A Murder At The End Of The World starts at a disadvantage. Opening with a Doors song will do that to you, especially the one echoing Apocalypse Now. As a needle drop, the Doors are a blunt object. A Murder At The End Of The World uses “The End” like a sledgehammer.
The show opens with Darby Hart (Emma Corrin), hoodie up and headphones on, making her way to a book event where she’ll be reading from her new tome The Silver Doe, a true-crime memoir in the vein of I’ll Be Gone In The Dark. As she pauses Jim Morrison’s Oedipal yelps from “The End” booming from her iPod, she tells the crowd that, though it’s against the rules, she’s starting from the end.
Endings play a big role in A Murder At The End Of The World, a sci-fi whodunit from The OA creators Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij. The premiere, “Homme Fatale,” introduces audiences to the moody world of Darby Hart, teen coroner, amateur sleuth, hacker extraordinaire, bestselling author, and the “Gen Z Sherlock” at the end of one story and the beginning of another. The show’s dual narrative follows Darby’s past and present, allowing this tedious premiere to drag its feet toward the actual mystery. Technically, we’re starting at the end of the past narrative and the beginning of the present. And in the present, Darby and her boyfriend/investigation buddy Bill (Harris Dickinson) broke up.
GRADE FOR SEASON 1, EPISODE 2, “THE SILVER DOE”: C
As Darby begins to read, we flashback to Bill’s beater car, and the two headed toward their final mystery together. Bill and Darby met recently on Detective Reddit, joining forces to track down Jane Does, unidentified female murder victims, all found wearing silver jewelry (hence, The Silver Doe). The show really wants to tease this out, so they argue in their motel room because this is more than Bill bargained for. But, they quickly patch things up off-screen and turn the Annie Lennox up on Darby’s iPod, harmonizing in a predictable moment despite it being five minutes into the show. AMATEOTW returns to clichés to smooth over any plot point that needs to happen already.
The pair arrives at a house in some nondescript suburban housing development, where Darby hacks the automatic garage door using a trick she learned from Lee Anderson (Brit Marling), the world’s most famous female coder, who was chased into hiding after “they doxxed her.” Once inside the house, they pound on the concrete basement floor with a concrete saw and sledgehammer and find nothing. Darby notices a shoddy wooden staircase that she blows down to uncover the body they were looking for buried underneath. Our hero cryptically reveals that the killer “started with his wife” based on a silver ring on the skeleton’s finger. A mysterious figure opens the basement door, and she and Bill start reciting the victims’ names.
None of this is particularly suspenseful or exciting because we don’t really understand what they’re looking for or why they’re looking for it. But the show has an hour and 10 minutes, plus six more episodes to fill, so Marling and Batmanglij need to stall for time. A season-long flashback arc will serve nicely. It takes a considerable amount of time for Darby to get to the titular murder to take place. Generally, in a whodunit, we’ll have a charismatic detective who can entertain the audience while we patiently wait for the whole thing to come into focus, find clues, interrogate suspects, etc. This isn’t going to be one of those. It’s an atmospheric, often silly but watchable mystery led by an introverted Mr. Robot type who doesn’t even have the benefit of a Christian Slater to make things interesting.
Following her successful reading, the “king of tech,” Andy Ronson (Clive Owen), reaches out to her about a retreat for nine elites. After some back and forth with the AI assistant Ray (Edoardo Ballerini), who tells her that he watched The Simpsons and it took his “breath” away, Darby takes the offer. She boards a private plane for Iceland, where Ronson brings the world’s greatest thinkers for an annual weeklong retreat to solve climate change. They have yet to solve the end of the world.
Aboard the plane, Darby meets the other guests. There’s the filmmaker Martin (Jermaine Fowler), who’s reading Darby’s book; “smart city” builder Lu Mei (the great Joan Chen), and astronaut Sian Cruz (Alice Braga). The rest are an assortment of venture capitalists (David, played by Raul Esparza) and tech dorks bragging about their deep fakes (Oliver, played by Ryan Haddad).
The plane lands in Iceland, and Darby and the other guests are whisked to one of those luxury hotels you only hear about in in-flight magazines. Darby’s feeling good, though. She re-dyes her hair before dinner and gets ready to rub elbows with the elite. That’s when Bill takes a seat at the table. Before Darby can say anything, Ronson arrives and explains how they’re here to solve climate change. He also says that only five guests are his, the other four were invited by his wife, Lee Anderson.
Later that night, Darby confronts Bill, and the two go for a walk. They talk about Bill, who is known in the art world as “Fangs,” and his success as an artist. He did a piece called “Artificial Insanity,” which feels one rung above Banksy’s Dismaland. The show has no shortage of groaners. Though the two flirt and hint at getting back together, they head in alone. Sometime later, Darby reconsiders and knocks on Bill’s door. She hears moaning and struggling on the other end, so she walks around the other side of the room to look at his window. Bill dies before her eyes. It only took 70 minutes, but we finally have a murder.
