A Murder At The End Of The World finale: An inspired, messy twist
In "Retreat," the FX miniseries bows out on a hopeful note
TV Reviews A Murder at the End of the World
[Editor’s note: This recap, like all recaps on The A.V. Club, contains spoilers.]
The series finale of A Murder At The End Of The World opens with an elevator to hell. Fifty meters below the Earth, a destination chosen because Ray determined that that’s the distance needed to avoid any nuclear fallout, Andy explains as he gears up for his showstopping reveal. It’s just a shame that Andy hasn’t figured out everything quite yet.
Throughout its short run, AMATEOTW has struggled to balance the genre’s two narratives. Creators Marling and Batmanglij built competing arcs: one where Darby plays a retired detective brought back into the game after the death of her ex-boyfriend, Bill; the other tracks her first case, the Silver Doe Killer, and how her relationship with Bill ended. But the writers could never quite marry the road trip romance with its tech-based whodunit. The proportions always seemed a little off, showing us via flashback how Darby developed her deduction skills and how her obsession with killers scared Bill off. When the show spent more time filling us in on the Silver Doe, it detracted from the mystery that often strained to build forward motion. Whodunits always go backward and forward, with the past clarifying the present. Outside of showing us Darby’s strengths and weaknesses, the Silver Doe Killer mystery rarely did this, making these stretches a bit meandering, particularly in episodes that ballooned in runtime.
The creators intend this to be a more empathetic version of the whodunit, where the detective learns more about their feelings than their investigation skills. Heck, by having the B story focus entirely on how the investigator got their powers, they’re upending a vital component of the drama. How often do we see Poirot or Columbo in flashbacks? These characters are often many steps removed from the crime they’re investigating. Here, it’s all Darby and a little Bill, regulating all the backstory about the suspects and their relationship to the crime in exposition. Call it faulty programming because these elements dragged in those overlong episodes, treading the same ground as they stumbled over its over-plotted trail. None of it was awful, but with this cast, this budget, and this many good ideas, a better show was in there somewhere. Maybe it’s more of a failure of editing than faulty programming.
When the show focused, that promise could blossom as if it were soaking in the sun’s rays bouncing around 160 feet of tunnels and mirrors. These last two episodes, particularly this finale, gave us a glimpse at what this show always should’ve been: a snappy, melodramatic mystery tempered with cabin fever-induced dread. “Retreat” made good on the show’s promises as Corrin and Owen, in a booming, mustache-twirling performance, bring this drawing room mystery of a finale to a close. That the ending was surprising, logical, and a bit silly was the icing on the cake.
Now, the ending doesn’t have to be satisfying for a whodunit to work (right, Murder On The Orient Express?), but it certainly helps. Also helping: Clive Owen takes charge of the story’s mask-off moment when answers come to the fore. Rather than giving this to Darby at first, Andy goes through each member of his retreat, barking accusations at them and giving into that rage we saw last week. Owen brings the heat as Andy, a man no longer able to hide his abusive, controlling, and woefully shortsighted interior. With the cops finally on the way, Andy decides to hold the retreat hostage in his little Zoomer tomb. Andy spent millions creating a bomb shelter that could protect Zoomer from any possible catastrophe, except meeting his biological father. That’s the one thing that Andy could not predict. But we’ll get to that.
First, Andy has a few things to get off his chest. For instance, whoever guessed that David attacked Darby in her room, come on down and collect your prize. David threw on a thick pair of black leather gloves, grabbed the nearest hunting knife, and attempted to scare Darby off the case. We’ve got to give it up to David, a pro at knife-wielding threats. Has he done this before? We’ll never know because that reveal is overshadowed by what Andy says about Lee: He deleted her criminal record, presumably using the “clean slate” from The Dark Knight Rises. The explanation helps clear up any lingering questions about Lee’s loyalty to Andy. She was more or less using him, which makes more sense than genuinely liking the guy. After all, when we first heard about Lee in the premiere, she seemed more like an anti-establishment Hacktivist in the mold of Trinity, who famously “cracked the I.R.S. database” in her pre-Matrix days. How she ended up with the personification of tech dickhead can only be explained through some transactional relationship.
