poor, dopey, mostly innocent friend.
Except What We Do In The Shadows isn’t really that show. So we get one more surprisingly sweet Gizmo-Laszlo scene to round out a season full of them, as Lasz helps his little buddy drag Derek’s body to Wallace the necromancer (a returning Benedict Wong), who raises the poor guy as a zombie. (This comes complete with a cheerful assist from Haley Joel Osment’s Topher, who’s apparently adjusted very well to undead living in the three years since we last saw him in season two’s “Resurrection.”) The end result is a very particular sort of What We Do In The Shadows happy ending: Derek might not be talking much, but he’s finally got some new friends; Guillermo isn’t a vampire anymore, but he seems pretty okay with that. And nobody had to die! (Except for all the people the vamps murdered in that restaurant, and which they’re murdering all the time.)
Looking back over the fifth season of What We Do In The Shadows, it becomes increasingly clear that, while the show clearly enjoys toying with these forays into long-form storytelling, it’s also never going to be a master of them. “Exit Interview” is the payoff to a whole season of teasing, but as enjoyable as it is, it can’t necessarily justify, well, multiple half-hours of being fruitlessly teased. (In fact, you can view tonight’s erratically paced two-parter as a microcosm for the show’s long-form pacing issues as a whole: a whole lot of waiting before the show feverishly unleashes the good stuff.)
Kudos are in order for all involved, though, for finding that rarest of things: an elegant reset button, one that feels both earned and emotionally resonant. And all of these critiques have to come in the context of What We Do In The Shadows itself, which continues, year in and year out, to feature some of the strongest, funniest characters in TV comedy today. Pretty much every character in “Exit Interview,” big-name cameo or no, gets a moment that’s laugh-out-loud funny, while the story zigs and zags in unpredictable ways. What We Do In The Shadows pretty much only ever looks bad in comparison to itself, and when it works—which it did more often than not this season, and especially tonight—there’s very little that’s as fearless or as funny existing in the comedy landscape.
Stray observations
- Vampire socialite Perdita Morrigan apparently holds a “Met Ball after-party so exclusive, no one is invited.”
- “Shades of Bacchus!”
- Nadja, when asked to “take in” The Guide’s portraits: “Aw, you know, I saw some art last year, so I’m good.”
- Nandor thinking Guillermo is a literal bloodhound, complete with barking, is officially the “Nandor too dumb” bridge too far.
- “Aw, fuck it, these can’t all be clever.”
- “I thought you really liked us!”
“I did…deeply and desperately.” - Sorry, Colin: Calling out the show doing a clip show doesn’t actually justify doing a clip show.
- Oh, and the hex wasn’t real, just The Guide screwing with Nadja. Some of you for sure called that.
- Matt Berry does some great physical acting from his cage, Laszlo giving increasingly worried head shakes as people embark on bad conversational choices in his presence.
- “Another mystery solved!”
- “Maybe if I wrote him a letter…”
“Yeah, if you wrote him a suicide note, and actually followed through on it, then that could probably cool him down.” - “Aaaand she’s joined them.”
- “How did you find me?”
“Well, I just took a map of Staten Island and laid it over a grid and looked for any motels that shared a square with an Arby’s, a party store, or a sweater shop.” - The Guide brought some of the hybrids by to say goodbye to Guillermo; they have not gotten any less disturbing.
- Guillermo’s first successful use of vampire hypnosis: stopping his mom from staking Nandor when her hunter instincts kick in.
- Nandor explains that, rather than dying, killing Derek will just cause Guillermo to “get a month older really quickly.”
- Out of all the money Guillermo gave Derek, he “only spent like $250 on ‘vampire clothes’ that he got from Hot Topic.”
57 Comments
Even though I know there’s more seasons coming, Exit Interview kinda felt like a series finale. You had a lot of cameos but also there’s not a lot, if any, storylines that have been established thru the seasons left. Really the main one has been Guillermo’s quest to be a vampire and his relationship with Nandor. We got to see all that play out (it was great) but what’s left? This show has always had a very talented group of writers so I’m sure they’ll come up with something but I’d be ok if this was it.
Same. I’m not sure where the group will go from here, given this season’s storylines. There has been a really satisfying evolution for the vampire family, if one finds the idea of a group of selfish killers becoming kinder and more ‘human’ satisfying. In that sense, it’s a true comedy; everything seems better and more harmonious. I suppose the last season could take a wicked turn and throw the group into a state of chaos. I think it would be funny if it focused on the film crew.
