TV Recap: "The Shards" Episode 8 — A Blackmail Tape Rocks Bret's World
In the aftermath of homecoming, The Shards goes back to school and shakes things up with a Shakespeare-centric penultimate episode. William Shakespeare may not have written about serial killers, but her certainly captured love and loss across his most revered plays, and those parallels are mined this week, with characters at times appearing in Renaissance garb to further underscore the themes. Here is a recap of Ryan Murphy’s “Hamlet.”
Episode 8: “Hamlet” - Written by Lenore Zion & Charles Rogers & Juli Weiner
Bret Ellis (Igby Rigney) arrives late to meet his friends at Hamburger Hamlet. They’ve been playing a voting game, declaring Thom Wright (Graham Campbell) the poorest and Robert Mallory (Homer Gere) the sexiest. Asked to submit a question, Bret asks, “Who is the Trawler?” while looking at Robert. Susan Reynolds (Kaia Gerber) votes for Rhonda, who is now in a mental wellness facility after falsely declaring Susan to have been her abductor. Regardless, the votes come in, and while most voted for the Riders of the Afterlife, one person submitted Bret’s name. “Looks like you’re the Trawler, Bret,” Robert gloats. Bret’s girlfriend, Debbie Schaffer (Hayes Warner), is upset that he hasn’t returned her calls for the past 18 days. “I was at the police station giving testimony,” he explains. “Matt Kelner is dead.” He tells them how he found Matt’s head in the trophy case when the power went out. “Somebody wanted me to find it,” he adds, staring down Robert, who seems unshaken.
After a week-long closure, classes resumed with constant police presence at the school. We meet Mrs. Rogers (Noma Dumezweni), the Shakespeare 101 teacher, whose current unit is on Romeo & Juliet. “Teenagers think they’re in love, but it goes away,” Susan says during a discussion about the play’s themes. Thom counters her argument, saying teenagers can feel love like adults and that even at their age, if you can’t be with the one you love, you should kill yourself. “Romeo and Juliet should’ve moved on,” Susan snaps, discrediting Thom’s belief that they were soulmates.
The mood is tense at Hamburger Hamlet that night as Susan and Thom sit together doing homework. They argue over their opposing views of Romeo & Juliet, and Thom claims he can’t live without Susan. “Thom, I need some space,” she says, breaking up with him. Thom thinks Robert is the cause of her change in attitude towards him. He asks the waiter for a steak knife, and when it arrives, Thom presses it to a main artery, suggesting that Susan join him in the bathroom to end their lives together. She takes his hand, asking for the knife, and when he gives ot to her, she scolds him, claiming he’s a guy who peaked in senior year, echoing Robert’s statements. “We’re done, Thom,” she sighs. He tries to stop her from leaving, promising to be different, but she says she wants the old him. “I hate myself,” he cries as he leaves.
The next class is about Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3, with Mrs. Rogers leading a discussion about the side effects of revenge. “Blood will have blood,” Robert says about the need to wound those who wound you. “Everyone loses in the end,” Susan adds. Rogers ends the class with a reminder about Lady Macbeth’s ramifications of her plotting: “Something wicked this way comes.”
Liz Schaffer (Evan Rachel Wood) has lunch with Steven Reinhardt (Jordan Roth) at Hamburger Hamlet, who schmoozes up to the boss's wife. He transferred her prescriptions into elegant bottles and sent a memo to the staff to address her as “Ms.” rather than “Mrs.” so she isn’t defined by her husband. Then he drops a bombshell: “I know about the porno film,” he says, saying that it’s playing in Echo Park and he knows her scene partner is Ryan. To protect her, he took the liberty of buying up all the negatives, but he recognizes that her true intention was to become an actress. “Terry doesn’t see me as a contender in this industry, so I’m going to need your help in bringing to life a grand vision,” Steven reveals, wanting to produce Bret’s screenplay, Less Than Zero. He tells her there’s a star-making role in it for her and instructs her to whisper, “Less Than Zero will make you a hundred million dollars” in Terry’s ear repeatedly while he sleeps.