Lee has a criminal past, too, just not one that anyone would blame her for. As a 14-year-old, Lee did the old Superman III/Office Space routine, shaving thousands of small increments off massive financial transactions. Lee breezes through this stuff kind of quickly (maybe it would’ve been helpful to learn about Lee’s past in the Scientologist enclave in Clearwater, Florida), but her parents went into debt, her father went to jail, and she started hacking.
Owen builds tension in this scene, squeezing Lee out of the frame and wielding his power before her and the retreat. He slowly recaps his accusations at Lee, who he believes was planning to take his son and ruin his reputation, company, and life’s work. That’s when Zoomer’s remote ambulance enters, and Zoomer announces that he made pancakes with extra chocolate chips for Lee. Sometimes, the moppet lays it on a little too thick. As Andy grabs Zoomer and his aids attempt to take the child from the room, Darby gets hung up on Zoomer’s insistence that he must finish his game. She puts on the helmet and sees the creepy vision playing before Zoomer’s eyes. Ray is guiding Zoomer upstairs to finish their game, and the sight is so shocking that Darby rips the helmet off and asks Zoomer about Bill. While Darby’s response to seeing Ray didn’t totally click with us, Corrin’s gentle interrogation of Zoomer pulled the show together rather slickly. Through her soft-spoken prodding, Darby draws out the truth: Under the guise of a game, Ray had Zoomer murder Bill and Rohan. However, Sian was an unexpected casualty of Ray’s safeguards against hacks, causing her helmet to malfunction.
Ray and Zoomer as the killer was an inspired twist. The show seemed to treat its AI reverently for so long, pushing Ray to the background. Over the last few episodes, Ray hasn’t been featured as prominently. He becomes a tool for collecting information, providing medical advice, and a shoulder to cry on, but the show was wise to keep him in the realm of a benevolent, mindless virtual assistant. Having him lead Zoomer to kill is a genuinely creepy idea, an original take on AI that presents a new bent on the Child’s Play dynamic. There have been many murderous toys whose actions are blamed on the owner. That’s not the case here because the show doesn’t linger on Zoomer’s responsibility and instead treats him like the victim of manipulation.
With the cards on the table, Darby uses Oliver’s deepfake app to hack into Ray’s therapy files. She knows what it’s like to turn to Ray for comfort, and so does Andy. Hidden within his memory banks is a recording from the first night of the retreat, with Andy fuming with jealousy, telling his robot therapist that Bill was a threat to the future of Andy’s company. Andy worries, logically or not, that if Bill were to challenge Andy for Zoomer’s guardianship, Bill could end up owning the company. Ray reads this as a direct threat to the company, one of his prime directives, so it concocted a game where Zoomer would inject Bill with morphine and kill him.
As the police enter the hotel, Darby, Lee, and Zoomer break for the server farm, showing the child what Ray actually is. The sight of all those computer systems whirring away does put in perspective the amount of energy required to animate an AI that can trick a child into murder. It certainly can’t be helpful for the whole climate catastrophe Andy’s preparing for. That thing’s got to go. So finally, after all this time, Lee and Darby get to work together, hacking the old-fashioned way: setting a laptop on fire and hurdling it into the servers.
Now, about those Bill scenes. I found them much more successful here than in other places, but I don’t think they work in the end. Do they inform the story at all? The B-plot helps reveal a bit about Darby, but what did we learn from Bill if the show’s message is to find answers through the victim? That Darby should remember the good times? That it’s okay to say goodbye? Did Zoomer know he had a connection to Bill that was more powerful than anything Andy had (a weird message about adoption, but the show does frame the biological father as the one who truly connects with Zoomer)? It’s all a bit messy as Murder At The End Of The World has been, getting the mustard of sincerity all over its snow-white shirt.
The show ends with another split narrative. Darby reads her book to the room of supportive new friends as she imagines Lee and Zoomer making a break toward freedom. The idea that Darby can move on is a satisfactory ending to the show, especially when we think about where she’s been. Darby’s reading of the book shows her growth as much as she’s no longer dying her hair pink. She learns that it isn’t about the killer or the victim: It’s the “terrifying culture that keeps producing them.” In the end, Darby is writing Bill’s story so he doesn’t disappear, nameless and faceless, into the night. People will remember his name: Bill Farrah.