Well they blew up the original premise, namely Guillermo wanting to become a vampire. So presumably they’ll lean into his slayer storyline (maybe the slayer urge becomes too much to fight, endangering his friends?) because otherwise, this show is just a bunch of disconnected comic vignettes and character arcs to nowhere like Baby Colin, Nandor’s wedding and Nadja’s hex.So it was good they didn’t revert lazily to the status quo but I also thought they tossed away a whole lot of comic potential in the Nandor-vs-Guillermo scenario and in Guillermo being a full vampire. Considering the last four episodes were errr kind of not funny much at all, they can’t afford to discard the good stuff in favor of padding like Lazlo’s fencing scenario. How did The Guide contrive that, anyway?
For the Guide I’m sure all the setup at the manor was handled by her wraiths. I’m shocked they didn’t mention that she is still technically the caretaker of the local council. I also agree that I really thought it was going to be interesting to have a season of Guillermo going through the “new vampire” stuff and learning contradictory crap from all the different housemates. It was very touching to show he was just too soft-hearted to be a vampire, but I’m very unsure about where to go from here.
For a brief moment I was terrified that the Guide had locked them into an escape room.Beyond that, this is going to be interesting to see where they go from here. Guillermo may not want to get his hands (or fangs) directly dirty, but he’s still a murderer – as he notes, of any number of vampires as well as those he’s lured to his death and later dismembered.Also, this does establish some serious stakes for the Baron and the Master. I don’t believe Guillermo ‘just aged a month’ – I’m pretty sure the show’s going with the logic that you age to the point you would have been when you turned.This also brings up the question… where’s Derek’s sire, since he apparently didn’t die in the invasion that turned Derek?
They probably bring this up later, since they might change the original actor with someone famous. Plus they need to cure Guillermo first before eventually kill Derek’s sire.
I’m pretty sure the show’s going with the logic that you age to the point you would have been when you turned.To the point you would be if you hadn’t turned, I think. So killing a sire of a 500-year-old vampire would mean instant death.
Speaking of Derek, WHY was he turned into a vampire. Why did someone in the vampire family bother to do that?They should bring back Craig Robinson. I have a theory that his character was a vampire who was cleverly trying to wipe out all the vampiric competition for food without getting his hands dirty. That would explain the never-explained oddity that they attacked the vampire family at night.Is Craig Robinson’s character is Derek’s sire?
A C+ is harsh, I think.
It’s on a WWDITS scale, which makes it a B- to B elsewhere.
Is this like the Barsanti “drop a letter grade because I want to show my bona fides about hating AI” scale?
In case it’s not clear from the review box, the C+ is ONLY for Morrigan Manor, Exit Interview is for sure an A.
I didn’t see that, thank you!
i used to love this show, but its went on TOO LONG. It needs to die, already. its completely toothless now.
Some of us are still enjoying it, so maybe just stop watching?
Reminds me of the old Walking Dead comments. “I’m done with this show!” Next season rolls around, “I’m done with this show!” So on and so forth for the next 8 seasons.
They had 6 great episodes and 4 so so ones this season. Not a terrible track record. But they threw away a lot of comic possibilities.
Heh, “toothless.”
Matt Berry could start a podcast called “Matt Berry Reads Phonebooks” and I’d listen. Bonus points if Patrick Warburton dropped in every few episodes to read the yellow pages.
also-he doesnt want to be a vampire, but he wants to be their servant? The whole reason for doing that in the first place was to become a vampire. This is really stupid.
They’ve been addressing this a little, though, such as the episode where he insisted he was now their bodyguard after his vampire-hunting skills were revealed. It’s not a big focus of the show, but I expect the vamps (or at least Nandor) are going to have to acknowledge him as more of an equal.
It isn’t stupid if the series is interested in redefining Guillermo’s place in this group, this hierarchy. He may no longer be a vampire but he no longer appears to be merely a servant either. They know he comes from a vampire-slaying lineage. He has earned respect.
To watch this show, you just have to accept that these people just don’t think. Why wasn’t it obvious to Guillermo and Lazlo that the Van Helsing blood was stopping Guillermo’s transition? Why didn’t Guillermo realize that being a half-vampire means he gets all the good parts of being a vampire and none of the drawbacks? He should have refused to drink the glass of blood.
