TV Recap: "The Shards" Episode 9 — The Season Ends on a Cliffhanger
After months of obsessing over a boy who might be a serial killer, Bret finally took Robert to bed. The final episode of FX’s television adaptation of The Shards moves swiftly past that with a potential kill. Was it the Trawler? Or like Cha Cha, was this a crime of passion? Here’s how the season ends.
Episode 9: “Stairway to Heaven” - Written by Juli Weiner & Charles Rogers
The episode opens on a bit of a prologue, finding Terry Schaffer (Wes Bentley) lying motionless on the foyer floor, blood leaking from his head. Someone seems to have pushed him over the upstairs banister, and there wasn’t just one person who wanted him dead.
Flashing back, we see Debbie Schaffer (Hayes Warner) in her bedroom staring at an envelope just like the one Bret received. She pulls out the tape and puts it in her VCR. We don’t see what she sees, but it’s fair to assume it’s the exact same tape Bret got. She looks disgusted.
Debbie barged into her father’s home office, interrupting his phone call, calling him by his first name. “I’m not daddy’s little girl anymore,” she says, saying she found out the worst thing possible about him. She won’t explain further, but demands payment for her silence. “I’m a killer; I inherited that quality from you,” she says, presumably referring to his shark-like business instincts. She wants a Ferrari and a screen test. “This is just the beginning of a long list of requests I’ll be coming to you with.” Terry gets furious, physically stopping his daughter from leaving, demanding what she knows. Debbie stays tight-lipped, feeling like she’s finally won something.
Thom Wright (Graham Campbell) asked Susan Reynolds (Kaia Gerber) to meet him at Hamburger Hamlet, apologizing for being too intense. She accuses him of killing Matt Kelner after his episode with the knife. He swears it was Robert, calling him a bad guy, but Susan refuses to hear it. She spoke to the school guidance counselor about Thom and gives him a card for the suicide hotline. It upsets him as he promises that he has a lot to live for, starting with their future together. He gets down on one knee to propose to Susan, who tries to back away. Debbie, who was waiting for Susan to join her at tennis practice, intervenes.
Instead of going to the tennis courts, Debbie takes Susan back to her house and tells her she has the court booked all day. With the Trawler causing so much fear that LA has canceled all Halloween plans, Debbie is hosting a party and wants help brainstorming a theme. But when she sees a lump under her covers, she assumes her mother is drunkenly sleeping in her bed again. Pulling back the covers, Debbie is horrified to find the severed head of her cherished horse, Spirit, staring back at her!
Liz Schaffer (Evan Rachel Wood) is upset, smoking and drinking by the fireplace, talking to Steven Reinhardt (Jordan Roth) about how she’s never seen Debbie hysterical before. Steven cleaned up the mess and shares that no prints were found on the head or at the stable where the rest of the horse’s mutilated body was found, its hooves removed. Liz thinks Terry did this, having grumbled about the cost of the horse for five years. Dr. Stone (Mark Bloom) enters with an update: he gave Debbie a sedative that will help her sleep until morning. Liz asks for a moment alone with him and asks for a shot of whatever he gave Debbie, too.
We see Steven on the set of one of Terry’s films, begging for some time to talk. “Things are changing between us and quickly,” he says, saying he’s changed a lot over the past 12 years and it’s time Terry made him a producing partner, taking credit for much of Terry’s success. “You are still nothing more than a coffee boy, Steven,” Terry says, threatening to fire him. Steven begs Terry to let him produce Less Than Zero, but Terry refuses and asks his assistant to pick up his dry cleaning. Steven walks away in tears.
Bret Ellis (Igby Rigney) gets into this chaos when Debbie invites him to swim, flaunting her sexy new Pool Boy (Juan Manuel Salcito). Bret asks if Terry got her a pool boy to cheer her up about Spirit. “I’ve learned, unfortunately at this young age, that there’s always a time you have to let go of your childish dreams,” she says, refusing to say why her dad has a new financial devotion to her. As they make out in the pool, she pouts about Bret’s lack of erection for her. He blames it on the water, but Debbie seems to know the truth now. She asks for his help to make her prom queen, saying that Terry is going to fund a writing campaign to help her beat Susan. She also tells him that going forward, they will have sex every Friday and Saturday, hinting that she knows detrimental information about Bret.
Susan has dinner with Robert Mallory (Homer Gere) at Hamburger Hamlet, telling him about Thor’s erratic behavior and complaining that her best friend Bret seems different now. “I don’t feel I can trust him,” she says, questioning if Bret killed Debbie’s horse, believing he was jealous of her bond with Spirit. Robert tells Susan she’s outgrown her friends and professes his love for her. He tells her he doesn’t want to rush things or hurt anyone’s feelings.
“It wasn’t until years later, after all the death and tragedy, that I learned how Robert had wormed his way into her confidence,” Bret’s narration reveals about this scene. He elaborates on later learning the sociopathic manipulation tactics that Robert was exhibiting. The narration segues into how brief Susan’s happiness would be.
We see Susan at home that night, all alone, as her phone rings. It’s that familiar heavy breathing with a crackling undertone. Hanging up, she locks her bedroom door, but then hears movement in the bathroom. A masked man in all black exits, holding a knife. Susan fights him, knocking him against the wall, causing him to drop the knife. She rushes into the bathroom, locking the door behind her, screaming. There’s a pounding on the door, and the voice calling out to her is Thom’s. “I was worried about you,” he explains. “I was watching you outside, and I saw him.” Thom claims he fought off the intruder and pushed him over the balcony, and while the door to the outside is open, there’s nobody on the ground below.
