Forget the Vampires. Guillermo is the True Hero of What We Do in the Shadows.

Anyone who loves Guillermo de la Cruz should hope he never gets what he wants. Those passionately mixed feelings are part of the magic of FX's What We Do in the Shadows, which began as a simple mockumentary about vampires in Staten Island but has become a hilarious hero's epic.

To wit: We're watching Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) become the center of the story, but we're feeling sweet agony because he doesn't realize he's the hero. He still thinks he's a supporting character to the vampires, no matter how much proof he gets to the contrary.

The evidence has certainly been mounting in Season 4, which concludes tonight. This entire season has been about allowing the people you love to change, but at the same time it's become increasingly clear that the show's supernatural characters are never going to stray too far from the status quo. Without spoiling anything about tonight's finale, their essential laziness and selfishness prompt laugh-out-loud resolutions to both the vampire nightclub saga and the rebirth of Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch). But Guillermo, our polite and nerdy audience surrogate, really does evolve. He comes out of the closet, for one thing, and unlike Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), he pulls off his scheme to skim money from the club. He also briefly lands a boyfriend and reconnects with his family, discovering they're all vampire hunters just like him.

This is what heroes do! They grow into their power. They learn to love. Maybe not all of them steal thousands of dollars from an undead disco, but that's just Guillermo's version of gathering his resources to make a decisive move. He's this close to becoming a swashbuckling vampire hunter, enacting his family legacy while romancing cute boys from coast to coast.

And damn it, that's what he deserves. Guillén and the show's writers have done such a good job evoking Guillermo's golden heart and quick wit, even when his vampire bosses are treating him like crap, that we have no choice but to root for him. When he wants to impress his family, he decorates the vampire mansion with a My So-Called Life poster. When he wants to romance his boyfriend, he takes him to see Wicked. This is the champion the world has been waiting for.

Yet despite his potential, Gullermo is still obsessed with becoming a vampire. It's the great, delicious irony at the center of his character, and it makes his story even more captivating. Because what if he really does get turned? It obviously will be terrible for him in the long run. He's a born vampire hunter, and more importantly, he's a sweet and empathetic person. None of that squares with life as blood sucker. He needs someone to shake some sense into him, since he clearly can't hear us when we shout at the TV.

Instead, Guillermo ends the season with a clever ploy to become a vampire at last. This is stressful because his plan is shrewd enough to work, and we'll have to wait months to see if it does. It's going to be hard not to worry. We need him. Staten Island needs him. Hopefully he'll abandon his desire to be undead and instead embrace his role as the bespectacled gay hero with a taste for button-down cardigans that he was always meant to be.

The Season 4 finale of What We Do in the Shadows airs September 6 at 10:00 PM on FX.

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Mark Blankenship has been writing about arts and culture for twenty years, with bylines in The New York Times, Variety, Vulture, Fortune, and many others. You can hear him on the pop music podcast Mark and Sarah Talk About Songs.