Well, that was a slapper of an episode, wasn’t it? With only one episode remaining now, FX’s The Shards has established some pretty serious candidates for the secret identity of the serial killer called the Trawler, while also digging deep into the way the characters’ extravagant wealth and privilege is a sort of rot that eats away at family, friendship, business, and romance with equal voraciousness. And it remains fun as hell to watch. This week, appropriately, the gang’s favorite restaurant Hamburger Hamlet is where the meatiest action takes place.

The show opens with the kids at the Hamlet playing a half-sexy, half-cruel game called Secret Ballot, in which they all cast their votes for which of the five of them has the best ass or the sexiest happy trail…or which of them is the poorest, or most likely to be the Trawler. Thom, who gets voted poorest unanimously (Bret isn’t there yet, to be fair), is understandably upset that his father’s abandonment of the family is getting used against him by his so-called friends.

But Thom’s toughest time at Hamburger Hamlet is yet to come. Susan has been quickly released from jail after Really Rhonda, who has since been shipped off to a mental institution much to her erstwhile friends’ condescending satisfaction, recanted her accusation. At lunch with her friends she complains of the trauma of it, though Debbie says it’s just made her more of a legend.

But it does seem to have gotten her thinking about her future. She breaks up with Thom at the Hamlet, tired of his clinginess and simply out of love with a guy who is, after all, just a childhood crush. Their break-up argument veers all over the place, with Susan trying every method available to deflect Thom’s increasingly erratic and eventually threatening declarations of love. At one moment she’s telling him she’ll be in his life for a long time; at another, she’s taking away a steak knife from him and responding to his threats of murder-suicide by repeatedly telling him fuck you. Seconds after that, she’s telling him he’s perfect. 

I think she means all of it when she says it! Long, intense, meaningful relationships between young people who wind up at different levels of maturity often end in this kind of chaotic conversation, a wildfire of declarations and accusations that just burns until it exhausts itself. It’s a very effective and surprisingly moving scene.

But let’s not forget that it also shows the continuing influence of the cult on Thom, who feels everyone has abandoned him; no doubt the Riders of the Afterlife will fill the void Susan and his father have left behind. For his part, Thom seems to blame it all on Robert, and appears eager for revenge. His knife-wielding behavior with Susan is extremely alarming.

Elsewhere in the episode, though still right there at Hamburger Hamlet, the fabulous Steven strolls in to do lunch with (and deliver drugs to) his boss Terry’s wife Liz. He also comes bearing news: He’s seen her porno film with young Ryan, as have half the perverts in the area. But he’s bought up every negative on her behalf, preserving her reputation. For now, anyway: He’s kept the negatives as insurance. All he wants in return is for her to subliminally tell her big-shot producer husband “Less Than Zero will make you a hundred million dollars” in his ear a hundred times a night while he sleeps. Steven is a big fan of Bret’s treatment and novel draft, and he’s determined to direct the thing himself. 

But Steven continues to seem like a leading candidate for the Trawler, with his skulking and snooping and scheming. I also suspect he’s the videographer behind the tape Bret receives from a black-clad burglar who may or may not be the Trawler and/or Robert. The tape shows Bret having sex with Terry in exchange for getting his screenplay developed into a movie, an incident we didn’t even know about until now. It’s a blatant quid pro quo that the exceedingly creepy Terry is barely even coy about.

Bret, eager to show how adult he is, acts like it’s all perfectly fine. His narration chronicles the sex in graphic detail. But in the mirror afterwards, he looks like a broken person. He has realized that he’s not half as grown up as he thinks he is. Less Than Zero and his sleuthing attempts are basically just him wishcasting himself into adulthood. Confronted with a predatory ghoul like Terry, he realizes he’s just a kid.

There’s one more Hamburger Hamlet meeting of note. Bret gets called in to meet with Robert’s Aunt Abigail (Constance Zimmer), who tells him that Bret’s accusations are really screwing with Robert’s head. But then again, he really was at that screening of The Shining the previous year, and he lied about it because his date was none other than the Trawler’s first victim.

Does this mean he’s the Trawler? No more than the fact that he discovered his dead mother’s body means he was the person who killed her. Abigail seems to think Robert’s father was the culprit there. But she warns Bret not to be blind to who or what Robert really is.

And what would that be? In what turns out to be a dream sequence, though it’s no less powerful for that, Bret returns home to find Robert there waiting for him. Tearful and sincere for once, Robert begs to know why Bret hates him so much. He has depression and anxiety, yes, but “that doesn’t make me a bad person.

“Am I a bad person?” he asks. “Tell me I’m not, Bret.” That’s when they have sex.

Does the fact that it was all a dream make the scene less important? I don’t think so. It takes place right after Bret has learned what could well be exculpatory information about Robert — that contra all Bret’s suspicions, he didn’t kill his mom, but was effectively a secondary victim of his father’s likely murder of the woman. Bret’s still talking about this like he has slam-dunk proof of Robert’s guilt because of the movie discrepancy…but then he envisions the kind of relationship he might have with Robert if things were different, if Bret were less suspicious, if Robert acted less suspiciously. And it’s not bad. The episode even ends with Bret cryptically smiling, the closest thing to a happy ending we’ve gotten yet.

It’s certainly not the first to do so, but this stellar episode of carries with it quite the imprimatur if you like interesting television. Its cowriters are Juli Weiner, a five-time Emmy winner for her work on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver; Charles Rogers, the creator of Search Party; and Lenore Zion, the creator of Brand New Cherry Flavor. (If you like this show’s tales of Hollywood excess, you gotta watch Brand New Cherry Flavor. It’s on Netflix right now!) Its director is Max Minghella, a fascinating actor you’ve seen in The Handmaid’s Tale and the latest season of Industry. 

These ingredients mix perfectly, zippily advancing the potboiler plot and hitting all the show’s usual over-the-top wealth-satire notes, but taking time for several scenes of real emotional impact too. Meanwhile, guest star Noma Dumezweni (Murderbot) anchors things with lessons on Shakespeare, leading different characters to quote and picture themselves as Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and, you guessed it, Hamlet. It’s terrific stuff that leaves me wondering where next week’s finale will leave us. (At the Hamlet, most likely.)

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.