Mrs. Rogers’ next lesson on Hamlet is interrupted by Detectives Fregosi (Chris Conner) and Donaldson (Constantine Malahias), who pull Bret out of class. They interrogate him about his relationship with Matt, asking why he didn’t disclose that he went to Matt’s house the day he disappeared. They got a lot of information from their interview with Robert, implicating that Bret and Matt were more than friends. “I didn’t have an alibi,” Bret’s monologue shares about how hiding his sexuality turned him into a suspect. The detectives also heard Bret on audio from Dance Off vowing to help Debbie win, questioning if he was involved in Cha Cha’s death too.
Bret gets home after dark, grabbing a beer from the fridge. The power goes off, and he tries to reset the breaker, but it won’t start. When a light shines through his back window, he ducks down. There’s a heavy knock at the window. “Robert? I know it’s you!” he calls. He runs to his bedroom and locks his door. When the power comes back on, he hears a car drive away. That’s when he notices an envelope on his desk that wasn’t there before. Inside, he finds a VHS tape with a note on it. “Play me,” the note reads. It also includes some damning photographs. Bret puts the tape in the VCR.
The video, shot through a window at the Beverly Hills Hotel, shows Bret sleeping with Debbie’s father, Terry Schaffer (Wes Bentley). We see the attached memory, with Terry offering Bret a drink and complimenting him on how mature his writing is, saying he understands adult things. “Terry was wrong,” Bret’s voiceover says. “I didn’t understand adult things. I just thought I did.” Bret waxes in retrospect about feeling a sense of control in the moment, but that it was unlike his times with Matt and Ryan. He had told himself it was what he wanted, but he regretted it. “All I knew was that it was 1981 and I was 18 and closeted. I would’ve rather been outed as a psychotic serial killer than a homosexual.”
Mrs. Rogers’ Hamlet unit continues, talking about his paranoia and hallucinations. Bret and Robert are in the middle of exchanging opposing views when the detectives return to take another student out of class, Robert this time. “Goodnight, sweet prince,” Robert whispers to Bret on his way out.
Bret received a surprising phone call from Robert’s aunt, Abigail (Constance Zimmer), and met her at Hamburger Hamlet. “Robert says you don’t like him much,” she says, asking Bret not to tell Robert that they met. “Why was he in the facility?” Bret asks. She tells him that Robert’s father put him there after his mother died. “Robert wasn’t home, but he was the one who found her,” she reveals. He came to stay with her that summer, 1980. “That’s when you said you saw him, right?” she asks. Bret repeats that he saw Robert during a screening of The Shining that summer. She confirms he went to see that movie with a girl, Katherine Latchford. “That’s the Trawler’s first victim,” Bret explains. She is aware, and Robert didn’t want anyone thinking he was connected to him. “I love my nephew very much, but I’m not blind, and I don’t think you should be blinded by him either.”
“I knew with certainty who the Trawler was,” Bret’s voice-over explains. When he gets home, he finds Robert in his house, lying on his bed. “What do you want from me, Bret?” Robert asks, seeming defeated. “They threatened to book me,” he adds, saying they accused him of horrific things he’s incapable of doing. “They think that I’m doing them because of you.” Robert laments that he’s been through enough with his mother’s death. “I’ve never hurt anybody. That’s not who I am. Why do you want it to be? Why do you hate me so much?”
Bret tells Robert he doesn’t hate him, but brings up the things he can’t ignore about Robert’s history. Robert says he suffers from depression and anxiety, but he’s not a bad person. Bret’s hand cradles Robert’s face, leaning in to kiss him. He brushes one of Robert’s tears away with his thumb, climbing on top of him. They take off their shirts and begin making out.
When Bret wakes up, Robert is looking at him. “To be or not to be,” Robert says, leaning in. “That is the question.” Bret stares up at the ceiling, smiling.
To be continued next Wednesday, September 9th, at 9/8c on FX and Hulu in the season finale, “Stairway to Heaven.”
With the city on lockdown, Debbie hosts a Halloween party that will change everything.
Songs Featured in this Episode:
- “O Superman” by Laurie Anderson