These last moments reveal that by allowing herself to embrace and share their relationship, Darby has found space for herself and her memories. The Silver Doe ends with an anti-climax as discovering the killer leads to a greater understanding of the crime. Retreat pays tribute to those who were lost, the victims, whose lives can be remembered appropriately rather than another casualty of patriarchal violence. The show ends on a hopeful note, with Lee and Zoomer firing a flare and waiting for rescue. They may be at the end of the world, but their lives are just beginning.
Stray observations
- “What are you doing for love now, Lee? Because David tells me you’re planning another great heist…OF. MY. SON!”
- It’s good to know that, even with the whole tricking a child to murder thing, Mei Lu is still interested in bringing Ray to her smart city.
- Darby’s reading epilogue was a nice moment of bookend to the series, but I have to wonder: Is her book being read as non-fiction? Do readers around the world know that Andy’s kid killed two people?
- Look at Marius, standing up for himself
- What did Chekov say about deepfake apps? If you introduce one in episode one, it must be used in episode seven.
- I loved the Zoomer as killer stuff, but his injecting Bill was a bit much. It worked better in my mind than on camera.
- “We built safeguards against this” is such a funny thing to say in response to the particular situation where you’re AI coerces your son into killing his biological father.
- I don’t know if I can forgive a show that had Joan Chen and did nothing with her.
49 Comments
Severely under-baked show. Half the characters were completely superfluous. Both rushed and turgid at various points with rather large plot holes. I can see why the just threw it onto Hulu.
“Under-baked” is a good word for it. Much like The OA, the final product felt like an early brainstorm. I’m constantly imagining a writers room full of people shouting, “Wouldn’t it be cool if….” They toss things together so carelessly.And like with The OA, I enjoyed the start, then abandoned the show, then I read reviews like this one that helped confirm my decision. :/
I bailed after episode two. I’m glad to see I didn’t waste another 5 hours.
The OA disappeared so far up it’s own ass by the end of season one, I didn’t even bother with season 2.
Yeah as I watched this series, I got the distinct impression that I was seeing several ideas for movies or shows, that the creative team failed to develop on their own, and so they bolted them together and called it done. And to make it worse, each idea was so blatantly derivative of other, better ideas. Darby and Bill finding a serial killer was Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Murders in an isolated setting was And Then There were None. Which in and of itself wouldn’t be anything bad or wrong. Just look at how Rian Johnson has breathed new life into the whodunnit with the Knives Out films, and Poker Face.What made this show annoying is they couldn’t even do a good riff on existing material. It all just felt so hacky and tossed off and shallow. Like the creatives behind this were so self-assured that they didn’t feel the need to actually try to understand and build-up, or deconstruct, the genres they were playing with. And as for the AI and climate change stuff, I kept rolling my eyes. It felt like them trying to be topical, like that party guest who passes themselves off as an expert despite only having read a few articles at The Nation.
Word. These straight to hulu joints are terrible.
This show straight up sucked. The “Gen Z Sherlock Holmes” was anything but. The love between Bill and Darby was devoid of almost any sparks (mostly due to Bill’s actor, but also due to the insipid writing), the message about bad A.I. was so on the nose that it made a hammer hitting a nail look subtle in comparison, the mentions of “hacking” almost everywhere in every scene would have been out of place in the ‘90’s movie “Hackers”, and there was zero humor anywhere. What a waste of what could have been a lovely parlor-room locked door mystery. I’ll take Knives Out all week long and twice on Sundays compared to this half-baked shit.What a waste.
more like Darby’s actor. She was more robot than human
Despite loving The OA, my husband and I couldn’t bear to watch past the third episode (and to be fair, he did guess the AI was killing people via the child’s game). I did go ahead and read all your recaps, though! So, thank you for watching so I didn’t have to.
Looking back, it might have been easier for Bill to spell “Ray” with his blood than to find Darby’s book and open it to the relevant passage he wanted to circle.
Heh, he was still conscious looking at Darby in the window. Could have just said “That fucking kid did it!”
