At the end of season four’s “What We Do in the Shadows,” Guillermo (Harvey Guillen) makes the tough decision to ask Derek (Chris Sandiford) to turn him into a vampire. Tired of her boss, Nandor (Kayvan Novak), ignoring her pleas for years, she decides to make it happen on her own.
But at the start of the show’s fifth season — the first two episodes of which premiered July 13 — we learned that Guillermo’s turning didn’t work. Or it worked, but only a little. It’s been 16 days, and the typical vampire powers haven’t fully come to her, which is highly erratic. Guillermo can still eat food (though he has a craving for very rare meat). He can still go out in the sun. However, he cannot fly after turning into a vampire bat.
Guillermo also learns that being possessed by a vampire who is not your master “changes” you, much to Nandor’s dismay, which he did not know. Laszlo (Matt Berry) calls it “the greatest insult” an acquaintance can give to his boss, and Nandor says that if Guillermo did it, he would kill him and then himself. Guillermo is in a difficult position, as he cannot even ask Nandor to cut him off and not pretend that Nandor replaced him. Why? Apparently, being bitten twice causes a vampire to explode.
So why isn’t Guillermo a full vampire? Viewers learned last season that Guillermo is a descendant of the legendary vampire hunter Van Helsing, which explains why he’s such an amazing vampire slayer (or savior, when the Coven needs him). Is it possible that there is something in Guillermo’s DNA that prevents him from fully transforming? Could he be a now-dead vampire slayer with some weird quirks (but without the desire for blood)? It certainly sounds possible.
There’s also the possibility that Guillermo’s change isn’t working because he didn’t get his boss to do it. Perhaps his transformation will end when he finally tells Nandor the truth – even if it ruins their relationship forever.
At the end of episode two, Guillermo tells Laszlo what he did, so we’ll have the rest of the season to find out what’s up with his vampirism, and whether he can get out of the situation alive (or, Rather, not die).
New episodes of “What We Do in the Shadows” premiere Thursday on FX and stream the following day on Hulu.