The Shards Recap: Star-Crossed Lovers

The Shards
Hamlet
Season 1 Episode 8
Editor’s Rating ★
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“I don’t even know who I am anymore, or why I do what I do,” Liz Schaffer tells Steven Reinhardt in the penultimate episode of The Shards. “I’m just an object now.” Behold the plight of the Ryan Murphy character, cursed to behave nonsensically and flit wildly from plotline to plotline based on the writer’s whims. Back in episode three, I noted that Murphy’s narrative inconsistency has been a staple of his work since the 2000s, but The Shards is hitting new heights of incoherence. There’s so little cohesion from week to week that last episode’s dramatic cliffhanger — Susan in handcuffs after Rhonda accuses her of kidnapping — is brushed off in an aside in the opening scene. (Rhonda recanted and got sent to a mental health facility, while Susan spent 45 minutes in jail. Okay then!) In “Hamlet,” the show suddenly returns to the source material and hits plot beats from the novel, but these moments feel like a desperate attempt to get the train back on the tracks before the finale. Sadly, this train has been careening off a cliff for the better part of the season.

To add insult to injury, the writers inexplicably make this a Very Special Episode about Shakespeare, with the wonderful Noma Dumezweni stepping in as the Buckley School’s Shakespeare seminar teacher, Ms. Rogers. In classic high school show fashion, the plays she’s assigning her students reflect the problems they’re dealing with outside the classroom. Case in point: Romeo and Juliet, “a play about death, obsession, angst, and love,” as she puts it. “It’s about what it feels like to be a teenager.” While Bret insists in his voiceover that “​​Matt Kellner’s death changed everything,” most of his classmates are indeed too consumed with romantic strife to care. Thom, in particular, has been driven to near madness by the distance he feels from Susan, who reasonably pushes back on the idea that Romeo and Juliet dying by suicide is somehow aspirational. Age-wise, we’re talking about an eighth grader and a sophomore, and Susan has a point that if they’d just broken up, they probably would have gotten over it. “Wrong, they’re soulmates,” Thom fires back. “Juliet’s special. She’s not some eighth-grade slut, she’s an angel.” What a way with words he has.

Thom’s uncomfortable intensity carries over to Hamburger Hamlet, where the tension between the couple finally reaches a breaking point. “Do you care about anything besides the things that you personally experience every day?” Susan asks. Thom doesn’t, of course, but it’s a little strange that he admits it. In general, as I’ve been lamenting weekly, his character is the worst-defined of Bret’s friend group, with his only real characteristic being abandonment issues triggered by an absent father. He’s a football player, but we’ve never seen him play, and he loves Susan, but we haven’t gotten any sense of their relationship, or why ending it would be such a big deal. “I love you, Susan,” Thom tells her. “I would die without you.” Susan maturely answers, “I don’t want to be with someone who needs me to survive.” At this point, the two begin (deep sigh) performing lines from Romeo and Juliet while dressed as the title characters. I think the intention here is more camp than pathos, but the execution is so clumsy that it just made me cringe. When Susan finally rips off the Band-Aid and says it’s time to break up, Thom suggests they slit their wrists in the bathroom. It’s a staggering escalation, one that feels out of character even as I struggle to get a handle on what Thom’s character actually is. Susan is appropriately horrified, but once her disgust passes, the now-exes share a tender moment. She assures him she’s doing this for herself and not for Robert, and that she’s not abandoning Thom. Troublingly, he uses this moment to remind her of what happens in Romeo and Juliet: “The lovers die.” Susan asks if he’s threatening her. “I’m just reminding you how the story ends,” Thom says.

Back in Shakespeare class, we’ve moved on to Macbeth. The only real reason to breeze through the curriculum this quickly is so that we can hear about the cycles of revenge, with Robert quoting the line “blood will have blood.” Is anyone in The Shards getting revenge at this point, though? I think the writers really just wanted to show Steven making an entrance at Hamburger Hamlet while we hear Ms. Rogers saying, “Lady Macbeth is one of the great villains of literature.” The connection is tenuous, at best — who is Steven’s Macbeth in this scenario? I’ll try not to overthink it. Steven is meeting with Liz so he can hand over her Valium and Halcion prescriptions, and to let her know that he’s seen the porno she made with Ryan. While she panics, he soothes her by revealing that he’s purchased every negative and will hold them for safekeeping. In exchange, he wants her to go full Nancy Reagan (now there’s a Lady Macbeth) by whispering in Terry’s ear that he needs to option Bret’s film, Less Than Zero. Steven’s big dream is to be a producer on the movie, which feels underwhelming to me, perhaps because I know the real Less Than Zero didn’t exactly light up the box office. Liz and Steven then perform some Macbeth in costume, because of course they do.

