TV Recap: “A Murder at the End of the World” – “Chapter 3: Survivors”

Six years after solving her first serial killer case with her ex-boyfriend Bill Farrah, Darby Hart was unexpectedly reunited with Bill at a billionaire’s retreat in the middle of nowhere, Iceland. And then he was murdered, and it’s been ruled a society. We pick up where things left off in last week’s double-episode premiere of A Murder at the End of the World with a recap of episode 3, titled “Survivors.”

“Chapter 3: Survivors” – Written by Brit Marling & Zal Batmanglij and Melanie Marnich

After meeting Bill Farrah (Harris Dickinson) face-to-face for the first time, Darby Hart (Emma Corrin) finds herself in the passenger seat of his uncle’s car, which Bill borrowed without asking. Darby navigates them through a wheat field to the site of another murder by a serial killer who marks his victims with a piece of silver jewelry that he stole from the previous one. They believe this woman was killed after the one found in Darby’s hometown, but before the survivor they’re on their way to interview.

In the present, Darby is in her room, staring at her laptop with a frozen image of the mysterious white mask caught on Bill’s door camera the night he died. “I’m gonna catch you,” she promises. She calls to the hotel’s AI assistant, Ray (Edoardo Ballerini), and asks where the other guests are. He tells her they’ve assembled in the library for a performance, so she freshens up to join them.

“I don’t think we’ve met,” Darby tells a man named Rohan Ravjit (Javed Khan), who let out an audible cry of sorrow when the news of Bill’s death was shared. Their conversation is interrupted by Lu Mei (Joan Chen) checking to see how Darby is doing. Rohan slips away as Lee Andersen (Brit Marling) asks Lu Mei for a moment with Darby. “Did you find anything in the footage?”, she asks. “No,” Darby lies, and Lee can tell she’s keeping something from her. Darby points out that Lee could hack the footage herself and asks why she didn’t. But they are interrupted by Lee’s husband and event host, Andy Ronson (Clive Owen). “Do you know that Bill was around when Lee was in Florida?”, he asks. “He was helping her save that little old house in Crystal River from falling into the swamp.” Daby tries not to be too swayed by this news, asking Andy if he knew Bill. He says no and refers to Bill as part of Lee’s “gutter punk cellar.” Lee laughs uncomfortably as the performance begins.

As Darby moves toward the seats, Tomas (Daniel Olson) offers her a glass of Shiraz wine that Ziba (Pegah Ferydoni) brought from Iran. Darby accepts the drink, apologizing for bumping into Tomas the night before, causing him to spill the pot of tea that was on its way to Bill’s room. She asks him who ordered the tea and how many cups there were. Tomas dodges the questions and leaves to serve other guests. Sian Cruise (Alice Braga) steps in, asking Darby if she’s going to interrogate her next. She cautions Darby to be smart about this, pointing out that Andy has the power to change her life. She points out that out of the initial 5,000 copy print of Darby’s book “The Silver Doe,” only 2,000 copies have been sold. “Impact isn’t just about having something to say, it’s about having the power to be listened to when you say it,” Sian says. “A friendly word of advice, Darby: Don’t bite the hand that might feed you.”

Ziba has assembled the group to a memorial for Bill Farrah, sharing that he’s the main reason she agreed to come to Iceland. “I didn’t agree with everything he did or said, but I think he was trying to wrestle down the darkness that he felt devour the world.” She introduces a song she performs, which was written in 1900 by a man in prison who felt his spirit could fly when he sang, which is how she hopes Bill feels now. As she sings, Darby looks around the room, imagining all of the guests in the white mask.

While the guests are listening to Ziba, Darby sneaks off, following a server into the hotel’s basement, where she finds the kitchen. Most of the staff are distracted by hotel manager Marius (Christopher Gurr), who instructs them not to give out any information about Bill Farrah when calls come in. Darby finds Tomas in the back of the kitchen by the dishwasher. “I don’t want to get you in any trouble,” she says, begging him for information. “Bill was my friend, and he didn’t kill himself. We both know they’re covering something up here.” Tomas tells Darby that he was hand-picked by Marius to work there, and he can’t jeopardize his career. But as Darby walks away, he says, “Three.” She stops, realizing he just answered her question about the teacups. On her way back to the stairs, Darby passes a board with a map of the hotel’s two guest floors, which has every guest’s room assignment. She grabs a marker and writes the information down on her arm.

