A Murder at the End of the World
A Murder at the End of the World is a lot of things. Like Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij’s ambitious, prematurely canceled series The OA, it fits into a wide range of genres: mystery, drama, science fiction, horror, thriller. Like Mr. Robot before it, it centers on a hacker who struggles with her own issues while trying to use her powers for good. It’s a critique of ultrawealth and capitalism in general, along with subjects like artificial intelligence more specifically. It’s also a love story.
“Chapter 1: Homme Fatale” opens on Darby Hart (Emma Corrin), this show’s equivalent to Mr. Robot’s Elliot Alderson. She’s a young amateur detective who just published a true-crime memoir entitled The Silver Doe. At a small bookstore, she reads an excerpt from near the end of that book, the show’s clever way of delivering exposition. Right off the bat, we’re sucked into her story, hearing about her background: Darby grew up in Lost Nation, Iowa, where she learned about crime scenes from her county-coroner father. She took an interest in the unsolved murders of women all across the United States, zeroing in on her slice of the Midwest.
With the help of her boyfriend, Bill Farrah (Harris Dickinson), another young hacker and sleuth she met on a forum, Darby managed to identify the last known address of a serial killer who left a trail of bodies all around the region. She persuaded Bill to join her for a trip to that house late one night, hoping to find evidence of the killer’s first victim: his wife Patricia. She and Bill came prepared with drills and sledgehammers, but they didn’t find anything in the redone concrete of the basement floor. It wasn’t until the next morning that they found the bones buried beneath a poorly rebuilt staircase. At that moment, an armed man showed up and fired at them, changing everything.
It’s admittedly a lengthy opening stretch, and it means that it takes a half-hour before we begin to understand the actual setup of this series. Here’s where your mileage will vary: To some, this episode will feel overlong and sluggishly paced. But many of my favorite moments in this pilot are the slow, character-building moments: Bill defrosting the tension between him and Darby by singing along to Annie Lennox’s “No More ‘I Love You’s,” for example, before the music dies down and they’re left without distraction for the final few heart-pounding minutes of their drive. The whole sequence is brutally tense, heightened by the naturalistic feel of the performances and the easy chemistry between Corrin and Dickinson.
Back in the present, Darby receives a message from Ray (Edoardo Ballerini), the AI assistant of the “king of tech,” a billionaire named Andy Ronson (Clive Owen). Ronson is inviting Darby to join him for an all-expenses-paid tech retreat at a secret location to discuss technology’s role during the climate crisis. But the real reason Darby decides to accept the invitation is Ronson’s wife: Lee Andersen (Marling), a brilliant coder and hacker who got doxed and went off the map until she married Ronson.
Two weeks later, Darby is on a plane to somewhere, accompanied by other VIPs like the cool but kind astronaut Sian Cruise (Alice Braga), snide venture capitalist David Alvarez (Raúl Esparza), prickly smart-city designer Lu Mei (Joan Chen), friendly filmmaker Martin (Jermaine Fowler), and Ronson’s head of security Todd (Louis Cancelmi). Of course, Darby’s book makes her a VIP in her own way; she’s been called the “Gen-Z Sherlock Holmes,” and nowadays people know her ex-boyfriend Bill as the provocative political artist FANGS.
Upon their arrival at the secluded Fljot Valley in Iceland, everyone settles in. Darby meets the hotel manager, Marius (Christopher Gurr), and reconnects with Ray, who turns out to be Ronson’s next big project. (This week will be his test run.) At dinner, she meets the other guests: robotics pioneer Oliver (Ryan J. Haddad), idealistic encryption expert Ziba (Pegah Ferydoni), the mysterious Rohan (Javed Khan), and most shockingly, FANGS himself. It’s the first time she’s seen her ex in six years — since the scrape they somehow survived. The next day, he had already left her, leaving behind a note on the mirror that read, “I think this is both too much and not enough.”
She also, of course, meets Ronson and Lee, along with their almost-6-year-old son, Zoomer. (Ugh.) That night, they all enjoy a nice pre-bed bath in the hot springs, where Darby learns about Ziba’s admiration for FANGS. Then she goes on a walk with Bill, where they clear the air. He compliments her memoir and acknowledges his main reasons for leaving her. His presence here has something to do with Lee, with whom he clearly spent some time. (Am I skeptical that it would take Darby this long to discover that connection considering her digital skills and how many photos of the pair exist online? A little.)
Bill has something serious he wants to tell Darby inside, but she rebuffs him at first, changing her mind when the same song comes on shuffle as that fateful night six years ago. But when she hears moaning from outside his door and he won’t answer, she works her way around to the outside of his room, only to find him bleeding and mid-overdose, begging her to just stay with him.
