I Think We Often Get Caught In The Silliness Of The Show And Forget How Deep It Actually Is. Yes It’s

The sir scenes this episodes were amazing between him confronting his brother and becoming possessive and Gabi talking to the recording like he was there. I feel like Gabi is becoming more and more dependent on him as time away from him passes like realistically she could solve these cases without him but I think she is doubting it as well in her own twisted way missing him. What are your thoughts on their dynamic

ok promise i’ll shut up soon but now i’m thinking about how in Act 1 the only game we see marvin and whizzer play is chess, where marvin clearly excels and whizzer doesn’t seem to entirely know how to play. and you can tell whizzer’s insecure abt it because he knows marvin wants a smart guy and he doesn’t feel he lives up to his expectations, and they fight and break up because marvin can’t help but be petty because he wants a smart boyfriend but not one smarter than him and someone he can still win over and it just shows how petty and immature they both are in that act that they can’t get over their childish need to prove something to each other and it has to turn into a whole thing

but then in Act 2, the only game we see them play is racquetball, a game where whizzer clearly excels because he’s the more athletic one of the pair, but even though they banter a little over winning and losing, it’s lighthearted this time. marvin, who once said winning was everything to him, is able to admit defeat and still have a good time, and it’s one of the happier songs in the musical. and then even when they play the second time and marvin is winning because whizzer is obviously sick, marvin doesn’t gloat the way he once would’ve, it’s again just light hearted banter that only turns serious when something is wrong.

i just think it’s really nice to see their maturity and growth from act 1 to act 2, especially with marvin going from making them play chess because he knows he can win to letting them play a game that he knows whizzer is better at and still enjoying himself :)

I have no proof to this theory other them a dream I had after the episode but what if the person sir is working with is Trents Dad

Gonna be so real, gang, I kinda expected Eddie to only get three seconds of screen time but it’s kinda wild that we got a time skip and pretty much everything revolving his immediate, acute grief happened off-screen.

Actually the time skip was the worst decision of the episode tbh. Like, I’m more than fine spending most of the immediate fallout from Bobby’s death with Athena (never gonna complain about more Angela Basset on my screen), but the idea that we hardly see any of the main character’s reckoning with the loss besides Athena and Chim? Thank god we got SOME Hen in the end but fuck man. Why did we jump ahead two weeks? Why did we spend so much time on what should’ve been a B-plot? How is Bobby dead but still had more screen time than other main characters but also got a janky montage as a funeral rather than an entire episode grieving his death? Literally what. Was any of that?

And the stoic Buck of it all? Yeah, people who called that they’re setting him up for captain were right and truly I hate that with my whole heart. For seasons, so much of Buck’s character growth has been routed in realizing that he can’t always be “the guy who fixes things” and how he can’t be everything to everybody and more importantly that he doesn’t NEED to be to still be loved and accepted. And now they’re setting him up to the center point of the 118, the figure that every other firefighter looks to—listens to, follows through literal flames. Literally making him become everything to everyone. The guy whose job it is to fix everything.

Take that with the implication that Bobby was right to think LA was not his real home; just his penance, his borrowed time (burying him with his “real family” in Minnesota)—even after he insisted on his last words that he found a will to live and a new family instead? I just—

It’s like they’re undoing years of character development. And for what? For shock value and “creative decisions”? The characters are no longer three dimensional fixtures in an expansive work of art exploring joy, despair, hope, grief, and the tumultuous lives of first responders. They’re glorified baby dolls being smashed into trauma after trauma—as if the showrunners got tired of telling interesting stories and instead now chasing dopamine rushes with the next big emergency they can torture their toys with.

And I’m expected to watch season 9? Hell, the rest of this season? How? The creative minds behind the show clearly don’t care much for the characters, so why should I?

(Great acting by Kenneth Choi and Angela Bassett though. Phenomenal what pros can do even with shitty scripts.)

Rewatching found and I got thoughts

I'm leaning more into my trents dad is sirs dad theory

Also something not a theory but a bit I started with a friend is suggesting Gabi should have just gone outside when he escaped with a book and a case file and called for him like a dog. He would have come back just throw in a couple I need yous and we are partners and he would have come back like a lost puppy and she could have chained him up. Me and said friend may have started saying "come here sir" like you would call a dog whenever they were trying to find him.

The final thought we had is the headshot photo they used in the press conferences like who took it. Every other time it's the age progression photo and the photo was what he looked like outside the basement. Probably just a plot hole but me and my friend decided for cannon sake Gabi did a photoshoot with sir after she shaved him.