Darby goes to her room to talk to Ray, asking if he has Internet access. While he doesn’t currently, he does have an archive of a week-old web crawl. She asks him to search for anything that connects other guests to Bill. From Twitter, he finds that Fangs (Bill’s alias) retweeted a post made by Oliver about how Fangs is a failed programmer looking for attention, and Martin liked one of Bill’s Tweets that pointed out how much of the world’s wealth is owned by 1% of the global population. She’s surprised to find that Ray has knowledge of a flight from Hong Kong to Vancouver that Lu Mei and Bill were both on in 2018, information he got from purchased credit card data. Photos were captured of Lee Anderson with Fangs at his “Artificial Insanity” exhibit in Detroit in 2021. Ray can’t find any connection between Bill and Andy. Darby asks about Rohan, and Ray provides a dossier. He’s a climatologist and environment activist who spent 3 years in a Moscow prison in the 80s. There’s no known connection to Bill, but Rohan has also been off the grid since 2006. A ship registered to him called “Last Chance” doesn’t have any maritime entries since then, either. Darby asks Ray about Sian and learns that not only was she the first woman to walk on the moon, but she was also recruited by Andy to lead his lunar colonization project. Darby asks for more information about Oliver and learns that he got into robotics as a child when he saw a robot that moved the way he did. He was accepted into Oxford at the age of 16 and also studied at Harvard. But Darby has to pause Ray when she sees someone leaving the hotel in a parka with their hood up.

Darby quickly grabs her coat and follows the hooded figure, who leads her away from the hotel, into a canyon, and up a cliffside. She tries to be quiet, but a misstep on the edge of a cliff causes snow and rocks to tumble, grabbing the hooded figure’s attention. Darby hides in a crevice on the side of the cliff as the person moves toward her. Her first glimpse is of their boots, which have bright red laces. And then she gets a brief peak at their face… they’re wearing a white mask… the one from Bill’s door camera! The masked stranger doesn’t see anybody, so they turn around and proceed the way they were going. Darby puts a little more distance between them before resuming the trail. The person heads to the highest point on the cliff face, and Darby watches from below as they pull out a red flashlight and begin to communicate in morse code out into the distance. “One down. Still a go.” She’s confused by the message. And from the horizon, a blue light sends a message back.

When Darby returns to her room. Ray is concerned about her body temperature, instructing her to disrobe, warm her midsection, and wrap herself up in a medical blanket with a hot water bottle, both of which are in an emergency kit in her room. Later, when her temperature has returned to normal, Ray tells Darby not to sleep since it would lower her body temperature again. So she makes herself a coffee and spikes it with Coca-Cola.

In a flashback, we see Bill driving as Darby pours Coke into a hot coffee. He thinks it’s a gross combination, but she offers him a sip. Yep, it’s so gross he spits it out. As they drive to meet the serial killer’s lone survivor, they talk about how organized and premeditated all of the murders seem to be. They suspect that he wants to be caught, but doesn’t think anybody will be smart enough to connect the silver jewelry he takes from a previous victim that he leaves on each body. They pull into the driveway of a farmhouse.