I kept wondering, how long did it take him to flip through to find the exact page he needed. I know a lot of books pretty well, and it would take a hot minute to find the exact word I was looking for.
1) Why do single use morphine injectors come loaded with a fatal dose?2) Laptop batteries are essentially hand grenades?3) “Our feelings are our compass, they tell us what direction to go in and why” is TERRIBLE advice.4) The robot ants thing kinda went nowhere, huh?5) Disappointed so many of the characters ended up being irrelevant and we learn basically nothing about them.6) Sooo they just walk to the boat? Kaaaaay.Anyways, there were parts I really liked, like the “B Plot” flashbacks and Bill. (actually all my favourite characters are the ones who get murdered boooooo) and there were parts I not so much liked. It all felt kinda slapped together. Like a bunch of ideas that couldn’t stand on their own.
Did they establish how he even got the thing or did the AI magic it into his little medical bag? By the time they were doing the exposition dump my mind checked out like Homer’s brain leaving. Huge parts of the finale were that Futurama Devil meme of “You can’t just have characters announce what they feel. That makes me feel angry!”
“Did they establish how he even got the thing or did the AI magic it into his little medical bag?”
Ray gave Zoomer access and told him what to do.
It just had Zoomer go get it, under the guise of getting medicine to help Bill.
They mentioned Ray knew the code for the safe where the morphine was kept. Ray told him where to go and how to get it.
The morphine came from the medical supplies they kept inside a secure lock, which Ray had the code to. He trick zoomer into thinking it a toy and them got him to pretend to inject morphine into Bill, of cause their was nothing pretend about it.
Title text: A laptop battery contains roughly the stored energy of a hand grenade, and if shorted it… hey! You can’t arrest me if I prove your rules inconsistent!
-The robot ants thing…they mention in this episode that Andy was leveraged to the gills for building his apocalypse bunker, but not for his city of robot ants that they never discuss again? What happens to this extremely useful concept once the creator slips out of public eye?-You’d think that of all the half-baked characters in this show, the one who expresses the most interest in Darby upon them meeting on the plane, Martin, would have SOME kind of repeat interactions with her throughout the series. Nothing.-I, too, liked the flashbacks with Bill. Not sure why they upset the reviewer that much. It’s not like it detracted from the main plot of the show as most of that shit was filler anyway.
“The robot ants thing…they mention in this episode that Andy was leveraged to the gills for building his apocalypse bunker, but not for his city of robot ants that they never discuss again?”
Jesus, the ants are part of it. He’s leveraged to the gills BECAUSE OF THE WHOLE THING.
Christ, you need it fucking spelled out?
The OA also had a lot of half baked ideas. If Andy was as rich as we were made to believe then their no way he was leverage to the hilt for a simple hotel and bunker. Now if he really was planning on building a whole city underground, then may be so. But not from what we saw and not from what they insinuate.
And not to mention that Bill, realizing that he’s dying of a morphine overdose at the hands of Ray via Zoomer, grabs his copy of Darby’s book to locate the phrase “faulty programming” to circle so he can give her just a little hint of what happened to add some context after she’s figured it out, instead of writing, say, “Zoomer” or “Ray,” or something that would lead her directly to the answer. I guess he knows how much she gets into solving mysteries, figured she’d resent him if he made it too easy.
Oh man I hadn’t even thought of that! UGGGGHHHH
Also how didn’t ray all see eyes spot this and realise what he was doing and get zoomer to destroy it.
ALL OF THIS. I was shouting at my TV for the entire finale. It was crap.
This show just kinda sucked didn’t it?
The whole series came off like a bad exercise from a creative writing seminar. Someone already called Ray as the killer after episode 2. As the parent of an adopted (non-biological) child, the ending was really, really disgusting and cruel. Bill wasn’t Zoomer’s father. He was a sperm donor. That’s it. He was nothing. Lee was written as a mentally unstable twat and I didn’t buy for a second that she was believable as a hacker (at 14, no less!). I hate myself for wasting time on this show.
“ but what did we learn from Bill if the show’s message is to find answers through the victim? That Darby should remember the good times? That it’s okay to say goodbye?”Jesus Christ, the whole point of the show was the importance of human connections. It wasn’t even subtle, or anything. That’s what the flashback that you hated and I loved were all about. Bill was interested in human connection. Darby was interested in the murders over human connection and and Andy was undone by his isolation form everyone around him.
