A Murder at the End of the World Premiere Recap: Grade the First Two Episodes of Hulu’s Whodunit

Rebecca Iannucci
·6 min read

Hulu’s new mystery drama A Murder at the End of the World was originally slated for an Aug. 29 debut, but it feels right that a moody, wintry show like this one is instead premiering when the sun sets at 5 pm.

The two-episode series premiere, which dropped on Hulu Tuesday, introduces us to Darby Hart (The Crown‘s Emma Corrin), an experienced hacker and amateur sleuth who grew up around crime scenes and dead bodies, given her dad’s career as a medical examiner in Iowa. When we first meet Darby, she’s reading an excerpt from her new book The Silver Doe, named for a particularly memorable Jane Doe whose only unearthed remains were her bones and a pair of silver earrings.

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During Darby’s reading at a local bookstore (and throughout Murder‘s first two episodes), we learn via flashbacks that Darby had developed an intense relationship with a guy named Bill Farrah (Trust‘s Harris Dickinson), who she met on a web-sleuthing forum as she began to dabble in crime-solving. Darby and Bill had pursued the Silver Doe case for quite a while, eventually piecing together that the Silver Doe was just one of several women murdered by a serial killer. But when their investigation got too real — they’d broken into the potential killer’s former house, uncovered the remains of his first victim, and were held at gunpoint by someone who may have been the killer himself — Bill bailed on Darby. “I think this is both too much and not enough,” he’d written to Darby on the motel’s bathroom mirror. “I left you the car.” Bill and Darby haven’t seen each other or spoken in the six years since he left.

After her bookstore reading, Darby returns home and receives an invitation (via a trippy augmented reality app on her phone) to an annual retreat held by billionaire tech entrepreneur Andy Ronson (Oscar nominee Clive Owen). There’s a lot of fuzzy details about the trip, including the destination, the other attendees and why, exactly, Darby is invited — but you don’t really say no to Andy Ronson. Plus, his wife is Lee Andersen, a hacker that Darby has idolized for years, so she accepts the invite.

The destination, it turns out, is Iceland, and Darby is joined by a handful of other guests that include a prominent venture capitalist, a well-known filmmaker, a robotics engineer, a doctor-turned-potential colonizer of the moon, and a woman who builds smart cities in China. In his welcome speech on the first night of the retreat, Andy shares his growing concerns about the looming climate crisis, but expresses hope that the attendees of this year’s retreat can help ensure humanity’s survival in the years ahead. It’s all very eloquent and optimistic and, for the kind of reclusive billionaire you see in shows and movies like this, surprisingly not foreboding at all.

That is, until Bill unexpectedly sits down across from Darby at the welcome dinner, and she quite literally chokes on her meal at the surprise.

Later in the evening, Bill and Darby go on a walk and clear the air about some things: Bill came to the retreat for Lee, with whom he apparently has a history of some kind. (We don’t find out what that is, other than some paparazzi pics of the pair walking down a street together.) He also reveals that he ditched Darby all those years ago because she scared him, and he knew he couldn’t be brave in the ways she needed him to be. And yet, at the same time, Bill had felt that Darby also left him, over and over again — in more metaphorical ways — during their years together, and it was “really hard to be in love with somebody like that.”

Darby initially declines Bill’s offer to “get warm with him” in his hotel room at the retreat, then later reconsiders after hearing a song on her iPod that she and Bill used to sing. Upon visiting Bill’s room, though, Darby turns away from the door when it sounds like Bill is having sex with someone else. But the moans give way to suspicious grunts and crashing noises, and Darby runs around the exterior of the hotel so she can see in through Bill’s window. She can tell there’s been a scuffle of some sort, and then Bill appears at the window, bloody and disoriented. He collapses on the floor and asks Darby to stay with him; she does for a moment, then runs to get help. Eventually, she gets access to Bill’s room, and former doctor Sian (Queen of the South‘s Alice Braga) tries to resuscitate him, to no avail.

In the morning, Andy gathers all of his guests at breakfast and reveals that Bill has passed away. Darby is frustrated that Andy cites an overdose as Bill’s cause of death — he’d gotten sober years ago, and the circumstances of his death don’t line up with an overdose — and she’s even more alarmed when Andy encourages his guests to stay and proceed with the retreat. But if she’s going to be asked to stay, she’s at least going to get some answers, and Darby later sneaks into Bill’s hotel room to examine his corpse. He was injected with a needle, but the injection site is suspiciously on his dominant arm, which is not a common place for drug users to inject themselves. Plus, Darby can’t find any fingerprints on the needle… and it’s not typical for drug users to wear gloves during the act. (“Somebody killed you,” Darby sadly whispers to Bill’s body.)

Darby finds an unlikely ally in Lee, who also snoops through Bill’s hotel room a bit after his death. Later, the two women sit next to each other at one of the retreat’s many tech presentations, and Lee agrees that Bill did not overdose. She reveals that all of the hotel’s security cameras are wireless, hinting that Darby ought to hack into them — and Darby does, successfully, a little while later. She scans through footage taken from the peephole on Bill’s hotel room door, which is an uneventful shot of the hallway for a while. Then, suddenly, someone appears outside the door, wearing a hooded jacket and a creepy chrome mask over their face. They stare at the door for a few seconds, but that’s all the footage we see for now.

Episode 2 concludes with a sweet flashback to Darby and Bill’s blossoming relationship. After weeks of texts and video calls, they arrange to meet at a bar in Iowa. Darby arrives and moves through the crowd, not seeing Bill anywhere at first. But she eventually reaches him, and when he looks up, they seem absolutely elated to be interacting in person.

OK, your turn! What did you think of A Murder at the End of the World‘s first two episodes? Grade them in our poll below, then drop a comment with your full reviews!

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