The show is clearly transitioning Guillermo’s desire to be a vampire into realizing what he actually wants is a romantic relationship with Nandor. You can like or dislike it but the show has definitely taken its time to plant the seed and build the change over the course of the seasons.
See, I thought Nador hearing the dog barks and thinking it was Gulliermo was really funny.
I thought the reveal about the vamps’ talking about The Guide on video was going to be that they were really praising Doll Nadia (I actually forget if they left it ambiguous since I only thought of it between the two scenes.)
In the mid-credits scene they all but admitted they were trying to set up Colin Robertson with The Guide so they’d both move out of the house.
Yes, I understand that. I meant that this was my theory between the time that Lazlo had them turn off the video, obviously because something was about to be revealed, and that mid-credits sequence.
TBH, I needed more Doll Nadia in these last two episodes. The point in the season I laughed the hardest was in the first episode when they pushed her dance and sing button and she struggled to get out “Fuck fuck fuck you all” out in between the canned recording.
This was the first season of this show that felt a little off to me. Certainly not without its moments (“Pride Parade” is an instant classic), was ambitious overall, and this was a sweet and almost-too-tidy sendoff, but I’d love for the show to lighten back up a bit and give us dumb shit like “the vampires get too drunk at a casino” again. I’m even starting to wonder if this show has much left in the tank, as we effectively resolved a plot point from episode 1 here.The big question, of course, is where does Guillermo go from here. He just wants to be happy at this point, and he’s clearly happy hanging out with the vampires. But does he have to spend his life as their bitch for that?
My guess is, the writers will have to lean into the slayer plotline. Guillermo wants to hang out with the vamps as their friend and equal and not their familiar. It seems to work at first but his sojourn into vampirism kicked something loose in his brain and his slayer persona is becoming uncontrollable…Something like that. They definitely need to keep going with Guillermo as the backbone of this series since he’s the only character who ever changes and doesn’t just revert to the status quo.And since they really shortchanged us on Vampire Guillermo, they should have him change back into a vampire at some point, unwillingly, with some Vampire Rule that prevents an easy reversion to human again. The Baron informs him that sadly, the second time, you explode.
i liked this season better than last. the colin robinson baby story was just not funny to me.
Gonna have to catch this on Hulu later, since Disney chose last night of all nights to pull all their channels from Spectrum Cable. I’m sure it’s mostly a play to rake Spectrum over the coals over ESPN (which I don’t give a shit about), but I guess I’m getting caught in the middle of it. Spectrum is playing up the victim angle–the pulled Disney channels just run a repeated message about how Disney was charging excessive fees and they are just trying to find a fair deal for their customers–but I’m not sure I believe they are entirely innocent in all of this. When corporations fight, it usually end up the customers that pay.
The fencing scene was a definite reference to the fight scenes from Garth Marernghi’s Darkplace, where Berry would ad-lib ridiculous one liners while his stunt double doled out martial arts beatings
oh, i love “garth marenghi!”
Guillermo is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people (~11 years as a familiar [2 as a guard?] , presumably providing humans every night) as well as dismembering and bagging up the parts of as many or more, but biting an unconscious guy’s neck is a step too far.
“Kristen Schaal is a genius”No, she isn’t. I’ve been watching (and listening… oh God, having to listen to that) for a few years now waiting for her to be something other than the screeching ditzoid, and she’s shown no signs of genius whatsoever. She’s always the same, every time. One-note performances, delivered as yowls. I was hoping the show would take the opportunity to use the Guide’s treachery to dump Schaal but I just don’t have that kind of luck.
I am not familiar with her outside of this show. But I agree, The Guide is annoying and I could do without her.
““Kristen Schaal is a genius”No, she isn’t.”Canonically, she’s a horse.
Good work as correspondent on The Daily Show.
I love her voice work on Bob’s Burgers and Bojack Horseman.
I thought she was hilarious on The Last Man on Earth – and I love her here. To each their own.
If Kristen Schaal was so smart, she should threaten to quit unless she gets better material. It’s painfully awful what the writers are giving her. The one and only interesting aspect of The Guide was her icky obsession with Guillermo for being a slayer and that’s been totally forgotten. Maybe they should bring it back now that Guillermo’s vampire phase is over. It would be very awkward considering Guillermo is gay and wouldn’t be interested even if he were straight but awkward comedy is this show’s forte.
