While the finale offers some definitive answers about Bill’s killer, other more enigmatic storylines remain unresolved and invite further musing.Spoilers follow for A Murder at the End of the World through the finale, “Chapter 7: Retreat.”
Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling’s projects tend to linger in the unknown — literally, with the cancellation of their Netflix series The OA before its third season, and figuratively, with films like Sound of My Voice and The East pondering the curiosities of cult dynamics, time travel, and whether Alexander Skarsgård in rebellious-activist mode is worth abandoning one’s undercover intelligence assignment to join a fringe ecoterrorist group. (The appeal of that option is sort of self-explanatory, actually.)
Batmanglij and Marling’s latest work, A Murder at the End of the World, offers more definitive answers by virtue of being a murder mystery that ends by unveiling a specific culprit: Tech innovator Andy Ronson’s “alternative intelligence” program, Ray, tricked Andy’s son, Zoomer, into killing activist artist Bill Farrah because Ray perceived him to be a threat to Ronson. Hacker, true-crime investigator, and author Darby Hart helps Andy’s wife, the internet-infamous Lee Andersen, flee Andy with their son as a last act of contrition toward Bill, whom Darby loved once upon a time but not in the way he needed. A Murder at the End of the World ends with Darby connecting the strains of misogyny and arrogance that galvanized Andy and came through in his AI creation with the same toxic combination that makes killers of women — like the one Darby and Bill tracked after they first met — believe they’re untouchable.
Those reveals don’t have any great ambiguity: Andy was a bad guy, saving Lee and Zoomer was the right thing to do, and Darby repaid a spiritual debt to Bill after breaking his heart six years ago. But A Murder at the End of the World is full of other, more enigmatic storylines that remain unresolved and invite further musing. Batmanglij and Marling have said they’re open to telling future stories with Darby at their center, and Emma Corrin is so startlingly naturalistic in the role that the possibility isn’t unwelcome. Regardless of whether A Murder at the End of the World continues, these outstanding questions are worth pondering. And sorry, you can’t ask Ray for any help this time!
What was Darby’s dad’s deal?
We learn in the first couple of episodes that she was raised by her single dad, a county coroner, in Lost Nation, Iowa. Her mother left when Darby was young, and Darby became an investigator after tagging along to her father’s crime scenes. We also learn that she and her father disagree a bit about how to approach investigations — he tells her “it’s not professional” to ask the questions she does about victims’ lives before their deaths — while all her mother left for her was an iPod.
“Why would I look for someone who left me?” Darby tells Bill when he asks about her mother. But … did her mother actually leave her? There’s a distant quality to Darby’s dad that made me give him the side-eye, and his technical know-how as a coroner would allow him to be a particularly well informed killer. Maybe it would be too manufactured, too Dexter-like, to have Darby, a hunter of serial killers, be the daughter of one, too. There’s an opacity to Darby’s dad that feels purposeful, though, maybe even ominous.
Why does everyone think of Darby as an author first, not a hacker?
This question is more about perception than fact, and maybe it’s simply explained by the series’ desire to position Darby as “Gen Z’s Sherlock Holmes.” But it’s a little weird that her true-crime memoir, The Silver Doe, is about her using hacking to investigate a killer and mentions her adoration for groundbreaking female hacker Lee Andersen, and that she currently oversees a team of other hackers looking into the cases of thousands of missing women around the country, but that everyone who meets her at Andy’s retreat just calls her a writer. Film director Martin mentions the book’s review in the Los Angeles Times, smart-city designer Lu Mei wonders if she’s there to sell books, astronaut Sian knows how many copies Darby has sold, and when her fellow retreat attendees try to figure out how she got an invite, they snark, “Maybe Andy loves him some true crime.” We eventually learn that Darby got invited as bait to bring Bill to Iceland, but she’s not some novice. If this was another element of the series’ “people underestimate Darby because she’s a young woman” through-line — notice how Andy describes Darby as “a fresh page” — it makes thematic sense.
What was FANGS’s “Artificial Insanity” art installation like?
Bless Bill and his mullet and his myriad tattoos, yet I’m not so sure about the art he makes under the name FANGS. Getting rid of the “S” in “Shell” gas stations around the world is clever, I admit! I wish we could have seen more of his infamous “Artificial Insanity” exhibit in Detroit, though, to get a greater sense of what he was like as a guerrilla artist years into his career, and his specific complaints about the omnipresence of technology, the development of smart cities, and how Silicon Valley has changed our culture for the worse. I don’t disagree with that overall take! But it would have been helpful character development to see Bill at one of his art exhibits in order to pick up on whether he remained the man we knew, became someone different as FANGS, or morphed into the “criminal prankster” certain members of Andy’s inner circle couldn’t stand. “More Harris Dickinson, please” is basically what this question can be reduced to.
Are Coke and coffee mixed together … good?
Someone please report back on Darby’s signature drink so I can tweak my caffeine addiction accordingly.