And that’s it for the Scottish play, as we move right along to Hamlet. Bret is naturally overrelating to the title character: “We were both princes, we were both secretive, and we both knew that something very rotten was afoot in our own kingdoms.” Again, feels like a stretch! Before Bret can continue to self-identify as Shakespeare’s most famous hero, he’s questioned by Detectives Donaldson and Fregosi, who wonder if Bret isn’t being honest about the nature of his relationship with Matt. “My secrets were catching up to me,” Bret says in another painfully on-the-nose voiceover. “My anxiety from concealing my sexuality had inadvertently led to becoming a suspect.” I’m so tired of clunky dialogue telling us things we already know. Back at home, Bret has another scare when a figure who looks an awful lot like the Trawler cuts the power and lurks ominously in the backyard. It’s a close call, but the figure eventually drives off. There’s something even worse waiting for Bret on his bed, however: a VHS tape that shows him having sex with his girlfriend’s father.

In a flashback, we see Bret meeting Terry at his Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow, though the show holds off on depicting the sexual encounter between them. Instead, we get a didactic voiceover from Bret explaining that he wasn’t the mature adult Terry insisted he was, and that the power and age discrepancy between them meant he didn’t have real agency. I understand why The Shards is applying a more overtly #MeToo lens to what Ellis writes in his novel, but it’s frankly cowardly for the series to avoid showing any physical contact between the two characters, a choice made worse by Bret’s Wonder Years-style reflections. (“This wasn’t what I wanted, but it wasn’t so bad. Or maybe it was. What did I know anyway? I was just a kid.”) Sometimes it’s okay to let the audience sit with discomfort! It’s okay to put problematic behavior on display without reiterating that it’s wrong. As with the constant references to the characters being 18 — instead of 17, as they are in the novel — the show seems terrified of ruffling feathers. Bret, meanwhile, is too freaked out to begin processing a sexual experience he couldn’t consent to. As he admits, “I would have rather been outed as a psychotic serial killer than a homosexual.”

Like Hamlet, Bret is plagued by paranoia. When he gets a phone call the next day, he assumes it’s the Trawler and is surprised to discover it’s Robert’s aunt, Abigail (Constance Zimmer), who wants to talk. They meet at Hamburger Hamlet, where she fills Bret in on more of Robert’s backstory. Robert’s breakdown was set off by his mother’s death, a supposed accident that Robert’s father had serious doubts about. He’s the one who sent Robert away to the developmental center. Abigail also reveals that Robert visited her the previous summer, and he was indeed at that May 1980 showing of The Shining in Westwood. The reason he lied about it is that he was there with Katherine Latchford, the Trawler’s first victim, and he didn’t want anyone to make the connection. “I love my nephew very much, but… I am not blind, and I don’t think you should be blinded by him either,” Abigail warns. Overall, it’s a nothing scene, and I resent the fact that Murphy got a Love Story standout (and Emmy nominee!) for such a thankless role.

After his meeting with Abigail, Bret is more certain than ever that Robert is the Trawler, and now he has proof. As he arrives home, he reflects, “Looking back at that point, all I knew for sure was that something was rotten in the state of California,” a line that would hit harder if this weren’t the second “something rotten” reference in 20 minutes. Imagine Bret’s surprise to find Robert waiting for him on his bed, having been questioned again thanks to Bret’s accusations. “Why do you hate me so much?” Robert asks tearfully. “Is it because I look this way? Too perfect? It kills me that they don’t see the real me. This me. The boy with the broken heart.” I’m sorry to put it so plainly, but this is the worst writing we’ve seen on the show so far. Nevertheless, it works on Bret. Even as he maintains that there are questions about Robert he can’t look past, Bret is clearly turned on by the other boy’s vulnerability. He wipes away a tear, and suddenly they’re kissing, tentatively at first and then with more passion. We don’t see them have sex — the show remains oddly chaste — but they wake up together the next morning. “To be or not to be,” Robert says when he leaves. “That is the question.” It’s probably supposed to mean something, but like so much of The Shards, I’m left scratching my head.

For Book Readers Only

• I’ve complained about how not gay this adaptation is, so I guess I should be pleased about Bret and Robert consummating their relationship. It’s much more interesting in the book, though, when Robert sadistically seduces Bret only to reject him at the last moment, laying the groundwork for what happens next. 

• Meanwhile, the sex between Bret and Terry happens on the show almost exactly as Ellis writes it, but we only hear about it via Bret’s graphic description. Because The Shards isn’t willing to really go there, the whole thing is a shrug.

• I’m surprised the incriminating footage is now linked to the Trawler. In the book, Liz’s private detective takes photos, which Liz cruelly passes on to Debbie. Given how the series has expanded Liz’s role, you’d think they’d keep that in. 

• Also baffled by the change to the scene between Bret and Abigail, who in the book is inadvertently raising Bret’s suspicions while trying to protect Robert. Does this Abigail actually think he’s the Trawler? 

• Minor point, but it’s driving me insane that Hamburger Hamlet is the only place anyone ever goes on this show. In the book, Abigail meets Bret at La Scala, a great Beverly Hills restaurant that still exists.

• The scene of the Trawler with the flashlight is based on a very similar scene that takes place in Palm Springs in the novel and is, no joke, one of the scariest things I’ve ever read. The fact that the show couldn’t manage even a modicum of suspense with the same material shows how utterly sauceless this adaptation is.