Darby’s memory is interrupted by a knock on her door. Lee has her son Zoomer (Kellan Tetlow) in her arms and tells Darby that when her son has nightmares, she walks him around the hotel to calm him down. She asks if he can rest on her sofa for a while and asks Ray to turn on “48 Variations for Two Pianos” to help him sleep. While Zoomer rests, Lee and Darby talk. “Why didn’t you hack the camera yourself?”, Darby asks. Lee says being a mom and hosting this retreat are two full-time jobs. Darby asks Lee why she didn’t give her the password. “I don’t know it,” she confesses. Darby pulls up her laptop and shows Lee the camera footage of the person in the white mask. “It’s a mask to defer AI facial recognition,” Lee reveals. “It means it’s someone who knows the footage is software monitored.” Darby asks who that would be, and she lists off pretty much everyone in the hotel. Lee tells Darby that Andy is the one who invited Bill to the retreat but that she encouraged him to come. “I met Bill 6 years ago,” Lee shares, a timeline that places their first introduction shortly after Bill disappeared from Darby’s life. “He was one of the few people who found me.” After being doxxed, Lee went to live with her parents in Florida to disappear. One day, Bill showed up at her doorstep with a copy of her book, asking to talk about it. Lee wouldn’t let him in, but Bill kept coming back, and she finally agreed to talk to him. As their friendship grew, he showed Lee Polaroid pictures of Darby and talked about her. Darby asks Lee if she and Bill were more than friends. “We hooked up once,” she confesses about a drunken night that they both deemed a mistake. “Darby, we were meant to be friends.” Darby asks for the timeline of Lee and Andy dating and learns that they were on and off for a while, both before and after she met Bill. “Then we got pregnant, and I got married.” Lee offers to hire Darby to solve Bill’s murder, but she says she doesn’t take cases for money and refers to herself as an amateur sleuth. Lee asks Darby to be careful, saying Bill’s killer seems sophisticated. “You have only one real advantage,” Lee asks. “No one sees a 24-year-old girl coming,” Darby finishes her thought. “You’re just another guest at a retreat as long as you play the part,” Lee confirms. Darby lets Lee and Zoomer sleep in her room.

The next morning, Darby wakes up at her desk, where she fell asleep. Lee and Zoomer are gone, and Ray informs her that she slept through her alarms. It’s now 9:51 am. Marius knocks on Darby’s door and hands her a giant black box from Andy. It contains a new parka and a note that reads, “11:00 snowshoe to the Southern Summit for a glimpse of the future.”

“What’s waiting for you at the top is unforgettable,” Andy promises as the group begins their trek. Darby walks next to Rohan, who offers her a drink from his flask before revealing that Bill is the one who helped him get sober. “He gave me the only thing that can really, really change a person – a different perspective,” Rohan shares, adding that he was sober for five years until two nights ago. As they walk and drink, Rohan’s pacemaker kicks in and catches him by surprise. He shares that he had heart failure two years ago. When he feels normal again, Darby asks Rohan if he spoke to Bill the night he died. “A good detective always has a timeline,” he smiles. Darby tells him she’s not a detective, but he tells her that’s not what Bill said. “Welcome to the future,” Andy declares as they reach the top of the summit. Everyone stares in amazement at the site of four-legged robots working together to dig a subterranean city. “They self-organize, self-repair, and they use each other to build bridges and to construct tunnels,” Andy explains. “All of this brought to beautiful fruition by Oliver.” Oliver (Ryan J. Haddad) shares that the technology is called “swarm robotics” and was designed to handle new climate extremes. He dreams of a future where robots will help mankind find food and shelter.

The group warms up in an elegant yurt. Darby is the first to remove her snowshoes, but she stops when she goes to the rack to grab her boots. On the top row at the end is a pair of boots with bright red laces. Somebody in the yurt is the person she followed last night. She sits down and anxiously watches as other guests go for their shoes, waiting to see who they belong to. David (Raúl Esparza) sits across from her and distracts Darby. “You looked like a kid in a candy store with those robots,” he tells her. Darby says she’s not a kid. “Trust me, you are,” he smugly replies. David invites Darby for a drink that night, adding that he read her book. “You’re a smart little girl,” he adds as he walks away. Darby glances back to the shoe rack. The boots are gone. Someone sits on the bench to her right. She looks down. It’s the boots. She looks up. It’s Rohan! “One down, still a go,” she whispers to him. “Careful, girl,” Rohan warns. “It was you who went to Bill’s room the night he died wearing a mask?”, she asks. “I would never hurt that boy,” Rohan says sternly, asking Darby to drop it. Rohan gets up and rushes out of the yurt. Darby heads outside to try and follow him, but he’s already gotten into an SUV, and the driver is pulling away.

Back at the hotel, Darby finds herself alone with a cup of tea in the dining room. Zoomer enters wearing a silver helmet, looking for someone real to play with. He has her try on his helmet, which augments reality. The hotel becomes a castle, and she plays a game where she chases after a floating crown. Ray is part of the experience, too, seen in his human form behind a desk in Zoomer’s Lab. When she’s done with it, she gives the helmet back to Zoomer and tells him how lucky he is. “Except when my parents fight,” he tells her. “When you were little, did your parents fight?” Darby acknowledges that her parents fought and asks what Andy and Lee fight about. “The future,” he responds. They’re interrupted by Andy, who scoops up Zoomer, gives him a kiss, and sends him off to play so he can talk to Darby.

