A Murder At The End Of The World recap: For Darby Hart, the game is finally afoot
Murder! Intrigue! Suspense! At last, the show becomes an actual whodunit.
The game is finally afoot At The End Of The World, with writers Brit Marling, Zal Batmanglij, and Melanie Marnich focusing on the mystery at hand rather than the one in Darby’s book. Filling in gaps is undoubtedly essential to this story, but the dual narrative was exhausting in those exposition-filled openers. Outside of occasionally explaining exactly how Darby is feeling at a pivotal moment in the present, the silver jewelry MacGuffin hasn’t begun to shine. Until that arc come into focus, it’ll continue to be a silver albatross around this show’s neck.
Thankfully, this week was light on Bill and Darby’s Hardy Boys adventure. Directed by Batmanglij, “Survivors” begins to look and feel like an actual whodunit, and the show is all the better for it. Appropriately, AMATEOTW won’t follow the path exactly as expected, choosing to rejigger tropes as they appear. However, while the writers avoid “death by GPS” in this episode, Darby learns to skirt quicksand the hard way.
Bill has been dead two days by the time we meet Darby in her hotel room agonizing over the security footage. In the lobby, she finds her fellow retreaters eulogizing their fallen brethren and moving on as quickly as possible. Billionaires, man, they handle grief so well. The scene in the lobby pinpoints several of Darby’s targets for the episode: Rohan (Javed Khan), an infamous climate activist and friend of Bill; Lee, who encourages Darby to continue investigating; Tomas (Daniel Olson), a waiter who admits that he brought three tea cups to Bill’s room; and Andy, whose growing suspicion of Darby is untenable. She watches the other hotel guests singing songs Bill’s honor, and all she can see are suspects. Now she’s thinking like a detective.
She’s acting like one, too, doing her gumshoe due diligence and engaging in two foot chases. First, Darby follows Tomas through the kitchen and interrogates him about Bill’s death. Then, change Darby’s middle name “danger” because she follows the masked man with red shoelaces across the icy tundra and watches as he signals “One down, still a go” in Morse code, using a red flashlight that beams like the hotel’s door camera. While I still can’t get over the fact that Darby has a skill for any situation, I do like the play on Bill’s early warning about following a trail without question. What is this but a little game of “death by GPS” with Darby following her dot wherever it leads?
Amid all this, the most crucial conversation might be with Sian. “Impact isn’t just about having something to say; it’s about having the power to be listened to when you say it.” Sian’s awkward expression rings true for Darby, who must learn to weaponize her perceived disadvantages (age, size, and gender) against the killer. Darby’s slight frame and pink hair make her easy to dismiss, as exemplified in the behavior of the show’s two richest men: David, who calls her a “smart little girl,” and Andy, who lectures Darby on grief and describes her as “fragile.”
Like many of us, Darby’s insecurities plague her worldview. Despite being a teen coroner, amateur investigator, and the author of a book that sold 2,000 copies and has a specific audience of the world’s richest, most elite people, Darby doesn’t have much confidence. That’s Bill’s thing. He gives people confidence. For Lee, he got her out of hiding and into Andy’s arms (for better or worse), and for Rohan, Bill encouraged sobriety. Bill gave him the only thing that can change a person: “a different perspective.”
That change of perspective is vital for Darby to hear. To Rohan, someone who only knew Darby secondhand through Bill, she’s an ace detective. “The best,” he says. Darby doesn’t see herself that way. By the time Lee arrives in her bedroom with Zoomer (Kellan Tetlow), Darby’s been on multiple foot chases, hacked the security system, and determined that right-handed drug users never shoot up with their non-dominant hands. But when Lee offers to pay her, Darby turns down the offer. She doesn’t work for pay, which is certainly something. Get the bag, Darby. Like Sian, Lee offers some good advice that helps this whole thing lock into place. “No one sees a 24-year-old girl coming.”
I’ve been critical of this show as a “whodunit”—mostly because it took so long for the it to get dun. It’s a tricky genre to pull off and often requires another hook to stand out, something like a detective with a kooky tick (Poker Face) or genre exercises to liven up interrogation (The Afterparty). At first, I called bullshit on this hotel of tech enthusiasts underestimating Darby, especially since everyone has seemingly read her book and knows who she is. However, I do like this dynamic. A good detective should be somewhat invisible and underestimated. Agatha Christie’s limping, egg-shaped, past-his-prime Hercule Poitrot slipped into many investigations because his suspects believed him more concerned with his mustache than the case. Similarly, Columbo’s ragged appearance threw off his snobbish suspects. Obviously, not all whodunits need follow this, but it certainly helps the medicine go down, which is probably why this episode hits harder.
The next day, Andy invites the guests on a hike to the top of a mountain where he’ll show off “the future,” a.k.a. his fleet of Boston Dynamic Robots that are digging a hole to the center or something. Andy describes them as examples of AI workers who can build societies in the most inhospitable places. It’s immediately sinister, but no one reacts to it, so we move to a glass igloo for some cocoa and conversation. More importantly, Darby learns that Rohan is the masked man, but Rohan flees before she can question him.