Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards is a serial-killer story, but it’s far more interested in probing the depths of its unreliable narrator’s psychology than providing neat, satisfying answers. Especially when it comes to unmasking the Trawler, there’s always room for doubt. Looked at in the most charitable light possible, Ryan Murphy’s TV adaptation seeks to preserve that ambiguity. After all, when the credits roll on this season and/or series finale, everything is still up in the air. We don’t know the identity of the Trawler, we don’t know who tried to kill Terry, we don’t know who killed Debbie’s horse, we don’t know who attacked Susan, we don’t know if Bret was right in any of his assumptions about Robert, we don’t even know if the two of them really hooked up. We also don’t know why any of it should matter, of course, which makes the galling lack of closure here a little less offensive. If I cared more, I would be furious right now.
Obviously, I would’ve preferred an attempt to recreate the book’s intense claustrophobia, that potent mix of fear and isolation and distrust and unexpressed grief and overwhelming malaise, over whatever we got here. But Murphy chose a more straightforward yet free-floating take on the source material, and this one calls for some answers. Yet “Stairway Tto Heaven” is almost perversely dedicated to leaning into ambiguity when the story calls for some clarity, and none of it feels purposeful. It just feels like the show raising possibility after possibility, then leaving them all dangling without any guarantee that they mean anything. Nothing means anything.
Let’s start with one of the many major threads this season: the love triangle. As I mentioned last week, this story has never had stakes. For one, none of the three characters are well-defined, nor do any of their performers manage to transcend the stock-type characterizations. It was also always clear where it was heading: Susan would leave Thom and be with Robert. Instead of complicating that dilemma, or at least showing Susan’s internal struggle to rupture her perfect-girl image by blowing up her relationship and life, the show remained in one boring mode, with Robert repeatedly humiliating Thom and smugly enjoying his secure position of power.
That continues here, first when Susan responds to Thom’s same old Robert concerns by directing him to the teen suicide hotline. He also proposes to her, weirdly—but again, Susan was never going to stay with Thom, and none of that changes here. Susan and Robert getting together is inevitable, as is their oddly chaste (and interrupted) first kiss later on.
The only particularly climactic or unexpected development in this storyline is the attack on Susan in her home, itself a new source of unanswered questions. It sure seems like Thom is the culprit, based on the timing and Graham Campbell’s unconvincing line readings as Thom fills Susan in on supposedly saving her, but the episode never confirms or denies her theory. In fact, she seems to move on pretty quickly, flipping almost immediately from fear to rage and claiming that tonight is the night she stops protecting Thom. Whatever that means, there’s no time to see how it plays out.
“Moving on pretty quickly” is a common theme in this show, which is funny considering these characters will supposedly be haunted by these events for the rest of their lives. Yet there’s no real sense of how Bret is processing his sexual encounter with Terry. Most perplexing is Debbie’s reaction to the tape of her father and boyfriend having sex. Hayes Warner is solid as Debbiein this role, but the script doesn’t allow her character to process this earth-shattering news the way she deserves. Instead, it just leads to another hollow power play, with Debbie using this leverage to extract endless gifts from Terry and reluctant sexual attention from Bret.
I guess there’s a version of this storyline that could be fun, with Debbie waging psychological warfare on her family and boyfriend and channeling her own repressed horror and sadness into career and social advancement. As usual, though, the show hasn’t done the work to make any of it interesting, especially because there’s noit won’t even confirmation of who killed Debbie’s horse, Spirit. (It could be Terry or Steven or Bret or the Trawler or anyone, really.) The sudden mention of a campaign for prom queen seven months away just reads as a lame tease of a season-two storyline that probably won’t ever happen.
Really, most of this finale is focused on the Schaffer clan, starting with that bizarre intro scene setting up the various suspects in the attempted murder of Terry. The voiceover here wastes a lot of time by making sure to list all the reasons why these people would want the man dead, even though we’re fully aware. And then the actual moment doesn’t happen until near the end of the episode—and without any extra answers about who actually did it. I’m not even sure the writers know.
At least Terry seems somewhat tethered to the main story through Bret. I remain mystified by the scenes of Liz and Steven, both individually and together. Evan Rachel Wood is doing good work and Jordan Roth is having fun, but it’s like they exist in an entirely different series. There’s no weight to Steven and Terry’s confrontation about the Less Than Zero movie, for example; it’s just connective tissue so that Steven can be a plausible suspect for Terry’s fall later on. He doesn’t even use the blackmail material we know he has.
If Debbie’s “Unmasked” Halloween party was supposed to be the real climax of this finale, it’s a major letdown; again, the sole surprise is Terry’s fall, but the episode deflates that tension by dropping it at the beginning. Really, very little of this finale feels like a finale. Bret and Robert’s heated conversation hits the same beats as always, with Robert denying every accusation (including, this time, the fact that they slept together) and Uno-Reverse-Carding Bret with some intriguing suspicions of his own. The final scene itself, with the whole gang convening at the station while the cops claim to know which of them is the Trawler, is most insulting. “That’s when things really got crazy”? What are we doing here?
It’s extremely difficult to imagine this ending working for anyone, even a fan of this show (they presumably exist). Rather than tying anything together or offering even some basic clarifications of motivations, “Stairway Tto Heaven” elects to simply pile on more mysteries and leave every possible explanation open. It’s a jumbled mess, just like the majority of this show—and as with many of Murphy’s recent projects, it suggests the writers don’t care much about any of this themselves.
With all that said, I only really have one thing left to say, something I’ve avoided including in these reviews since the beginning. But there’s really no other appropriate way to end this season and bid Ryan Murphy’s latest disappointment adieu. The Shards? More like The Sharts.
Stray observations
- “Why is everyone so invested in a script from a fucking teenager?” Good question, Terry.
- “I love you. You know how aroused you make me.” Credit to Igby Rigney for making this line so funny.
- Does Susan really think Bret killed Spirit? That made no sense to me, nor did the suggestion that Bret killed the horse out of jealousy. It’s not like Bret is dying to spend more time with Debbie, and Susan knows that as well as anyone.
- In general, we’re told over and over how much Susan’s friendship matters to Bret, but I have no sense of what that bond really looks like. His jealousy of Robert is more interesting than Thom’s jealousy of Robert, but there’s still no specificity to it.
- Why don’t we see Debbie explicitly tell Terry what she saw on the tape? Knowing him, it could be anything, and I guess she wants to play on that fear. But it’d be way more cathartic to see her call him out on what he actually did. Right now, the episode almost leaves it unclear what Debbie actually did see.
- That attack on Susan wasn’t even scary.
- “The theme of the event was ‘Unmasked,’ which was ironic, because by the end of the night, many, if not all of our secrets were going to come out.” First of all, that’s not what “ironic” means. Second of all, pretty much none of their secrets came out, unless we’re really supposed to think all of that will happen down at the station. Either way, it’s a stupid tease that I didn’t believe for a second.
- The cops mention that Katherine, Matt, and Rhonda’s disappearances are all tied to the same individual. What about the other Trawler victims mentioned earlier in the series?
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