Does the final episode of FX‘s The Shards reveal who the Trawler really is, or does the Ryan Murphy drama set up a whole bunch of new mysteries?
**Spoilers for The Shards Episode 9 “Stairway to Heaven,” now streaming on Hulu**
The Shards Episode 9 “Stairway to Heaven” opens with a brand new mystery that’s similar to, but very different from how Bret Easton Ellis’s bestselling novel of the same name ends.
After weeks of watching Terry Schaffer (Wes Bentley) prey upon young Bret (Igby Rigney), bully his wife Liz (Evan Rachel Wood) and assistant Steven (Jordan Roth), and come up short for daughter Debbie (Hayes Warner), it seems he finally meets his maker. Someone — we don’t know who — pushes Terry over his own balcony during a party. The Shards giddily sets it up so anyone, even the perfect Susan Reynolds (Kaia Gerber), has a motive to see this awful man (literally) fall. Moreover, the final episode of The Shards ends not with a resolution, but a tease that the cops have rounded up all of the remaining main characters and believe one of them is the Trawler.
So will there be a Shards Season 2? Do we have to wait for FX to greenlight another season of The Shards to find out who pushed Terry Schaffer, who killed Matt Kellner (Owen Painter), and who the Trawler really is? Here’s everything we know about how The Shards ends…and sets up The Shards Season 2.
The Shards Ending Explained: Will There Be a Season 2 of The Shards? Who is the Trawler?
We don’t yet know the identity of the Trawler and we don’t yet know if there will be another season of The Shards!
Part of the fun of Bret Easton Ellis’ book The Shards is that the author invites the reader to mistrust his central narrator. That means, when the book ends, it’s up to the reader to decide if Robert Mallory (played by Homer Gere in the FX show) really was the killer, or if Bret himself might have been. The FX show goes several steps further by refusing to solve the mystery of the Trawler’s kills — and teasing that the answer to that Whodunnit won’t be solved until a potential Season 2.
“You know, we originally [had] been talking about this as a limited series,” The Shards executive producer Brad Simpson told DECIDER. “I think that as we cast these actors and as the writers started writing, it felt like we were going to have something that if people liked, we were gonna want to do for more than one series.”
Simpson then recounted how experiences making past Ryan Murphy productions influenced the decision to leave The Shards open-ended for future seasons.
“I think there’s always this thing: When I made The People vs. O.J. Simpson, at the end, we all loved each other so much. We were like, ‘God, we wish we had another series, a second season,’ but it was impossible,” he said. “But with a book, with a novel it is.”
“Bret’s storytelling is so slow. The novel itself only takes place over the first three months of senior year. It really has that sense that you get in high school of things moving so slowly and thin sliced and we decided to pull back and not rush to the end of the book,” Simpson explained.
“Hopefully people will enjoy it and we won’t have gotten to the end of the book, which may not even be the end of our series also, but be able to come back for a second season and do the same deliberate thing. Let’s look at the next couple months after the season ends.”
So, hopefully enough people watched The Shards for it to get a second season…so we can finally find out who (or what) is behind all of the killings in 1981 Los Angeles.
The Shards Season 1 Finale: Does Wes Bentley’s Terry Schaffer Die?
No, Terry Schaffer is not (yet) dead! Even though he was pushed from a balcony and crashed on the floor below, we’re told that Terry is still alive. That means that if Ryan Murphy and his collaborators get their second season of The Shards, Terry might be able to identify who pushed him.
The Shards‘ Biggest Mystery: Who is the Trawler?
Maybe one of the The Shards‘ biggest feints is its insistence — or Bret’s — that all of the crime occurring is the work of one mysterious madman known simply as the Trawler. From where we’re standing, it looks like some of these crimes are the work of “the Trawler,” some, like the murder of Matt Kellner, are connected to the cult the Riders of the Afterlife, and some are just vindictive acts of violence staged to look like the Trawler’s doing. Which are feints and which are the work of the Trawler are mysteries we’d love to see parsed out in a Shards Season 2.