'A Murder at the End of the World' Spoilers: What Are You Doing, Darby?!

By Nate Parker | TV | December 7, 2023 |

By Nate Parker | TV | December 7, 2023 |

SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 5, “CRYPT”

I love a good mystery, which hardly makes me unique. So when Dustin raved about the premiere of A Murder at the End of the World like I did Deadloch, I had to give it a watch. And he was right! A closed-door murder during a billionaire’s retreat at an isolated hotel full of eclectic guests, one of whom is an amateur sleuth, is a great setup. Darby Hart (Emma Corrin) and Bill Farrah (Harris Dickinson) come fully loaded with charisma and chemistry. Most of the guests are nuts or suspicious characters, as are Andy (Clive Owen) and Darby’s hero, Lee (Brit Marling). I’ve been coming up with my own banana-pants theories to go with Chris’s — nice call on #2 and #3, btw — and it’s fun watching a group of the super-rich come to terms with their own mortality during a retreat where a spoiled, erratic billionaire convinces them they’re going to change the world.

But Darby’s behavior gets harder to justify as the story progresses. I could excuse the pilot. She’s a white-hat hacker focused on solving cold case murders of unidentified women, but she still gave anonymous access to her phone’s camera, mic, and all her Bluetooth devices, then handed her phone to a stranger and flew to an isolated secondary location where she’s forced to wear a tracking device. Poor decisions all around, but they established the setting and story, and Darby wanted to meet her idol. Unfortunately, after Bill’s death and particularly in this week’s episode, “Crypt,” Darby’s eccentric investigation style jeopardizes lives and her investigation in equal measure. Most of her conversations can be described as follows:

Darby: “I don’t trust you.”
Suspect: “I don’t trust you either.”
Darby: “Here’s everything other people told me in confidence that makes me think it’s you.”
Suspect: “Here’s why it isn’t me. I’m very trustworthy.”
Darby: “I trust you enough now to ask you to help with my investigation.”

Round and round it goes.

When ads kept calling Darby “Gen Z’s Sherlock Holmes,” I thought they meant that she was a younger, female, more socially aware genius investigator. Instead, the “Gen Z” part refers to her inability to keep private matters private. Darby fits the very definition of an unreliable narrator. The serious concussion, sleep deprivation, and drug use make her more so, evidenced by the fact that Darby ignores the brain swelling that could cause her death while telling the doctor she’s worried about surviving the night.

But it gets worse when Darby storms into Andy’s suite and tells the tech billionaire monitoring everyone’s location and health status she knows he isn’t Zoomer’s biological father. I don’t know who needs to hear this (Darby), but if you’re ever unsure about the parentage of someone else’s kid, here’s how to proceed: Mind your damn business. Even if you can’t because you’re investigating your ex-lover’s murder and you think he’s the baby-daddy, don’t start your inquiries by telling the husband. Go to the person who birthed the kid. And if you’ve made the mistake of telling a man like Andy you know the kid isn’t his, a man you just watched have an emotional outburst perfectly lit to highlight the gobs of spit flying from his mouth, don’t then casually tell the baby’s mother that you probably should’ve come to her first, but didn’t, and you told the father he isn’t the father, but he’s cool with it because he already knew and he’s sterile, be tee dubs. Confused? So am I. There had to be an easier way to establish that Lee didn’t know Bill was Zoomer’s father. Darby is a champion of women’s justice who tells a controlling father/husband she suspects may be an abusive murderer that his wife has a passport in a different name! She tells Andy he’s a cuckold and tells Lee that Andy is sterile! Finally, she receives an anonymous message from someone claiming to know why Bill died - via a lamp blinking in Morse code, obviously - and goes to meet that person in the pool room. While she waits for the informant/murderer, she goes for a swim. In the dark. Alone. Underwater. We all saw how that went.

With only 2 episodes of A Murder at the End of the World left, I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij came up with the broad outline of a cool murder mystery and is more concerned with keeping viewers on the edge of their seats than narrative coherence. I hope that by the finale, we’ll understand why the killer keeps warning Darby off while killing the people around her instead of just doing her in. Eventually, we’ll know who it is by the simple expediency of being the only one left alive. Emma Corrin is fantastic, and the past timeline where she and Bill are hunting for a serial killer is engaging as hell. I just wish the current timeline’s version would get her head in the game.