FX’s The Shards capped its current season with a finale that was less a conclusion and more a dare. The episode ends with the entire cast in a police station interrogation room as a cop announces someone in that room is a killer. Bret Easton Ellis’s narration caps it: “And that’s when things really got crazy.” It is a full commitment to the “this is just the beginning” gambit.
“And that’s when things really got crazy.”
The Funniest Lines of the Finale
The episode is packed with quotable absurdity. Liz Schaffer wails about “a serial killer targeting the glamorous.” Robert Mallory tells Bret his sexuality struggles are “some really heavy shit,” citing Death in Venice. Terry Schaffer dismisses his ambitious assistant Steven Reinhardt by saying, “You look like a prostitute businesswoman on a spaceship.”
Then there is Thom Wright, on his knees at Hamburger Hamlet after a disastrous proposal, watching his ex-girlfriend Susan get dragged away by her friend Debbie. He plaintively calls after them: “Think about it?”
A Comedy That Hides in Plain Sight
The show is funny on purpose, but that humor is often invisible to viewers. The series embodies everything it mocks: rich Hollywood teens, delusions of grandeur, violent psychosexual misadventures in mansions set to Ultravox’s “Vienna.”
The same disconnect hit Euphoria Season 3, The Idol from Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye, Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, and Brian De Palma’s Body Double. The Shards also borrows from giallo, the lurid Italian slasher genre, where overwrought visuals serve as a send-up of the material as it unfolds.
The Plot Thickens Without Resolving
No case gets closer to a solution. Debbie receives a videotape, implied to be a recording of her father Terry and Bret on the casting couch. Steven all but admits to filming it. Debbie uses it to blackmail her father and makes odd demands of Bret, noting he is not hard when they kiss in the pool.
Robert’s approach to Susan is different. He never makes demands, letting her come to him. Bret calls it a sociopath’s playbook. Neither Bret nor Thom is happy, and the game of chicken between Bret and Robert over who is the Trawler accelerates.
A Horse Head
It sure does seem to drive Thom to attempt to murder Susan in her bedroom. He claims he fought off an attacker and knocked him through a window, but Susan finds no sign of the struggle. She openly accuses him.
Debbie finds the severed head of her beloved horse, Spirit, in the bed where she expected to find her mother Liz sleeping. Liz has been sleeping there because it is “the only bed in this house where Terry hasn’t lied to her with his body.” The hooves are missing too. None of the hyperliterate characters mention that The Godfather used the same trick.
A Halloween Party
The episode builds to a black-tie Halloween party Debbie throws at her father’s expense. Terry is summoned from his office-lair and pushed off the balcony through a glass table in slow motion. Bret, Susan, Liz, Debbie, Steven, Thom, and Robert all have motive.
It is a wet Hollywood nightmare, rendered with all the heightened pitch of a dream. The season ends without resolution, betting that viewers will want more. The chutzpah is hard not to admire.
Source: decider.com
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