Their arrests and Jamie in the same episode!!!! That's crazy!!!!

its me and the “x reader” tags against the world.

Does anyone else think sir got out while they were looking for gabby cause they didn't show him at the end of the episode?

Not my artwork, credit to the artist (unlisted on my fb where I found this so if anyone finds the original artist please tag them so I can), but a post to celebrate the return of Tennant and Tate because I love then always and forever.

So here's my problem.

And it's not about Nandermo, not exactly anyway. Because I didn't expect Nandermo to become textual until the very end, if at all. The show kept making it clear that they liked their ambiguity to keep the relationship on the razor's edge, and Paul Simms made it clearer and clearer that for some reason (put a pin in this) he just couldn't see their connection as a sexual one.

But I frankly don't care about that, because if anything is canon in this show it's that the vampires will eventually fuck everything, and Nandor canonically fucks his other friends. More importantly, their connection was always the emotional core of both characters. And Paul always did say he saw their relationship as a romance, if a strange and non-sexual one.

So I figured we'd maybe get Nandor confessing that Guillermo meant a lot to him (and immediately walking it back a little), or Guillermo confessing how lost he feels without his vampire dream and Nandor offering him a place. Maybe an ambiguous, could-just-be-queerplatonic-partners 'I love you'. Maybe just the hug they kept teasing for three or four seasons and never got. We got like...half of two of those, in episode 10, so I guess that's a wobbly semi-fulfilled thing by my definition of it.

But it's not the Nandermo of it all. It's the Guillermo of it all. And how this final episode seemed to almost mock Guillermo's place at the emotional core of the show.

And the Guillermo of it all is why we never got the Nandermo of it all.

Shadows has vampires doing absurd-ass things, but every character also has things they want and feel, and there are various amounts of emotional ink spilled about it. The show has found space, sometimes very poignant space, to take that seriously in between the piss and sex jokes. The vampires change very slowly and in spirals, they repeat a lot of their old issues that stem back even to their mortal lives. But they always try.

And things do change in the vampire house; that is not the same household from the first season. Every single character, right down to the Baron and the Guide and Derek, are in different and better places than they were before the show began. They've made progress in their individual desires, and a lot of that is due to the improved connections they have with each other, connections we've watched them foster. A lot of the time it's because they're talked about as a found family, something Guillermo started and Guillermo believed before any of the rest of them did.

---

So where is Guillermo this season? Our human point of view, our dynamic character, the character who has a dream and wants something more than any of the others? Whose dream drives the storyline of the entire show?

Guillermo has chosen to be human, and he thinks he can't be part of the household if he's not a vampire. We watch Guillermo try to throw himself back into the human world trying to make up for lost time - to the point that he forgets the person he called his best friend, the people he called his family, in a way I think we never fully resolve. He thinks he's thriving, and he doesn't even seem upset about leaving the others behind.

We watch him revert (and that's fine, people revert sometimes) to the same waiting lapdog he was when we started the series. We watch him realize that and he says no. Nandor stands up for him, and feels better and more fulfilled in doing so, and that's a great capstone for Nandor and Nandor's own tendency for selfishness. And that's excellent. Episode 10 was a great start for all the ground they had to cover.

Nandor offers for Guillermo to be his partner in crime. His sidekick, but Guillermo expressed that desire back in season one so it's not an insult inherently. But here's the problem. Here's the part of Guillermo that has frankly always been a problem, because I thought it's something the show was eventually going to cover respectfully, and instead it was always part of the joke.

---

Guillermo is someone who made a decision sixteen years ago as part of a very young man's desire, to be respected and have cool powers, to live forever, to see the world. (He somehow thought being a vampire, and only a vampire, could get him those things but that's a rant for another time.)

That young man has grown up. He's in his mid-thirties, he has a body count. We've watched him at various times be empathetic, clever, cunning, and brave. Also extremely sexy in bodyguard gear. (And for some reason, the show keeps wanting us to forget that for a season he was extremely competent and badass and sexy pretty much all the time, and he seemed thrilled to be in that role, and he didn't even care about being a vampire if he could protect Nandor in that way and be regarded as 'part of the team'.)

