If I’m not doing a weekly recap of a Ryan Murphy-produced show, am I really living? Luckily, I don’t have to answer that question right now because it’s…The Shards season!
In Episode 2, another one of Bret and his pals’ classmates—a girl named Julie Selwyn—went missing, Debbie’s dad Terry outed his own Hollywood-lothario creepiness, and a torture tape recorded by the mysterious killer stalking LA turned up at Bret’s house with Bret’s name on it.
So what did the next installment bring? Below, find every thought I had while watching Episode 3 of The Shards.
- “That’s the gift of youth: you think you’ll live forever.”
- Well, I never did, even as a teen, and that’s on Jewish anxiety!
- Esalen mentioned!
- Did the concept of “spooky season” really exist in 1981?
- IVY WOLK!
- Playing Rhonda, a…girl with Tourette’s?
- That nobody seems to understand as Tourette’s?
- I mean, if anybody can pull off this role (and I’m genuinely not sure anybody can), it’s Wolk.
- I desperately want that paperback copy of Joan Didion’s The White Album.
- Lord, take me back to 1981 so I can unironically participate in roller disco.
- Oh no, Wolk’s fate on this show is making me nervous, but I love this extended roller-disco solo dance sequence set to The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” for her.
- And…yep, she’s missing.
- Why are none of these crime scenes remotely secured?
- Ah, jeez, I could have lived a long and happy life without seeing Ivy Wolk in a cage being fed bugs.
- Were those bugs?
- Or…snakes, or something?
- Sorry, I’m too much of a coward to rewind.
- I love the TV logic of “a bunch of our classmates are missing, let’s have a televised dance-off!”
- Smoking kills and all, but damn, Kaia Gerber looks really good puffing a cig.
- Why are students making school announcements about the missing teens instead of, I don’t know, teachers or cops?
- Okay, I do love this luxury-water-is-the-new-milk-carton gag.
- Did people really say “It’s the ’80s!” this much in the ’80s?
- I should ask my mom, who does have some legendary ’80s stories (none of which I’m cleared to type here).
- “Bret, stop going to crime scenes” challenge!
- Again, not that they’re cordoned off with police tape or anything to disincentivize evidence tampering…
- Oh, I need Liz’s supremely ’80s light-up vanity mirror.
- And honestly, I could probably find it at the right estate sale!
- Ugh, I love a crazy-lady pretend Oscar acceptance speech.
- “Keep practicing your speech, babe, with one of my three Oscars.”
- Brutal.
- Love a little J.Didi romanticization!
- Bret retyping her sentences from The White Album on his typewriter is making me think of when I was 23 and printed out a copy of “On Self-Respect” and brought it with me to read aloud to my best friend on a road trip.
- Did Didion write with “restraint, economy, and total control,” or was she just a very hungry Republican?
- Ahh! Scary music!
- …that segues right into “Edge of Seventeen” by Stevie Nicks, as it should.
- Wait, is Bret going to discover Rhonda?
- Or are we in two totally different dark, spooky rooms right now?
- I’m confused.
- “Being afraid is so lame.” You said it, babe…but it also might save your life?
- Not that anybody on The Shards has any self-preservation instincts to speak of.
- Rhonda rescue mission?
- Nope, that’s Rhonda’s captor opening her cage, and it…seems like he’s going to kill her.
- Meanwhile, Bret seems to have stumbled across a…bloody iguana?
- Hiding under what I think is Mark’s uniform jacket?
- I remain confused with my cortisol spiking.
- And yet, not at all unwilling to watch the next episode!
