What’s the funniest line from the season finale — and it’s clearly a season finale, not a series finale, at least not if Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis get what they want — of FX’s The Shards?

Is it Liz Schaffer wailing “There’s a serial killer targeting the glamorous!”

Is it Robert Mallory patronizingly telling Bret, “You’re struggling with your sexuality, and from what I’ve read — Death in Venice, among other things — that’s some really heavy shit.”

Is it Terry Schaffer dismissing his ambitious assistant Steven Reinhardt by saying, “You look like a prostitute businesswoman on a spaceship.”

Or is it Thom Wright, on his knees in the middle of Hamburger Hamlet following a disastrous attempt to propose to his (ex-)girlfriend Susan, watching her get dragged away by her friend Debbie, plaintively calling after them: “Think about it?”

Of course, if your sense of humor leans in another direction, you can pick just about any bit of Bret Easton Ellis, Boy Detective’s molasses-thick hard-boiled narration: “One of the most intimate ways to kill someone is to push them from a great height.” “That fateful night, before the most terrifying event of her life occurred, Susan went to bed feeling what she hadn’t felt for months: peace.” 

Or my personal favorite, the troll to end all trolls: Capping off the entire season with a shot of the entire cast in a police station interrogation room, with the cops announcing someone in that room is a killer, accompanied by Bret saying “And that’s when things really got crazy.” These crazy sons of bitches really went and did the This is just the beginning thing at the end of the season. You have to admire the chutzpah!

The larger point I’m trying to make is one that’s come up before: The Shards is funny, and on purpose! But because it’s embodying all the stuff it’s simultaneously clowning on — rich and sexy Hollywood teens with delusions of grandeur having violent psychosexual misadventures in mansions while “Vienna” by Ultravox plays — its own sense of humor is simply invisible to many viewers. The same thing happened with Season 3 of Euphoria, and before that The Idol, Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye’s L.A. sleaze masterpiece. Before that it happened with Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. You can put Brian De Palma’s Body Double in there too. 

There are even elements of the lurid Italian slasher genre giallo here — the way the overwrought visuals serve as a sort of send-up of the material as it unfolds, pointing to the unreality of it all. Watching Terry Schaffer plummet from the second-floor balcony of his home through the glass table below in slow motion as half a dozen suspects watch like they’re in a box at an opera…seeing Bret work on the Trawler case in his underwear…peering in on Debbie as she induces her “tanning butler” to rub Bain de Soleil on her ass…the lush color palette of pink and coral…the beautiful faces, the glitzy costumes, the bombastic performance styles…this is Bret Easton Ellis’s wet Hollywood nightmare brought to life as-is, with all the heightened emotional and visual pitch of a dream left intact.

There are some developments worth noting, even though we’re no closer to a resolution of any of the cases Bret’s been tracking than we were when the episode started. Debbie receives a videotape, implied to be a recording of her father Terry and her boyfriend Bret on the casting couch. (Steven all but admits to Bret that he’s the videographer later in the episode.) 

Armed with this knowledge, she blackmails Daddy Dearest into giving her everything she wants. She goes relatively easy on Bret, though she points out he isn’t hard when they’re making out in the pool, like any red-blooded American boy would be with a dripping wet Debbie Schaffer wrapped around them. As a result, she demands, well, regular proof of his attraction to her that would be pretty damn hard to either deny or fake.

Thom’s dumbass proposal to Susan, meanwhile, only proves he’s just as erratic as she feared he’s become. Robert, on the other hand, adopts what Bret says is a technique out of a sociopath’s playbook: He never makes demands of Susan, always allowing her to come to him. Before they so much as hold hands, he makes it feel like they’ve been in love for years, and that it’s their time at last.

Needless to say, neither Bret nor Thom is happy with this turn of events. It accelerates the game of chicken Bret and Robert play about turning each other over to the police as the Trawler — Robert has by now fully I’m rubber you’re glue’d Bret about the serial-killer thing. Bret, meanwhile, believes his hallucination of Robert coming over and fucking him is real; Robert believes Bret killed his parents, and who knows, maybe he did.

And it sure does seem to drive Thom to attempt to murder Susan in her bedroom one night. He eventually appears as himself, claiming to have fought off the attacker and knocked him through the window to the ground below, but of course Susan finds no sound or sign of this struggle. By the end of the episode, she’s openly accusing him of the attack.

Debbie, too, is having bedroom issues. Specifically, instead of finding her mom Liz asleep in her bed — “She says it’s the only bed in this house where Terry hasn’t lied to her with his body,” Debbie explains to Susan — she finds the severed head of her beloved horse, Spirit. Bizarrely, none of these hyperliterate Hollywood types so much as mention the fact that The Godfather also dumped a horse’s head in a bed in a big-shot movie mogul’s house — but perhaps that’s because the dismemberment of the animal (its hooves are missing too) fits in neatly with the Trawler’s M.O. as well.

The episode all builds to a ludicrous black-tie Halloween party Debbie throws for herself at her dad’s expense, where he gets called out of his weird office-lair and summoned to confront…whoever it is that pushes him off the balcony. Bret, Susan, Liz, Debbie, Steven, Thom, and Robert are all present, and each has a motive. Ryan winds up in the interrogation room with the rest of the crew, so I suppose we should throw him in as well. There’s one shot that heavily implies Robert and Steven are in cahoots, Scream-style, so I’m putting my money on that. (Until I change my mind.)

I’m unlikely to change my mind about The Shards being good and fun as hell. The cast is an utter delight; in this episode, Wes Bentley, Hayes Warner, Jordan Roth, and Homer Gere stood out, playing sleaze, sexiness, scheming vizier, and weird sociopathic rizz generator to perfection respectively. They looked gorgeous doing it, too, with soft lighting that clings to every angle and contour of the cast’s beautiful faces and their luxurious environments. 

I’m not even disappointed by the cliffhanger ending. Either we get a second season, which would rule, or this is how the show ends, which would be hilarious, and therefore fitting. With L.A. noir, and with send-ups thereof, it’s the journey, not the destination.