‘The Shards’ Recap, Episode 2: Bret Comes of Age

“It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination,” Joan Didion famously wrote. Bret has surely read that essay from 1968’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem because — as he confesses to Terry Schaffer over lunch in this episode — the author’s writing has been a major influence on his own. And the Santa Ana winds are blowing in September 1981, mentioned in a news report before an announcement of the latest Trawler victim in the season premiere. But Bret doesn’t need to have read the essay to know “there is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air,” and troublingly, he’s the only one of his friends who senses something is off. When Debbie, Susan, and Thom come over for a double-date pizza night, only Bret is concerned about the spate of recent home invasions, the missing pets, and the desecration of the griffin mascot. Debbie mentions a new missing girl, Julie Selwyn, but it’s just in passing, and Susan is more fixated on throwing a party for Robert Mallory than anything else. Dr. Croft has confided in her that Robert spent some time in a developmental center before moving to L.A. and needs friends to make him feel welcome. Again, Bret alone expresses alarm — the newcomer is a liar who was institutionalized in a loony bin. “That’s a little dramatic, Bret,” Susan snaps. “You always embellish everything.”

Bret’s insistence that Robert is bad news is already driving a wedge between him and his friends. He’s facing broad nonchalance from those he’s closest to — as much as his voice-over keeps insisting the city is on edge, his friends don’t seem to care about the Trawler or the cult. A decade after the Manson family murders, L.A. is contending with the Riders of the Afterlife, a gang of hippies who have been plaguing the region, from Ojai to the San Fernando Valley. They’ve gone from drug-infused rituals out in the desert to home break-ins, where random acts of violence against the residents have recently escalated to murder. With their paintings of bloody pentagrams on doors and the black ski masks and turtlenecks the cult’s shape-shifting home invaders wear, there’s obvious overlap between the Riders of the Afterlife and the Trawler, leading some members of law enforcement to believe the serial killer is not one person but several. For the time being, however, suspected crimes of the cult and of the Trawler are being reported separately, and Bret considers them distinct and urgent threats. On the nights he’s home alone writing, he thinks he hears the doorbell ring or the garage door rise and clutches a knife through the halls of the empty house, just to find there’s no one there. At least when his friends are over, there’s safety in numbers. The date-night tension defuses when the couples move to the hot tub, where Debbie passionately kisses Bret. She doesn’t seem to notice he’s distracted by his desperate longing for Susan and Thom, grinding on each other in their bathing suits to the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me.”

So far, The Shards is doing a fantastic job at creating a vibe and capturing moods, but the plotting is already starting to feel a bit rushed in the second episode, which covers a lot of ground. We get a quick scene of the fraught relationship between Debbie and her mother — Liz keeps lightly hinting at their similar taste in men — before Debbie picks up Bret for a night out at a hot new music-video-themed club. Music videos themselves are still brand new in this world; MTV would have launched with “Video Killed the Radio Star” just one month prior. That’s the song playing when Debbie and Bret enter the space, which is decked out in TV sets and bathed in bisexual lighting. Debbie wants to introduce Bret to the owner, but as a music fan and cinephile, he’s more interested in watching the videos. The Buggles song fades into Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” as Bret finds a place to sit, only to discover Robert is already lounging beside him. The dynamic between the two remains deliciously strained, and Robert’s insistence on matching Bret’s visible frustration with an easy smile makes these scenes a joy to watch.

It doesn’t help that Robert starts the conversation by telling Bret he’s sorry about what happened with Matt, having heard the two had a falling-out. Bret is immediately caught off-guard — is Robert accusing him of something? — before explaining he’s just been too busy for Matt since he got a girlfriend. Robert won’t let it go, though. “Maybe you were too clingy and you turned him off or something,” he suggests. When Bret tells him to fuck off, he only smiles. “There he is,” Robert answers. “That’s my guy.” He’s constantly walking on the knife’s edge of flirtation in a way that unnerves Bret and maybe (though he’d be loath to admit it) turns him on. The conversation moves to Susan with Robert asking why she and Bret never got together. They were always just best friends, he says. But didn’t he ever want to fuck her? For Bret, whose performance of heterosexuality is a constant effort, this kind of straight-male bonding is a foreign concept. As ever, it’s not clear if Robert is trying to get under his skin or simply find common ground, but the more vulgar he gets, the more disgusted Bret becomes. “I’d love to fuck her,” Robert says, the camera tight on his face. “Taste her sweet little pussy. Fuck her in the ass. Make her scream.” All Bret can do is walk away. In voice-over, he admits he wishes he’d stayed with Robert to find out his plans for Susan. As it stands, “She was gonna let herself get lost in his madness, and everything would get ruined.”

As electric as the exchange between Bret and Robert is, the subsequent scene is less successful. We’ve only had an episode and a half to define relationship dynamics, so when Bret heads to Matt’s for what becomes a dramatic confrontation, the whole thing feels oddly abrupt. To be fair, Matt’s attitude comes out of nowhere for Bret too. He’s hostile and paranoid the moment Bret arrives unannounced at the pool house where Matt lives, demanding to know why Bret keeps calling him and breathing into the phone. He also blames Bret for draining his fish tank and drawing a pentagram on his Foreigner poster. Bret should pick up on these flashing warning signs, but he’s distracted by the false accusations being hurled at him. He thinks Matt got too high and absent-mindedly did these things himself. Both boys subtly accuse the other of telling Robert too much about their illicit relationship — Matt wants to know why Robert was asking him “interesting” questions. Bret warns him to stay away from Robert, then makes a last-ditch attempt at tenderness by reaching out to Matt, who coldly slaps his hand away. “This was never a serious thing,” he says, scoffing. “You think we’re gonna be boyfriends or something? Are you fucking crazy?” It’s a cruel dismissal that sends Bret fleeing to his car, where he sobs his way through the drive back home. I just wish the show had given us more than one scene between the two to establish the emotional stakes before this brutal blowup.