That’s right, folks: This is in many ways a good old-fashioned Agatha Christie–esque murder mystery, as you may have suspected from the title and probably realized once the setting shifted to a remote home owned by a shady billionaire. In some ways, that realization was a little disappointing to me; this show is about a lot of things, and I’m not sure this specific mystery will be the most interesting part. Part of me was looking forward to seeing Darby and Bill work through their issues in the middle of the wilderness. Besides, it already feels like there are only a few real options for the culprit.
Indeed, with “Chapter 2”’s increased focus on the retreat — and with the relative slowness in setting up the next phase of this story — it’s a weaker episode than the first. We haven’t yet reached the point where everybody fully grasps the severity of this situation, so they all agree to stay for the rest of the retreat despite one of them being a killer. They all assume it was an accidental overdose, but Darby senses the truth, especially after getting access to Bill’s room.
There are clear signs of a frame job here: For one, the injection site is on the wrong arm, and Darby can’t find fingerprints on the syringe, even from Bill himself. Then Lee shows up, urgently looking for something. That’s definitely cause for suspicion, but Darby manages to build a sort of alliance with Lee when she brings up what she learned. Lee suggests an old hack of her own so Darby can get Bill’s doorbell footage; after a convoluted path to identifying an SSID using a light connected to the larger network, Darby manages to get ahold of it. David and Ziba show up in the footage, but the scariest moment is the sudden reveal of a masked face staring into the camera.
It’s spooky, albeit not necessarily a game-changing final moment for an episode that gets a tad dry. Still, there’s a lot to like here, especially when the episode gets back to that idea I nodded to early on: Bill may be dead, but in many ways, this is still a love story.
Flashbacks will be a significant part of A Murder at the End of the World, seemingly telling the story of The Silver Doe alongside the present-day murder mystery to both build out the backstory and suggest where Darby gets her ideas for the investigation. If the pilot began with the end of the book, this one goes back to the beginning, showing how Darby grew up taking an interest in crime scenes while her classmates ignored her. After Darby and her father encountered an unidentified female corpse on the edge of town one day, finding nothing on her but a pair of silver earrings, Darby posted about it. That’s how she met Bill.
But there was a length of time between their first online introduction and their in-person meeting, and that’s where this chapter lingers. Again, I appreciate the patience in drawing out their dynamic; it’s nice to see their casual afternoons hanging out over webcam, and Bill’s “happy birthday” message via hacked train-track lights is pretty cute. That latter scene comes after a pretty big plot moment, but the episode focuses more on what it means to the characters. Sure, it matters that Darby located a woman who survived an attempted abduction by the very serial killer they’re looking for. But what matters on a deeper level is Darby’s anxious reaction to the suggestion that she meet up with her online boyfriend in person.
Similarly, it feels notable that the episode doesn’t end on another big plot reveal or a climactic moment in either timeline. It ends on an emotional, character-driven note, showing us the moment when Darby and Bill meet in person for the first time at the tavern, smiling at each other as Frank Ocean’s “Moon River” takes us to credits.
Mr. Robot had its occasional problems with plot and momentum, but it excelled by always staying rooted in the story of its complicated protagonist, alone against the world without any allies he can fully trust, including himself. I’m hopeful that the same will hold true for A Murder at the End of the World. Even if the murder-mystery element proves to be disappointing, I’m in this for Darby and Bill, and the way Corrin’s specific, compelling live-wire energy plays off Dickinson’s mischievous warmth. AI can do a lot, but it couldn’t write that smile.
Zeroes and Ones
• A nifty scene: Darby almost wakes up the whole neighborhood with her toy hack, which opens every garage door on the block instead of just the one she needs.
• The age of Zoomer, combined with the oddness of his interaction with Bill and the reactions of Lee and Ronson, immediately made me suspect Bill was the kid’s father, which would make both Lee and Ronson the clear leading suspects in his murder. Setting that aside, though, I really like how seeing Bill’s ease with kids brings Darby’s feelings of warmth flooding back. Corrin really sells that moment.
• Bill notes that Darby’s bravery might not come strictly from a place of, well, bravery. He doesn’t get the chance to explain further, but it’s an idea to keep in mind. The same goes for his suggestion that she only really likes women and his remark about how Darby left him many times before he left her. Sounds like she let her obsession with the serial-killer case take over her life. The investigation that brought them together also tore them apart.
• Martin has been collaborating on a new film with Ray and seems intent on defending AI as a tool for art. I had to roll my eyes a little at his “new Harry Potter book in the style of Hemingway” trick, which probably came from an actual software like ChatGPT. (Ronson prefers “alternative intelligence,” because of course he does.)
