The Shards Season 1 Ending Explained: Who Pushed Terry, and Is Bret the Trawler?

The Shards spent its first season encouraging us to believe Bret Ellis (Igby Rigney), though there were hints that he is an unreliable narrator. Robert Mallory (Homer Gere) arrives at Buckley, and people start disappearing. The two things may or may not be related, but Bret instantly decides to make the connection that Robert is the problem. We know from Episode 8 that Bret has been attracted to Robert, even if it is a perverse attraction. Also, it has become considerably harder to believe Bret by the finale.

The finale of this Bret Easton Ellis and Ryan Murphy creation does not give us the big Trawler unmasking we might have expected. Instead, it introduces more doubts about Bret, leaves Terry Schaffer (Wes Bentley) bloodied after a mysterious fall, and ends with practically every important character sitting in the same police interrogation room. It is less an ending than the moment The Shards finally admits that almost everyone could be hiding something.

Who Pushed Terry Schaffer in The Shards Finale?

The Shards finale begins with Terry’s fall before going back to explain that there are at least half a dozen people who had motives to do the deed. Debbie (Hayes Warner) has obtained a compromising VHS tape involving her father and Bret. She realizes immediately that it gives her leverage, though I thought her father already did what he could for her. But, as it turns out, no. He bluntly tells his daughter that she has no talent when she demands that he make her a star. But talent does not matter when you have damaging information.

Things get considerably darker when Debbie and Susan (Kaia Gerber) discover the severed head of Debbie’s horse, Spirit, in her bed, The Godfather style. Meanwhile, Susan’s relationship with Thom continues to disintegrate. Susan is attacked inside her home by someone apparently posing as the Trawler. Thom conveniently arrives and claims he fought the attacker and threw him from a balcony. But Susan isn’t convinced. It is more likely Thom himself staged the attack to become a hero once again in Susan’s eyes. Executive producers Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson have deliberately refused to confirm whether Susan’s attacker was actually the Trawler or Thom (via TV Insider).

Then everyone gathers at the Schaffers’ Halloween party. Terry is pushed over the railing and falls through a glass table. It is not confirmed whether he is dead, though he is fighting for his life. The show never reveals who pushed him, or even definitively establishes everything that happened immediately before the fall. So, who pushed Terry? For now, there is no canonical answer.

Is Robert the Trawler or Is Bret an Unreliable Narrator?

Igby Rigney as Bret in The Shards | Credits: FX

This is the much bigger question, and The Shards finale makes Robert look less like the obvious answer than ever. Bret confronts him at the party and again insists that Robert is connected to the murders. Robert responds by turning Bret’s entire theory against him. More importantly, when Bret mentions that they slept together, Robert seems to have no idea what he is talking about. That immediately makes Episode 8’s intimate encounter far more suspicious. Did Robert sleep with Bret and simply deny it, or did Bret imagine the entire thing?

This uncertainty is intentional and specifically tied to Bret’s unreliability as a narrator right from the first two episodes of The Shards. Robert then delivers an even more disturbing counterattack: he contacted Bret’s father’s workplace and learned that nobody there knows where Mr. Ellis is. Bret’s parents supposedly went away for a vacation, as per him. But his father apparently just stopped showing up for work. Robert asks whether Bret murdered his own parents and suggests that Bret himself could be the Trawler. He could have killed people and turned their deaths into material for his writing. It would be a twist, but not hugely surprising

Then comes the final twist. At the police station, Bret and Robert are joined by Susan, Debbie, Thom, Liz, Steven, and Ryan. Detectives reveal that they have new information concerning the murders and Rhonda’s kidnapping. More importantly, they believe the person responsible is inside that room.

And then the season ends, and we don’t know who the Trawler is. It instead transforms Bret from our amateur detective into another suspect. Robert could still be involved, but so could the others. Different crimes could have different perpetrators, like the slasher movie franchise Scream. Bret then says that this is when things “really got crazy.” Considering what happened earlier, that is quite a promise.

Who do you think is really behind the Trawler murders? Let us know in the comments below.

The Shards Episode 9 is now streaming on FX on Hulu.