Bret doesn’t have too much time to sulk. Nothing will stop him from keeping his very important lunch with Terry, even if Steven Reinhardt sets an odd tone for the meal with his ominous warning: “Everyone has an agenda, and sometimes these agendas don’t connect with what we actually want or what we’re gonna get.” Terry appears warm and friendly, though, and asks pointed questions about the novel Bret is writing. Will it make a good movie? Does it have sex in it? “Everything’s about sex,” he explains. “Everybody loves a coming-of-age story.” Bret is shocked when Terry immediately offers to option the book as soon as Bret finishes it, but the lunch takes a turn toward the unprofessional as Terry pivots to personal questions. When he flat-out asks Bret if he likes guys as well as girls, Bret can only answer, “I’m not … limited.” Provocative questions about Thom and Ryan prove less easy to deflect, and soon Bret’s pushing back by asking how Liz would feel about Terry having a conversation like this with his daughter’s boyfriend. “You’re smarter than that,” Terry says. But is he? Bret’s belief that Terry had Steven arrange this lunch out of genuine interest in his novel betrays a naïveté that’s destined to be shattered. That’s made clearer when Terry warns Bret not to tell Debbie about their meeting, even if he follows it up with a plea to start collaborating on a script soon.

We go from one harrowing meal to another. When Bret meets up with his friends at Hamburger Hamlet, Susan announces Matt Kellner has been missing for five days. (It must be at least as long since Bret last saw him, but The Shards could do a better job at articulating a timeline. Clarity on how much time is passing might also help things feel less rushed.) Bret is obviously shaken, though he denies being friends with Matt, which Robert clocks immediately. It turns out Matt was even more isolated than we realized — it took a few days for his parents to notice he was gone. Because his car is still there and he didn’t leave a note, they’re concerned about his whereabouts, and Susan has been tasked with asking the student body to come forward with any information. “Isn’t it so strange how his parents spent so little time with him?” Debbie asks the group. This is how so many Buckley students live, though. Robert points out that he hasn’t seen his own dad in six months and that Bret’s parents remain on an endless European vacation. But as much as these kids believe they’re adults already, they’re not exactly thriving on their own. Would Matt have gone missing if his parents had been paying more attention? Would Bret spend every night terrified of the noises he thinks he’s hearing if he weren’t always alone? With no trustworthy grown-ups to guide or support him, Bret is latching on to a man he’s already been warned has ulterior motives. Nevertheless, when he sees Terry at lunch, he thinks, “He was professional, an adult, something to emulate and aspire toward. He was someone I wanted to be.”

At school, Bret and Ryan Vaughn are drawn back together by Matt’s disappearance, even if Ryan only knew Matt as someone he bought weed from. Ryan is alarmed about the way young people in L.A. keep vanishing. He wonders if it could be the cult, though Bret offers up the Trawler as an alternative. Sure, the serial killer has only targeted girls so far, but maybe, like Bret, he’s not limited. “I’m glad we’re talking. I like talking,” Bret tells Ryan, dangerously risking a hand on his shoulder. However nervous Ryan looks, he doesn’t pull away, but the moment is ruptured when Susan arrives with the latest news on Matt. His blood-drenched backpack has been found in a parking lot in Crystal Cove State Park. That’s an alarming development, and what Bret discovers next is much worse. At home, there’s a tape waiting for him in his mailbox. The audio is hard to decipher at first: sounds of whooshing and crackling, then a creepy voice urging someone to “eat it.” The more Bret listens, the more he’s able to picture the scene. It’s Matt Kellner, beaten and bloody, being forced to consume the still-living fish from his aquarium. He’s crying and pleading in between gagging on the fish, but the assailant in a black ski mask and turtleneck insists he eat them all. “Did you like sucking the cock?” the man taunts him before injecting Matt with a heavy dose of LSD. Bret listens in horror as Matt descends into madness. He runs to the bathroom to throw up in the sink — but his sudden awareness of what happened to Matt will be harder to purge.

• It makes sense that the show would expand Liz’s role in the story, both because the book is told solely from Bret’s perspective and because you wouldn’t want to squander Evan Rachel Wood. I like seeing more of her dynamic with Debbie, something underexplored in the novel.

• I also think it was smart to elaborate on the Riders of the Afterlife and provide more concrete details, including about the leader guiding them, but I do question dumping all this exposition in episode two — particularly when it comes to the obvious link between the cult and the Trawler. In the novel, Bret overlooks the similarities because he’s so fixated on Robert. If he’s already acknowledging the overlap, does that undermine eventual reveals?

• The scene between Bret and Robert at the club plays out as it does in the novel, but I was surprised we didn’t get the attack by a cult member in the bathroom. I would assume The Shards is saving that set piece for a subsequent episode.

• As I said in the recap, it does feel like we’re moving through plot quite quickly, and that includes the arrival of the Matt Kellner tape much sooner than in the novel. My only concern here is if you bring Bret to this level of terror so early on, where does he go from here?