OK, so now we know that Colin Robinson is dead — or is he?
In Thursday night’s Season 3 finale of wacky, surreal FX vampire comedy “What We Do in the Shadows,” Laszlo (Matt Berry) trudged into the basement of the group’s Staten Island house to bid adieu to “energy vampire” Colin (Mark Proksch), who was moldering in a bed after dying in the penultimate episode.
Colin had a gaping hole in his chest, and when Laszlo, holding a lantern, followed a slimy trail into another room, he discovered a naked, crying newborn baby — with Colin’s unmistakable grown-man head and holding his ever-present black glasses.
“S–t,” Laszlo muttered. Dude, we get it.
“Colin in the form we know him as being an energy vampire died after 100 years, or has ceased to exist, but this new form of him was gestating inside his body this whole time and sprung out,” series executive producer/showrunner/writer Paul Simms told The Post in an interview with Proksch and co-writer Sam Johnson. “Now the question is, will he be the same Colin, the same energy vampire we know, or will he grow into something different?”
Simms said that, from the outset, there was never any thought of killing off Colin (in whatever form he takes). “After Season 1, we couldn’t just keep doing jokes about ‘Colin says a boring story and it drains people’s energy,’ and that’s why over the last two seasons you’ve seen him become more a part of the group with [showing] more facets of his personality.
“Part of it came out of a discussion we had in the writers’ room: how does someone become an energy vampire? Are they born that way? Does someone turn them into an energy vampire? Since we couldn’t figure out the answers we thought, well, let’s have that be Colin’s search … and to give him a ‘journey’ to go on.
“But we wanted a good surprise at the end and a good challenge for ourselves in Season 4.”
Proksch said he thinks “it’s great” how Colin’s demise, and rebirth, was handled.
“I don’t think he did find what he was looking for — I don’t think an energy vampire ever does — because he was clearly starting to search and had this midlife crisis right at the end of his life, or his cycle, or whatever you want to call it. It’s their curse — they never really learn about themselves and where they come from.
“The last thing you want as a comedic actor is to become a cliche, where the stuff you say and do in the first season becomes annoying to viewers in the third season. ‘What you talkin’ ’bout, Willis!’ wasn’t as funny in Season 4 or 5,” he said, referring to Gary Coleman’s catchphrase in “Diff’rent Strokes.”
“I’m very cognizant of that as a viewer of TV and someone with a lot of opinions about TV and comedy and I don’t want to fall into those traps. So it’s really kept the character fresh.”
Baby Colin was just the icing on the cake in Thursday night’s finale, in which Laszlo tricked wife Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) into going to the UK (for a seat on the Vampiric Council) and, for good measure, nailed familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillen) into a crate with her (and her coffin) for their transatlantic ocean voyage. With Guillermo gone, that meant that Nandor (Kayvon Novak) was left to travel overseas by himself as he sat forlornly on a NJ Transit train, sporting a blue JansPort kid’s backpack.
Simms gave a snapshot look at Season 4, which is currently in its fourth week of filming.
“What we see at the end [of Season 3] is that they were ready to scatter to the four winds,” Simms said. “I think all the journeys they went on between seasons [3 and 4] is disappointing to each of them in different ways — which sort of brings most of them back to where they began.”