Then Nandor dresses him in a stupid cowboy costume, and gives him a sidekick name ending in 'Kid', which he seems less than thrilled about. They all still talk about him the entire episode as if he's a disobedient child. The vampires speculate if Guillermo is having a fling with the crew, but no - Guillermo's had one boyfriend, who we saw him hug once and nothing more. Despite living in a house for fifteen years that is openly raunchy and shameless, he seems like a character designed to be both desexed and humiliated, and they never expand on the reason why.

(And if Guillermo were ace it'd be amazing, hell it's my headcanon at this point, but I don't think that's what they're going for. I think the show just desexualizes Guilermo. As a matter of praxis. For some reason.)

And the show has done this more and more to Guillermo in the later seasons. Nandor says he could steal original!Freddie easily from Guillermo if he wanted to. The vampires laugh at the thought of him being a vampire - "a little bat pooping everywhere," and Guillermo's time as a vampire has him basically feeling no different in his sexuality or, after a very brief moment, his confidence. Even Nandor's big climactic moment in Episode 10 has him saying that just because Guillermo isn't as cool or hot or interesting or strong as Jordan (or Nandor) doesn't mean Guillermo deserves to be treated poorly.

Look, I don't know if it's because Harvey Guillen is babyfaced, or because he's fat, or because he carries a different energy to his masculinity. Or because it's great to talk about gay sex and being horny, but writing a gay relationship is just too hard. Or some fun combination of all those things.

But I keep thinking about everyone freaking out when Nandor swooped into the collapsed floorboards to save Guillermo in season 4, and everyone freaked out and swooned. And Paul Simms expressed that as "[Nandor] has to save his little buddy."

Guillermo is a grown-ass man, with a desire to feel powerful and special and accepted, who Nandor sees as his little buddy. (Who everyone in the house sees as their little buddy, and it's nice he's part of the family, but...) After every emotional beat that makes them seem like equals with a special connection, he reverts to the less-cool sidekick who makes Nandor feel special and important. And Guillermo's prior devotion to Nandor - not to vampirism, not to a job or promotion, to Nandor - changes to other things, but Nandor never figures out why that hurts him so much. And for some reason the deepest bond of the series just isn't sexual, the showrunner just can't see it that way, in a house where everyone's fucking but not you Guillermo.

We're at the end of the story, and that's our punchline.

---

And we don't end on one of the points where Guillermo is asserting himself as someone who deserves to be taken seriously, and given the things he wants - and the show has had plenty of those moments, all of which seem to be building and evolving his relationships over the years.

We end on Guillermo being told that suddenly, the documentary is packing up without any fanfare or clarity on what they were looking for in the first place. We get Guillermo stumbling for clarity on what it all meant, what the point was for him and what his life is going to be now. We're told over and over again the documentary (and Guillermo, and the viewers) needs a satisfying capstone, needs emotional closure.

And the vampires tell him to shut up. And they tell him this has all happened before, and none of it is special to them. ("No human is special," Nandor said several episodes ago, and never went back on it.) And they tell him to do a little dance for their amusement, and Colin recites some pithy lines. And every attempt to take a moment to care about Guillermo's journey, or the core of his character and what he needs, is turned into a joke for him and for us.

Guillermo's looking for a point to it all, for some kind of fulfillment, and there wasn't one. And everyone is satisfied in that but him. And even if there were times Guillermo got the chance to be respected, to have cool powers (which he kept, but the vampires keep forgetting them), to live forever (he will die and leave Nandor someday!), to see the world - none of these things are going to come to him now.

It would make absolute, complete, and devastating sense for Guillermo to feel he's outgrown them and to leave. Nandor doesn't even seem upset enough to try and stop him. We never really get a clear reason about why he decides to stay.

I mean, it's for friendship or something, with a line about how they can still be close but he needs 'his own thing'. But in six seasons, over and over and over, we've been driven back to the idea that the most emotional part of this story is Guillermo's desire to become accepted in this family, and the effect he has on Nandor. That Guillermo needs this home and he consistently makes Nandor softer, kinder, less selfish and more fulfilled when they're together.

But those parts of their relationship, the love story parts, don't matter. Guillermo is going to find 'his own thing' when it's been clear how entrenched in this world he is (right down to his DNA), but Nandor will drag him back into shenanigans anyway, probably keeping Guillermo from whatever 'his own thing' is.

And Guillermo will always be Nandor's sidekick, his little buddy, never to be taken seriously. And one day, Guillermo will die, and he'll be someone they all forget. And for some reason, he'll be just fine with that, because he belongs with them but will never really be in a better position.

And he'll be satisfied with that. For some reason. But I won't.