Did FX’s The Shards finale finally expose the true identity of the Trawler — or did Ryan Murphy’s unsettling drama leave viewers with even more questions than answers?
**Spoilers for The Shards Episode 9 “Stairway to Heaven,” now streaming on Hulu**
The Shards Episode 9, “Stairway to Heaven,” wastes no time introducing a fresh enigma, one that echoes the ending of Bret Easton Ellis’s bestselling novel while sharply veering in its own direction.
For weeks, Terry Schaffer (Wes Bentley) has loomed over the series as a corrosive force, targeting young Bret (Igby Rigney), terrorizing his wife Liz (Evan Rachel Wood) and assistant Steven (Jordan Roth), and failing his daughter Debbie (Hayes Warner) at nearly every turn. In the finale, that pattern appears to catch up with him. During a party, an unidentified person sends Terry plunging from his own balcony. The series clearly wants viewers to suspect almost everyone, even the seemingly flawless Susan Reynolds (Kaia Gerber), because just about every major character has a reason to want Terry gone. But instead of delivering closure, The Shards ends on a provocative cliffhanger: police have gathered the surviving central players and appear convinced that one of them is the Trawler.
That leaves the biggest questions hanging over a potential The Shards Season 2. Will FX order another installment? Must fans wait for a renewal to learn who pushed Terry Schaffer, who murdered Matt Kellner (Owen Painter), and whether the Trawler has been hiding in plain sight all along? Here’s what the finale reveals — and how it positions The Shards for another season.
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.”
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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.