Which came first, the “ACHOO” acronym or the syndrome name “autosomal dominant compelling helio-ophthalmic outburst”?
I have been unable to find which researcher, scientist, or doctor came up with this acronym, but they are a genius.
What was Lee looking for in Bill’s room?
The series spends a good amount of time suggesting Lee is involved with Bill’s death, starting with her frantic search of Bill’s room, which we watch alongside the hiding Darby. She looks at his body and through some papers and his jacket, and Darby suspects Lee for knowing Bill far better than she lets on. That turns out to be true, and we learn that Lee and Bill slept together, conceived Zoomer, and remained friends, leading to Andy’s jealousy and eventual murderous intent. I think all of this means that Lee looking through Bill’s room was purely a red-herring move to reveal a closer relationship between the two than was initially suggested and to make us as wary of her as Darby was. But what was she trying to find? A document related to Bill, Rohan, and David’s planned rescue of her and Zoomer seems like the most likely thing, though whatever it was clearly wasn’t important enough to preclude her from eventually (probably) boarding Rohan’s boat, the Last Chance.
Was Todd hot?
Am I just being tricked by Louis Cancelmi’s bone structure, or was Todd — who told Darby about how he had hunted down and beat the living crap out of every bully responsible for the hate-crime murder of his gay brother — actually very attractive? Yes, he’s loyal to Andy, but that resolute fidelity is objectively appealing if pointed in the right direction. And again: those cheekbones!
What was the oxygen situation in Andy’s bunker?
Andy, Lee, and Zoomer live in a specially designed bunker that is ten stories belowground, at a depth protected from climate change, nuclear-radiation fallout, and any other kind of conflict occurring on the earth’s surface. That robot army, fueled by Andy’s paranoia and his billions of dollars in funding, does good work! While showing Darby around, Andy brags about tunneling natural sunlight into their home through a CB2-evoking light fixture, but I’m more curious about oxygen: In a contained space that deep that doesn’t seem particularly ventilated (it can’t be, right, if Andy wants to avoid any contaminant that could seep through soil and volcanic rock?), wouldn’t the family run out? Can someone explain the science of this to me, someone who is bad at science?
Speaking of the robots, what are they up to?
Do they just keep working on the second bunker Andy was planning to sell to the rich? Were they technically taking their orders from Ray, and, with his death, do they — like vampires severed from their sire — stop their construction of what Ziba called an “apocalypse timeshare for millionaires”? Or because they were designed by Oliver, does he code the robots to switch to the side of the good guys once he realizes what Andy is? Either way, I did not care for how the robots resemble gigantic insects that move like loose-limbed eldritch horrors, and I would like for the “radical future of humanity” not to include them!
For real, how did Lee and Andy get together?
Love is perhaps life’s greatest mystery, and A Murder at the End of the World really makes us remember that with the Lee and Andy pairing. Even before Andy is unmasked as an abusive husband who hits his wife in front of their son and uses his sprawling tech empire to track her every movement, the two seem totally unaligned: He snarks about her time in Florida “running a kind of gutter-punk salon” of hackers and says he has “no idea” why she invited her guests to Iceland. Darby’s expressions when Andy and Lee are together are tinged with disgust and confusion, and I get it! Here is a woman who wrote an entire manifesto about how men and misogyny are destroying the internet’s potential, and here is a man who is casually dismissive of her and her beliefs right to her face. Other characters, like Sian, are confused about the relationship too, though they blame Lee — which feels in line with their dismissal of Darby. The series makes everyone’s “we don’t get them together” reaction textual, but that doesn’t really make the relationship any more convincing or understandable. A flashback to their happier days, when Lee wasn’t already on guard and Andy wasn’t fully entrenched in his power, might have helped.
Was Andy trying to Transcendence himself into Zoomer?
Forgive me for bringing up the very not good 2014 Johnny Depp vehicle, but it’s what I kept thinking about whenever Andy went all helicopter parent on Zoomer — not letting him eat bread or go outside, forcing him to sleep for longer periods of time and learn about genetics and other scientific concepts, and referring to him constantly as “my son,” never “our son.” Stories of billionaires trying to prolong their life span in increasingly dangerous, bizarre, and narcissistic ways are common these days, but Andy is already receiving “life-extension therapy” in the compound’s medical bay. That makes me wonder if Andy wanted Zoomer for a more nefarious purpose. Think of how he tells Darby about Bill: “He provided the hardware, I provide the software. And we all know it’s the software that matters.” If we extend that thought, the suggestion here is that Bill’s consciousness, his “software,” could one day be transferred into Zoomer’s body, Bill’s “hardware.” Was Andy molding Zoomer in his image not just as a family-legacy move but a mortality-continuity move? “Zoomer is his life” … dun dun dun!
Why name this child Zoomer?
This kid isn’t even Gen Z, he’s Generation Alpha! Maybe he’s named after an internet search engine that never launched or a defunct app. But at least “Zoomer” is a noun and a name and not a random collection of letters that makes you roll your eyes until your head hurts.
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