Bret planned to confront Robert at Debbie’s Halloween party. “I knew Robert’s secret. The problem was, he also knew mine.” He rented a tux for Debbie’s black-tie “unmasked” party, missing his dad as he struggled to tie his bow tie. He felt nostalgic for their youth, when he would trick-or-treat with Susan, Debbie, and Thom.
As Bret moves through the party, he hears Susan telling Thom that she knows he was pretending to be the intruder. He frantically denies it, but she doesn’t believe him.
Similarly, Bret confronts Steven, saying he knows he’s the one who videotaped him with Terry through the window. “Trick or treat, dumpling,” Steven muses.
Bret watches Terry as he finds Robert and invites him to his hot tub. “I never say no to a hot tub,” Robert says, smiling at Bret as he goes.
Liz and Debbie watch as Terry escorts Robert away, both seeing it clearly. Debbie apologizes for not seeing sooner how tough her mother's life is living with him. Liz vows to make Spirit’s killer pay. “We all know Daddy did it,” Debbie says. Mother and daughter hug, and as Liz walks away, she has a vengeful look in her eyes.
Bret stands at Debbie’s bedroom mirror, trying to fix his bow tie when Robert enters, his hair still wet from the hot tub. “It was all quite enlightening,” Robert taunts, adding another description: “Informative.” Robert helps Bret with his tie as Bret asks to talk about what happened between them. Robert acts like nothing happened, like it was all in Bret’s head. “You were never in my bed, just like you were never at The Shining,” Bret responds.
Robert accuses Bret of being obsessed with him again, asking why he cares whether he was at the movie. Bret reveals that he met his aunt, who told him Robert was at the movie with Katherine Latchford, the Trawler’s first victim. Robert dismisses the accusation, saying his aunt is a depressive alcoholic who can barely cash her alimony. Robert expresses pity for Bret, saying he read Death in Venice and can empathize with closeted homosexuals like Bret. “I feel bad for you, I really do,” Robert condescendingly tells Bret. “You have to get over this little crush that you have on me.”
Bret scoffs as Robert shares that he and Susan are in love, tears forming in his eyes. “I won’t let that happen,” Bret promises. “You will not have Susan. I will die before I let that happen.” Bret tells Robert that he is meeting with the detectives tomorrow to tell them about Robert’s date with Katherine Latchford. Robert stops Bret from leaving, saying he will join him to share what he knows about Bret. “I called your father’s place of work to inquire about his mysterious months-long disappearance,” Robert reveals. “They told me he never told them he was going on vacation. One day, he just didn’t show up. They presumed he quit.” Robert suggests that Bret murdered his parents, calling him sick. He accuses Bret of being the Trawler as fodder for his future novel.
Debbie and Susan enter and find Bret and Robert arguing. Susan asks to speak with Bret. “No, that’s ok, babe, I think I’m all caught up,” Bret scoffs at her. Steven interrupts, saying Oingo Boingo is performing in the backyard. Debbie takes Bret’s arm, and he leaves with her. On his way out, he catches Robert and Steven exchanging knowing glances.
Terry had confined himself to his home office, reading a script. A mysterious phone call got him out of his chair and into the landing. We see the killer’s point of view. “What do you want?” Terry asks as he's pressed against the banister and pushed over the edge. We see him fall to the floor, coughing up blood as he looks up at his killer, but we don’t see who it was.
Robert and Susan are making out in a bedroom when they hear a scream and rush out to look down. Terry’s body is still, blood leaking from the back of his head. Steven joins them on the banister, having come from another upstairs room. Bret and Debbie emerge from Debbie’s room. Liz and Thom step out of another room. They see Terry and all seem shocked, all except Robert, Bret notices, who seems unusually calm. Debbie rushes downstairs to try to resuscitate her dad, yelling for someone to call the police.
The next day, Bret arrives for his meeting with the detectives and finds Robert in the waiting room too. Robert pats the seat next to him and complains that there wasn’t any candy at the party. Bret tells him that’s not funny; Terry is on life support and might die. Robert shares his theory that Bret did dark things to get his film sold and that he resented Terry so much that he tried to kill him. Bret remains calm, telling Robert that he has indisputable evidence that he is the Trawler. “You will be going away in handcuffs,” Bret says if he talks to the detectives first. But instead, they are called in together.
As Detectives Fregosi (Chris Conner) and Donaldson (Constantine Malahias) lead Bret and Robert into a conference room, they both find it already full - Susan, Debbie, Thom, Liz, Steven, and Ryan (Daniel Dale) look up at them. “What I didn’t know then was that life was about to cleave into a before and after, and not just Robert’s and mine, but all of us,” Bret’s narration teases. The detectives reveal they have new evidence regarding the murder of Katherine and Matthew, plus Rhonda’s kidnapper, and that the person responsible is in the room. Bret looks at Robert and says, “I knew it.”
“And that’s when things really got crazy,” Bret’s narration closes out the season, teasing what may come if FX renews The Shards for Season 2. The future of the story, and the show, hangs in the balance, but there’s always Bret Ellis’ novel if fans want to visit the source material, although the series hasn’t been a straight adaptation this far.
Songs Featured in This Episode:
- “Ultravox” by Vienna
- “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes
- “Only a Lad” by Oingo Boingo
- “Our Lips Are Sealed” by The Go-Go's