FX‘s The Shards loves lingering on beautiful things. Director Michael Uppdendahl’s lens luxuriates in the sight of a beaming, utterly fearless girl roller-disco dancing on her own in slow motion…on a circle of young, beautiful friends eating lunch, the camera whirling around and around them…on an incredible dancer commanding the camera…on a fast drive down a twisting, secret road…on a fallen model practicing her grand Oscar kiss-off…on a boy smelling his lost boyfriend’s jacket and crying. When this episode finds something nice to look at, it lets you know it, and does not let go.

The episode’s inciting incident is the disappearance of Really Rhonda (Ivy Wolk), an eccentric and beloved student in the gang’s class. Bret’s narration explains that she was what we would now call neurodivergent, and she displays Tourette’s-like symptoms. Mainly, Really Rhonda is herself, completely, at all times, up to and including her lingering love of the now-passé roller-disco trend. 

“She just didn’t care what people thought of her,” Bret says. “Can you imagine? The gift of that?” To be friends with Really Rhonda, as all the kids seem to have been, is to take a vacation from the image-obsessed lives all of them led at all other times. You can see why her disappearance really gets to Bret, the same way Matt’s did.

Bret continues his investigation into the case. He goes to Matt’s poolhouse and smells his jacket, crying during a lingering closeup. Then he receives a menacing phonecall which ends only when Bret uses Robert’s name. 

Next he follows Robert to a rental property owned by his aunt on Cielo Drive, site of some of the Manson murders. Bret waits until Robert leaves with an ominous bowling bag in his hand and investigates the place personally. “Being afraid is so lame. You are not a pussy,” he repeats to himself. 

Misleading crosscutting makes it look like he’s on the verge of rescuing Really Rhonda, when in fact he appears to have been too late. We see the Trawler, who’s been feeding her live eels, drag her out of the cage, while in the here and now Bret discovers a bloody jacket from his high school covering an equally bloody pet iguana.

Honestly, I’m just relieved Really Rhonda didn’t get tortured on camera too badly. By taking so much screentime to present her as an endearing and magnetic figure, the show makes us truly dread the prospect of her torture and abuse at the Trawler’s hands. Making you want to see sexy murder hijinks and then regret when they actually arrive is a smart technique.

So is the repeated use of fairy-tale storytelling and imagery. The hidden chamber in which Really Rhonda has been caged has its roots in slashers, gialli, and serial-killer true crime, but it also evokes Hansel & Gretel and Bluebeard. Terry Schaffer whisks Bret through a secret road from Beverly Hills to the Valley that only he, Warren Beatty, and Jack Nicholson have the access code to — a hidden passage, the path through Mirkwood, the Yellow Brick Road. (The Trawler, it seems, also knows the number.) This all fits Bret’s obsession with passing from the world of childhood to adulthood, the metaphorical basis of so much myth and fantasy.

Terry is a more interesting, and even more loathsome, character than he appears at first glance. Sure, he likes to use his influence to bed high schoolers, but he’s also gratuitously, enormously cruel to his wife, Liz, whose career stalled out at ex-model when she married him. Now she holds his Oscars and gives speeches to an imaginary crowd, where she gets to say fuck you not only to showbiz people who wronged her, but to her disappointment of a daughter and terrible husband. Terry interrupts her, mocking her ruthlessly for her failures. It’s an ugly scene.

Bret’s great frustration, meanwhile, is that he can’t get any of his friends to care in the slightest about the disappearing kids. Instead, the gang is still pushing ahead with Robert’s party. They’re so unconcerned it’s like something out of It by Bret’s beloved Stephen King, where It’s malignant presence causes the people in the town of Derry to look the other way and forget anything they happen to see while they turn their heads. (The fundraiser Susan arranges, in which they place Really Rhonda’s face on bottled water instead of cartons of milk and don’t mention Matt at all, is like an Addams Family Values bit.)

Debbie also has them all planned for an appearance on a local teen TV show called Dance Off!, where a girl named Cha Cha Rodriguez (Bella Valdes) held the camera’s attention for the entirety of Blondie’s “Rapture.” Debbie craves that kind of attention, since she’s not getting it from Bret; she begins flirting with Ryan (Daniel Dale), Bret’s former hookup. She’s got a type, anyway!

Working with cinematogrpaher Cory Geryak, Uppendahl brings a genuinely filmic look to the proceedings. The light feels real and textured, illuminating the surface of things rather than being slapped on like a paint job. The show has a subdued dynamic range, letting the luxe lives of its characters and the depravity of its antagonist provide the lurid thrills. It’s an approach that’s working very well.

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.