As far as premiere episodes go, this one is lacking. Marling and Batmanglij, who wrote six of the seven episodes together, stretch everything out to streaming length. Seconds of plot turns into tens of minutes. That would be fine if the characters were energetic or idiosyncratic or anything other than an introverted hacker. Her pink hair and tattoos aren’t fooling anyone: Darby lacks personality. I’m sure this is all leading to some traumatic twist ending, but I’d rather know exactly what her deal is so I can start to care about her.
That said, this show is perfectly watchable. The look resembles the desaturated, low-light cinematography and sets with clean lines and Nordic design you’d find in Mike Flanagan’s Netflix shows. These tones were algorithmically generated to be a neutral good, like a Starbucks with a strong WiFi signal and a clean bathroom. These are good things. Or at least okay things. Aggressively fine things. Maybe episode two will do something with it all.
Speaking of, let’s get into it: Now that Bill is dead and Darby has a mystery to solve, the End Of The World gets a bit more energetic. Doing her best Lisbeth Salander, Darby leads a snow-blind mystery as she grows more skeptical surrounding the circumstances of Bill’s death. Darby suspects foul play, but the hotel’s doctors and security arrive on the scene, pull her to her room and feed her some pills that Darby has no problem swallowing. Why she would take these pills when she already appears suspicious of this entire outfit? Who knows! The show is so filled with little lazy moments like this that structurally have to happen that it’s easy to fall into nitpicking. Anyway, she passes out, and we’re treated to another flashback.
Having joined her father (Neal Huff) on crime scenes since childhood, Darby has grown into a prodigious teen coroner. However, Darby’s fatal flaw is not sticking to facts. She doesn’t understand the criminal mind. Rather, she focuses on details of the victims’ personal lives, particularly silver earrings she’s supposed to drop in evidence. This leads her to the internet, where she skims Reddit for any information on corpses that wear earrings. This is how she meets Bill, who DMs her to quiz her about true crime. Darby tells her that the earrings mean Jane Doe is an older woman because kids don’t wear earrings like this.
Back in the present, Andy Ronson announces Bill’s death to the other guests. He says it was an overdose. Darby disagrees. She creates a diversion by clogging a toilet and threatens the concierge with a feces-filled function if he doesn’t leave his desk and check out the bathroom. Darby sneaks onto his computer and turns her room key into a skeleton key that can open Bill’s door. The first thing she finds upon entering his room is Bill’s corpse, draped in plastic in front of the open window, baking in the sun for all the other guests to see. Using her powers of empathetic deduction, Darby discovers that Bill shot up on the wrong arm, and there are no fingerprints on the syringe. Ray confirms that it’s statistically rare for heroin users to inject with their non-dominant hand, and they’re even less likely to wear gloves. Cool facts from Ray.
While in Bill’s room, Darby hears Lee enter, so she hides in the bathroom. Lee, we learn, had a relationship with Bill, too. It is just like Bill to date his ex-girlfriend’s hero. Later, while Mark is doing his mind-numbing presentation on AI-generated movies he very nearly spared us from, Darby admits that she saw Lee in Bill’s room and wants to know what’s going on. Lee points Darby toward finding the SSID and password for the hotel’s smart devices, like lightbulbs.
Darby has another flashback to right before she met Bill in person. She follows some clues to the flickering streetlights above a nearby train track that an idiot local thinks must be haunted. No, it’s Bill’s “genius” that’s making the lights flicker. This inspires present-day Darby to grab the SSID off a smart bulb. She then hacks into Bill’s door camera and finds a masked visitor in the footage.
The show has more gas now that there’s a mystery to solve. But we have to sit through hour-long episodes to get one small development: Someone entered Bill’s room wearing a mask. Two episodes in, and it’s starting to feel like this show would’ve been much better as a two-hour movie, where we, theoretically, move things along a little bit. Instead, we’re stuck in this hotel filled with the world’s greatest thinkers who think tech billionaires are going to save the planet with AI assistants. This show needs some reality and concrete stakes or it’s going to be a long five more episodes.
Stray observations
- I must shout out Louis Cancelmi, who brings his pinched-face excellence to AMATEOTW as he did to Killers Of The Flower Moon earlier this fall.
- This might be a personal hangup, but it is so risky to declare a character a good writer, artist, etc., and this show does it a lot. None of the fake art is particularly good and some of it looks or sounds dreadful.
- In addition to Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I was getting Silence Of The Lambs vibes from the master/apprentice relationship Darby has with her dad and Bill. Many quid pro quo, question-and-answer sessions in episode two.
- I genuinely had a hard time discerning how successful Darby was. At the book reading, which seems like an open mic night, the crowd scatters as she takes the stage. It’s only when she starts reading that their ears perk up. Later, Martin is caught reading the book and she is called “Gen Z Sherlock” by the press. But the real problem with characters praised for their work is the work has to live up to the hype. It rarely does.
- I’m trying not to nitpick this show to death, but c’mon, Ray has read every book and watched every movie yet has never heard the expression “hit the lights.”
- That said, Harry Potter in the style of Ernest Hemingway is a spot-on example of what AI is used for.
- It can’t be a coincidence that the one survivor in Darby and Bill’s serial killer investigation escaped on Andy Ronson’s son’s birthday. We’ll keep our eyes out for April 14 (4/14).