The Shards Season-Finale Recap: This Is Not an Exit

The Shards
Stairway to Heaven
Season 1 Episode 9
Editor’s Rating ★
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Maybe it was the use of Ultravox’s “Vienna” — a song we haven’t heard on The Shards since the series premiere — but for a moment, I was convinced we were back on track. With the understanding that any course-correction would almost certainly be too little, too late, the finale’s opening scenes made me feel like the show might be approaching a level of entertainment that’s been missing for nearly the entire season. Then I kept watching. The deeper into the episode I got, the clearer it became that The Shards is doomed to incoherence, too far gone to ever put all these pieces back together into something satisfying. We get no surprises and no resolution, just build-up to an impressively anticlimactic ending. The final scene of “Stairway to Heaven” is such a “fuck you” to the audience that it’s clear this show never cared about the viewers or the much better novel it’s based on. My mistake for briefly believing otherwise.

After an opening scene that flashes forward to the mystery of who pushed Terry over the railing — sigh, we’ll get to it — we return to the Schaffer residence at present, where Debbie watches a VHS tape that we can assume shows her father and Bret in some very compromising positions. Like Bret in last week’s episode, Debbie is horrified by what she sees. Unlike Bret, she chooses to immediately use this to her advantage. She moves straight into blackmail mode, confronting Terry with the information she now possesses — she never says exactly what it is, but she doesn’t have to — and plainly stating her demands: Daddy is going to make her a star. “You have no talent,” Terry tells her, now that they’re being fully honest with each other. Debbie doesn’t let it faze her. “But I have information,” she counters. “I am now aware of something that Mommy could never prove.” Even in 1981, I’m a little dubious that she could actually destroy Terry’s career the way she’s threatening to. (Maybe if the show hadn’t been afraid to let Bret be underage.) Regardless, Debbie appears to have the upper hand.

Meanwhile at Hamburger Hamlet (where else!), Susan and Thom are having a very uncomfortable post-breakup conversation. “You threatened me with a knife the same week our classmate’s severed head was found in a trophy case,” she points out. Thom is not doing a great job of appearing any stabler now than he was then. Even as he maintains that there’s something very wrong with Robert, Susan notes that none of Robert’s behavior has been nearly as unhinged as Thom’s. Case in point: Thom uses this moment to propose marriage to Susan, who has already made it clear she doesn’t see a future for them. Luckily, Debbie arrives just in time to pull her bestie away before she has to respond. Living high on the newly upgraded lifestyle Terry is providing, Debbie’s only real disappointment is that it’s Halloween week and everything is canceled because of the Trawler. It’s a little hard to square her attitude with Bret’s insistence via voiceover that, “I was no longer some crazy Cassandra spewing hollow warnings; now everyone was afraid.” Are they?

Clearly, Debbie should be afraid, which she learns the hard way when she and Susan find the severed head of her horse, Spirit, in her bed. (The Trawler is a fan of The Godfather, apparently.) We don’t see much of Debbie’s reaction to this gruesome discovery, but Liz reports that her daughter was “hysterical and then deadly calm.” I find it hard to believe that Liz’s maternal instincts are persisting to the extent that she feels hurt by Debbie rejecting her comfort. I do buy that she’d tell Steven she thinks Terry, who has long hated Debbie’s horse, might have something to do with it. Surely there would be better ways to dispose of Spirit than stabbing, decapitation, and hoof removal, but it could be revenge for the blackmail plot — not that Liz knows about that yet. Evan Rachel Wood continues to give her all in these scenes, and her interaction with the drug-dispensing Dr. Stone might just be the highlight of the finale for me. “My husband is a homosexual, my daughter hates me, there’s a serial killer targeting the glamorous,” she explains when he asks for the root of her anxiety. “Can you give me a shot of whatever you gave Debbie?”

However broken Debbie may be by Spirit’s mutilation, she seems perfectly fine by the time Bret meets her for a swim. There’s a “life goes on” quality to much of what happens on The Shards, but it feels like sloppy plotting for a return to normalcy so soon after life-altering trauma, much like Bret being relatively chill the day after finding his first love’s severed head. I did at least smile when Debbie confronted Bret about his absence, and he answered, “I’ve just been busy, and people around us keep getting murdered.” Fair enough! Debbie doesn’t go so far as to blackmail Bret, but she hints at the dangerous information she now wields as a way to get him on her team. Aside from demanding sex, she tells Bret that she will be prom queen in seven months and that he’ll be in charge of her campaign. The whole thing smacks of a planned storyline for a second season I doubt will ever happen. Elsewhere — yes, at goddamn Hamburger Hamlet — another couple is negotiating the terms of their relationship. Susan and Robert are finally together, or at least moving firmly in that direction. In his voiceover, Bret reflects on the way that Robert has manipulated and gained control over Susan, but I think it’s as simple as Robert being the only one to treat her normally. When he tells her, “I think you have to acknowledge that you might have outgrown your friends,” I’m inclined to agree.

