I love a good disastrous-party episode, and we’ve got a good one here. “Robert’s Party” is the event FX‘s The Shards has been building to since Robert Mallory first showed up at Bret’s school and won over his circle of friends. Susan, the hostess with the most-ess, has pulled out all the stops: fine champagne, expensive booze, terrific coke, glass bowls full of cigarettes. Bret says it’s both an imitation of what the rich adults they know do and an attempt to turn themselves into who they’d like to become. But none of that matters when the guest of honor goes berserk and a cult leader crashes the party.

The episode begins, however, with a total left turn. Suddenly Ryan, heretofore a peripheral character, is the narrator, walking us through his personal grooming habits…and introducing us to his after-school job as a porn star. His next co-star is none other than Liz Schaffer, Debbie’s mom, who’s found a way to pursue her acting passion after all. “How’s your mom?” she asks politely as she walks to the set where she will then fuck her daughter’s classmate. It’s the premise of a porn movie, behind the scenes of one.

Ryan winds up being important later on, too. Tired of Bret’s coldness towards her — he thoughtlessly makes fun of her when she boasts that the new Stephen King release she bought him as a gift is a first edition — she encounters Ryan while she’s off doing coke in Susan’s house. The two quickly fall into bed, after some charmingly confident flirting-as-foreplay by both of them.

But this is Susan’s bedroom, so there’s a picture of the whole gang on the nightstand, Bret included. Debbie’s unable to cheat on him, and calls things off using the excuse that Ryan’s dick is too big. Only when he’s hard, he protests, but he concedes the point like a gentleman. Turns out he actually does like her and would be happy just to hang out.

They’re not alone. Lurking inside the closet is Bruce, the leader of the Riders of the Afterlife cult, wielding a long and gnarly knife. He menaces the two quasi-lovebirds; Ryan, greatly to his credit, offers to stay if he’ll just let Debbie go. This for a girl he barely knows! It puts Bret, whose narration talks about how he uses his status as an “observer” to partake in decadence while relieving himself of responsibility for it, to shame. 

Bret, meanwhile, has dug up additional intel on Robert. Some acquaintances from Robert’s old school in Chicago inform Bret that he was “cleared of any wrongdoing” after his mother died following a fall down the stairs. Put this together with the facts that Robert has spent time in a mental institution and taken psychiatric medication (shock! horror!) and he feels he’s got his man.

(Granted, we do see the Trawler out on the beach with Really Rhonda, carrying Robert’s bowling bag, but I don’t honestly know what to make of that at the moment.)

So he goes up to Robert and tells him he knows he killed his mother. Robert reacts by pounding a handle of vodka and cutting it up on the dance floor to “Funkytown” — an incredible performance that soon turns chaotic and even dangerous, as he shatters glass everywhere and walks on it barefoot. He gets in a physical fight with Thom, kissing him on the mouth in the process. He’d been busy coming in between Susan and Thom all night; Thom reveals himself on a couple of occasions to be genuinely stupid, and it’s slowly killing Susan, who now has another option on the table, or did until this debacle.

Finally, Robert tosses himself into the pool, where he floats unconscious. Thom and Susan jump in to rescue him, with Susan stripping to her underwear to do so. Susan revives him with mouth-to-mouth that Bret later says straight to her face was a kiss in disguise.

Then the lights go out, screams echo from the house, Bret recognizes that it’s Debbie, and he and Thom rush in to rescue her. They wind up trapped in the bedroom with the two shirtless teens and the knife-wielding whacko, who knows Thom by name, and seemingly not because he happened to overhear the others using it. 

But this mystery is just one more thing the gang seem content to forget about the next morning, as they lounge in the sun, smoking in monogrammed bathrobes. (It’s very funny that, apparently, Susan has these on hand for all her best friends if they stay over.) While they eat their lotus petals, not only Really Rhonda but Matt Kellner as well remain alive in the Trawler’s underground cages. That leaves either hope or horror in their future.

I can’t say I have much hope in Bret as the case’s lead detective. He may have taunted Robert about his mother’s death, but for some reason he doesn’t mention finding a bloody school uniform and iguana in a cage on Robert’s property to either the cops or his friends, not even as he repeatedly tries to convince them he’s a dangerous lunatic liar. You had physical proof, Bret!

Perhaps the idea is what Bret himself alludes to: the detached-observer schtick he’s cribbing from Joan Didion. The problem is he’s an active participant in the events he’s detatchedly observing. He’s shown surprising bravery at times, from breaking into Robert’s rental property to rushing into the darkened house to rescue his girlfriend. But could be be doing that for the same reason that he’s doing so little if he truly believes Robert is a serial killer: because it makes for a better story?

The episode ends with Debbie refusing to look up at the beautiful sky. “I’ve seen it already,” she sighs. This cynicism is the embodiment of the world of adulthood and death into which Bret now feels he’s been thrust permanently. His days as a kid are permanently over. This, of course, is what the whole party was a rehearsal for, but now it seems ugly and empty. As a wise woman once said, when they get what they want, they never want it again.

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.