Love these comments. What’s stopping any of you complainers from writing your own masterpieces? Those who can do (even if imperfect), while the insipid bitch and moan here.
Didn’t anyone with half a brain figure this out at least three episodes ago?(note: obviously “anyone with half a brain” inherently cannot apply to anyone who works for AV Club in 2023)
In case we didn’t know how smart you are from the first sentence, you chucked an “inherently” into the second one and really drove the point home. You did it. You’re the king of avclub now. We inherently bow before you.
What is the “this” in your comment? That the show wasn’t very good, or that the AI was using a 5 year old as a proxy killer, complete with a deux ex machina murder bag?
the latter
Well fuck.
Really don’t understand the bad comments, it was not perfect but pretty good in particular if you compare it to the utter disaster that for some reasons everybody here loved that was Glass Onion with a similar premise. In fact it was “what if Glass Onion but good”.
“Is her book being read as non-fiction? Do readers around the world know that Andy’s kid killed two people?”
My thought was that she just admitted to helping Lee “kidnap” Zoomer, there’s no way she’s just been allowed to publish this book.
Show went done hill fast, and then with about 15mins left they have the 2 characters who brought nothing to the show chime in for no reason stating how Ray is Racist and Sexist, etc…
Interesting that you brought up Chekov’s gun, as I was thinking that AI has become that. As soon as it was revealed that Ray-bot was deeply integrated into the bunker, and not just a cute phone app, it seemed obvious that it was going to be the killer.Also, there’s a reason you never saw Columbo flashbacks, because they’re usually far less interesting than the main plot, a fact proven here. Also, it didn’t really show how Darby ‘got her skills’; it basically implied that she always had them. All I really got from the flashbacks is that mullet boy was a bit of a coward, and a whole piece of shit. You were so much in your feelings that you’re going to sit in the tub with like, 2 inches of water? And then you just leave without even saying goodbye? Yeah, fuck off and go pretend to be Banksy.
Coward for not wanting to confront a serial killer? What kind of logic is this? He’s human. She’s a robot
He stood his ground when confronted with the serial killer; he was cowardly for abandoning Darby by just leaving. I guess I wasn’t clear.
She didn’t leave him much of a choice.
A better title would have been 2023: An Icelandic Odyssey
Anyone one know why they saved the “Doe serial killer shooting themselves thing” for the end of the show, like it was some kind of revelatory reveal to the audience? The whole series I’m thinking they’re building to some big reveal with the flashbacks, but it didn’t seem seem possible, given we knew they were victorious over the serial killer and that Bill left her due to the trauma since like episode 1. Then I get to the end, and the serial killer offs themselves, and I’m like that’s it? I feel like 80% of the flashbacks that occurred past episode 3 were worthless. Pert of me thinks the book reading in episode 1 should have been cut short, so we never knew what happened to the case, just so they would have had something to actually reveal with the flashbacks at the end.
Yeah. I think you’re right about cutting back a lot of the book reading from the beginning. I think that would have made the flashbacks more compelling. I found the present-day mystery far more interesting. When they were in the flashbacks, I generally just wanted to get back to the present day.
The writer of the article forgot Person of Interest, where both the Machine and Samaritan used humans to affect the world, in Samaritan case often by manipulating them. So Ray wasn’t exactly Mr Originality.
Personally I was expecting a twist that Lee was actually behind the entire thing. Kill Bill and destroy Andy company so she could vanish off into the night. An with Bill dead, Andy dealing with the fall out of his AI going rogue and murders, she would have plenty of time to vanish and just after stripping his companies of billions.
Also the story a penniless mother on the run, would have been a great way to manipulate a person like Darby. But instead it turn into a bit of a feminist rant at the end. An Andy was 100% right, there a right a proper way to go about things.
The ending of this show was the pits… So condescending and pontificate. Save your time and watch Children of Men, Lost or season 1 of You.
I can’t believe they named this fucking kid Zoomer.
INSPIRED twist?!?!?! We predicted this shit the week we first saw Zoomer’s helmet!