But Susan has bigger problems than a fractured friend group. That night, she gets a phone call from the Trawler, who is already in her home and chases after her with a knife. The whole thing is a bit of a shrug — Susan manages to escape unharmed and hides in the bathroom, where she locks the door and shrieks her head off. I wish this show were capable of creating any suspense, but at least it’s given Kaia Gerber the opportunity to show off her screaming range. She’s not in the bathroom long before Thom comes to her rescue, telling Susan that he tussled with the Trawler and threw him off the balcony. It’s a very sus story, and not just because Thom doesn’t have a scratch on him. When they look down at the backyard, there’s no body. I’ll give The Shards credit for this homage to Carpenter’s Halloween, especially with so few other reminders that this is a Halloween episode. But it’s not like the sequence serves any real purpose. Despite her near-death experience, Susan is still going to Debbie’s Halloween party.

Yes, a Halloween party! What an exciting opportunity to make the finale pop by putting everyone in fun costumes. Or it would be, if they weren’t all doing black tie and attending “unmasked.” Bret says this is the moment when all their secrets will be revealed, which is, I’m sorry to say, a blatant lie. For his part, he promises that he’s finally going to confront Robert about being the Trawler — has he not been doing that all season? — and that he’ll lay out all his evidence at the party. When they’re face-to-face at Susan’s, however, things don’t go as planned. Robert is unbothered by Bret invoking Katherine Latchford, and he brushes off Aunt Abigail as a depressive alcoholic. In fact, he’s easily able to turn the tables on Bret. “I feel bad for you,” Robert tells him. “You have to get over this little crush that you have on me.” When Bret brings up that they slept together, Robert appears genuinely confused. Is he playing Bret, or is Bret delusional? Troublingly, Robert also shares that he called Bret’s dad’s job to inquire about the months-long vacation Bret’s parents are on. Work has no idea where Mr. Ellis is; he simply stopped showing up one day. “Is he on a permanent getaway with your mother in the basement, Bret?” Robert presses. “Did you hack them to pieces?” 

At this point, Robert calmly accuses Bret of being the Trawler, murdering kids so that he can write what he knows. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bret is less bothered by this than he is by the revelation that Robert and Susan are together now. There’s no time to process that, though — they’re interrupted by a scream from another room. Terry has been shoved over the railing by an unknown assailant, and is now bleeding out on the floor below. “Looks like he slipped… or crossed the wrong person,” Steven observes, which is probably not something I’d say out loud if I were standing over the broken body of my employer. At the police station where the party guests have been taken for questioning, Bret and Robert continue their tense tête-à-tête. Both think the other pushed Terry — Robert says Bret did it because Terry made him do things to get his script optioned, while Bret says Robert did it because he’s a sociopath. They each swear they have enough evidence to get the other locked up, depending on who talks to the cops first. Unfortunately, the detectives want to speak to them together. 

And not just Bret and Robert, it turns out — the boys are taken to a room with Susan, Debbie, Thom, Liz, Steven, and, for some reason, Ryan. Detectives Donaldson and Fregosi announce that they have information pertaining to the murders of Katherine Latchford and Matt Kellner, and the kidnapping of Rhonda Fox, and that they now believe the culprit is someone in this room. (What about the rest of the Trawler victims? Does the show even remember that Cha Cha was murdered a few episodes ago?) As the suspects look at each other suspiciously and the Go-Go’s “Our Lips Are Sealed” starts to play, it becomes clear that The Shards has no intention of solving this (or any) mystery. Did you actually think this show was going somewhere? Adding insult to injury, Bret hits us with a final voiceover promising a better second season: “And that’s when things really got crazy.” Roll credits. If you’re not booing at the screen, you’re not paying attention.

For Book Readers Only

• I’ve long wondered how the show was going to handle the Trawler’s identity, since the book ultimately reveals that the Trawler is really just cult members paying tribute to Robert. Bret even acknowledges there may be multiple killers in this episode. Who could detectives finger here that would make any sense? 

• In the novel, the Trawler’s attack on Susan and Thom is much scarier and horrifically violent — and even more disturbing when you learn who really did it. I have doubts that the show is willing to go there. 

• On the other hand, Robert’s interaction with Bret at the party does call Bret’s sanity into question. Did he fully imagine their hookup? Did he murder his parents? If the series continues, it could explore the idea of Bret as a dangerously unreliable narrator. 

• I imagine a second season would also solve the mystery of who pushed Terry, but I don’t know why we’re supposed to care. There’s already a serial killer on the loose, and that feels more important. In the book, we never learn who pushed Terry — or if he was pushed at all — because it doesn’t really matter. 

• Of all the changes this adaptation made, I can at least be grateful that Spirit’s death is way less graphic here than on the page. I’m still getting those images out of my head.