I like her much more as a voice actor. Her Sara Lynn was great.But I always thought she was the worst thing about Flight of the Conchords…most of the live action things I’ve seen her in give her pretty much one note to deal with.
Thank you for stating this. I don’t get it either. Her comedic chops are, meh, marginal at best. She can’t act terribly well, her voice is awful, and I don’t understand the obsession by the author or others over her.
Tell me you’ve never watched Gravity Falls without saying it
her louise on “bob’s burgers” is my favorite character.
The Cornholio line from Colin Robinson almost made me pee my pants!My very favorite Patton Oswalt role is Happy. Batshit crazy show, highly recommended if you haven’t seen it.I just love this show so much; it brings me so much joy! I’m sad the season is over, but happy we’re getting more at some point. Thanks for the reviews!
“Aw, fuck it, these can’t all be clever.”My favorite line of the first episode. They did not bother to hide it much, what with recording saying all six of them (only Guillermo caught it) and the Guide laying on top of a box with her legs up teenage girl style saying “are you sure you don’t need any help” to Lazlo.Two things I am surprised the review left out. It seemed by the fourth fencer that these were definitely the Wraits (something about the way they acted). And I thought it was clear that the victims in the end massacre were the Antipaxians (?) that Nadja made friends with this season. ooof. Rough end for them.
Could you give some examples of Kristen Schaal’s other work that impressed you? You frequently speak highly of her and the attention she deserves, but i’d never heard of her before this show.
Kristen Schaal is the voice of Louise on Bob’s Burgers and Mabel on Gravity Falls, two all-time great comedic performances
When Colin Robinson said, “So this is basically a clip show now? Are we Golden Girls?” I lost it.
Season 5 started with a run of 6
great episodes back to back and then whammo they lost their funny bone. Good
thing for Guillermo’s plotline, it’s been the only reason to watch the final 4
episodes.But what a
lot of comic potential they threw away. For starters, why wait so long to state
the obvious, that Guillermo couldn’t turn because of his Van Helsing blood. That
just made the characters look like morons.And why didn’t Guillermo realize he
had it good: getting all the fun parts of being a vampire (telekinesis, flying,
mind control, immortality and fast healing) without the drawbacks (killing
humans to drink their blood, not being able to eat human food or go out in the
sun).It would
have been a lot funnier to rewrite the final 4 episodes to firstly, have more
of an epic showdown between Nandor and Guillermo. I was expecting a battle with
things getting tossed around telekinetically, at minimum. How
about a running battle that takes up a whole episode on its own?
Then once they get that out of their
system, Nandor can tell Guillermo how to be a real vampire and Guillermo
sensibly refuses. Then we have an episode or two where Guillermo flaunts how
much better he has it than the others, which antagonizes them so much they
scheme to trick Guillermo into drinking human blood so he’ll be as screwed as
they are.Then when
they do trick him, Guillermo pitches a fit, refusing to do any vampire things
like drinking blood, which is immoral anyway. He locks himself in a cage to
stop himself from hunting. Lazlo cooks up daffy experiments for getting him to
eat. Nandor brings him victims and tries to force them on Guillermo. Guillermo
gets hungrier, crazier and more desperate.After it
becomes obvious Guillermo is going to die if he doesn’t turn back into a human,
then they can revert him. Next season I hope they go whole-hog into the whole
slayer thing, which they’ve never really capitalized on. And this
doesn’t preclude the possibility that Guillermo might be turned back into a
vampire, unwillingly, in some demented scenario. Well he can be turned back,
but y’see there’s this Vampire Rule that says if you try to turn back twice,
the second time you explode. Or something. We’re not really sure, it hasn’t
happened very much but we’ve heard rumors. Really not worth risking, Gizmo.
Yep, there’s a season 6 and maybe 7 still left in this show. But
stop ignoring so much comic
potential, writers!
Doesn’t anybody care that Nandor kicked Legendary Human Comedian Patton Oswalt off of a rooftop?
Hey! Cut the guy some slack, a dear friend of his recently died quite suddenly.
i thought/hoped that maybe nandor would have second thoughts & swoop down & make patton a vampire to save him from dying!
I did think that the show could have had an easy out and have the Guide actually be Perdita. Like that she needed something to do the rest of the year.