Editor's note: The below contains spoilers for Season 4 of What We Do in the Shadows.Nandor’s (Kayvan Novak) quest for true love in Season 3 and 4 of What We Do In The Shadows has caused plenty of collateral damage. From the destruction of wannabe-human vampires running a self-help cult to the dozens of ex-wives and husbands Nandor revived only to send back into the ether, it’s clear by now that Nandor’s quest for “love” is an unfulfilled, selfish endeavor. We come to see this most clearly in Season 4 in Marwa (Parisa Fakhri), the only one of Nandor’s dozens of spouses he keeps around after reviving. Unlike many of his other wishes, Marwa actually sticks around for more than one episode — but we never get the chance to really know her. Even though Nandor claims she’s the wife he loved the most, he doesn’t seem to care much about her as a person. Over the course of the season, we come to see how selfish Nandor’s actions are, but Marwa herself doesn’t get a resolution.
At the start of Season 4, Nandor finds a Djinn (Anoop Desai) who will grant him 52 wishes. As he’s been on a quest for love, he asks the Djinn to revive all of his 37 spouses as he insists one of them was his true love. After spending time with all of them he settles on Marwa and disposes of the rest, but immediately neglects her. If anything, he treats her more like a toy, something he can leave at home and come back to when he wants, and this leads to her feeling unsatisfied. Thus, Nandor starts making more wishes on her to keep her out of his way or change her altogether to suit his tastes.
Nandor revives Marwa with one of his selfish wishes and everything that happens to her after is the result of yet another selfish wish. It’s hard to say whether Marwa has any will at all on a narrative level, because she was brought back with the purpose of being a wife whom Nandor could project his expectations of a loving marriage onto. In the process, however, his selfishness leads him to change her more and more. Initially, he only does small cruel actions like excluding her from activities or wishing she was not involved with the main crew's normal shenanigans. But over time his actions make her less and less of an individual person. Nandor wishes Marwa agreed with him on everything before their wedding, so she starts to act exactly like Nandor, even carrying out his will to get away from her by taking over his plans for his “man cave” in the home renovation episode and making it her own. Being a perfect copy of his will isn’t enough, though, because Nandor’s selfishness extends to his familiar, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) as well.
Seeing Guillermo — who, until now had been almost single-mindedly devoted to him — happy with his new boyfriend, Freddie (Al Roberts) leads to Nandor becoming jealous, and the vampire makes his most awful wish to date by asking the Djinn to turn Marwa into Freddie. In the process, he not only destroys Guillermo’s relationship but effectively wipes Marwa out of existence. It neatly displays the distances Nandor will go to for his own selfish desires and how little he cares for the feelings of others by completely disregarding both Guillermo and Marwa, but even this narrative understanding of why this happened to Marwa doesn’t make her departure feel any less abrupt or disappointing.
Marwa, while clearly being a vessel for the show to exemplify Nandor’s frivolousness, was poised to be an interesting character. She was brought back to be Nandor’s supposed true love, but as we saw him start to make changes to her, a different narrative option appeared for her — one that would let her branch off into her own life and perhaps help Nandor realize the error of his ways. We see little of Marwa, but we understand that she longs for connection not just with her husband but with the others as well. She asks to go along to the night market with the gang and goes to Nadja’s girls' night to watch Mamma Mia, and through these things, however small, we get a sense of internal life from her. She’s an individual, and this is what makes her ultimate fate of being forcibly morphed into a carbon copy of another person, with Marwa herself completely forgotten, so egregious.
In this season's home renovation episode, we saw how Nandor’s wish to make her thoughts align with his has caused her to similarly want to distance herself from him. This choice seemed like it could easily set up the kind of wishing narrative we’ve been told for centuries: wishes don’t work out how you want them to. Perhaps Marwa could’ve just become to Nandor what Nandor is to everyone else, exposing his flaws to his own face and existing purely to show how useless his wishes were in getting what he actually wanted. You cannot wish a person into being exactly what you want, because then they will cease being whoever they were in the first place. Marwa could’ve been the final nail in the coffin for Nandor to show that even when he controls everything in a relationship, it still doesn’t work out because he is the problem. In the end, Marwa only evaporates from the narrative in order to show Nandor’s selfishness in other ways.
Marwa seemed like an important and interesting figure at her introduction. We’d been hearing about Nandor’s 37 wives from his time as the ruler of All Qolnidar since Season 1, yet when we finally get to meet Marwa we learn very little about her — only that whoever she is, she’s still not up to Nandor’s impossible standards. She’s kind with a desire to befriend the other vampires, and she seems to genuinely want her relationship with Nandor to work even before he starts changing her mind with wishes. Her presence throughout the season seemed to be building to something, and she offered a unique opportunity for someone close to Nandor besides Guillermo to be able to actually do something about his actions. In the end, however, Nandor’s selfishness won out and he (and the narrative) deemed hurting Guillermo as the top priority. Any potential Marwa had to become her own person or bring Nandor’s hubris back to bite him is lost in a puff of smoke as she completely transforms into a carbon copy of a modern white British guy. It’s a disappointing end — not just because it doesn’t provide the usual wish-based comeuppance, but because we’ve seen just enough of Marwa to want more for her before the story erases her entirely. Marwa could have been so much more than just something to illustrate the lengths Nandor will go to for his own satisfaction, but by destroying her in a manifestation of his jealousy, that’s all we’ll get to see her be.