“Know anything about Walt Disney?”, Andy asks Darby as he pours himself a drink. “In the 1920s, nobody believed it was even possible to make an animated feature. Took him seven years, and then he broke all records. Years later, when he was in his 50s, he built all these train tracks in his home. People thought he’d lost his mind. There was this grown man riding in and out of the living room on a children’s toy. But he was thinking in three dimensions. He was working something out. Something that had never been done before. A movie in motion in the real world.” (Note: There are a few historical inaccuracies in this speech. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released in 1937 and took three years to make, not seven. And Walt Disney’s miniature train was in his backyard, not inside his house.) “And you feel a kinship with him?”, Darby asks Andy. He shares another anecdote about how Zoomer once had pet hamsters, one of which was unintentionally female. They would study the genetic patterns of her offspring to view the dominant and recessive traits, and it gave him an idea. He shares that Ray is the result of two software bred together – a language processing algorithm and a home security AI. “Like Disney, you leapt tech-forward through play,” Darby observes.

Despite the friendly conversation, Andy tells Darby he’s sending her home. “You’re grieving, and to be perfectly honest, you interrogating the guests and my staff is something I’m not comfortable with.” Darby says she’s asking questions because the police didn’t, sharing that she hacked the doorbell camera from Bill’s room. “You think I don’t know that?”, Andy asks. “I’ve seen the footage, too. I know that someone in a mask came to his room at 12:03 am, but he’d already injected himself by that point. See, we don’t have cameras in the room, but we do monitor heart rates, and Bill’s spiked as a result of the morphine 4 minutes and 36 seconds before the arrival of the uninvited guest and 6 minutes and 11 seconds before you turned up at the door. The reason the police didn’t ask you anything is because they got everything they needed to know from Bill’s blood. The toxicology came in. It’s definitive. He overdosed. You grew up on crime scenes, and you think this is one, too. It’s not. It’s the site of a tragedy, and keeping you here is painful for you and the others.” Darby promises she’s ok, asking to stay. “I have to do what’s best for everyone,” Andy says, confirming that a car will take her to Reykjavik, where she has a first-class seat on a commercial flight home. Andy takes Darby’s ring, opens her door, and instructs her to pack.

“It was sixteen years ago,” Marta (Karina Arroyave) tells Darby and Bill at her kitchen table in a flashback. She’s the lone survivor of the silver doe killer, and she can’t remember what the man’s face looked like, but she’ll never forget the smell of bleach and aftershave. She was outside of Wendy’s, heading to her car when he attacked, strangling her so she couldn’t call for help. Since she had her keys in her hand, she was able to use them to stab him in the face. He released her from his grip, and she ran into the restaurant. Marta is reluctant to talk to the young adults across from her, and she seems doubtful that they can do anything to solve this case. But Darby looks out the window at Marta’s daughters playing in the yard and shares that she dreams of a world where they don’t grow up feeling like their lives don’t matter. Motivated, Marta gets up and grabs something. It’s a silver pin that was found in her car after it was detailed. It didn’t belong to her. “Thank you. This could really help us find other victims,” Bill tells her, and he demonstrates. Snapping a picture of the pin on his phone, he posts it to the message board, and within a minute, someone connects the pin to a high school in Utah. “Don’t give up,” Marta encourages them. “I’m holding out hope that whoever did this can never do it again.”

In her room, Darby calls the front desk and asks Marius to connect her to Andy. He says he can’t do that, but she asks to leave a message. “I’m keeping my room,” she declares. Lifting up her sleeve, Darby reads her arm and decides to go talk to Rohan in room 3. She knocks on the door and calls for him, but  he doesn’t answer. “I know you loved Bill,” she says through the door. “I know you love him still. I’m here to listen.” Todd (Louis Cancelmi), Andy’s head of security, comes to collect Darby, telling her a car is waiting for her and they need to leave now to beat an incoming snowstorm. He escorts Darby back to her room, finding that she jammed her door so she’d be able to get back in without a ring. “Give me a minute,” she asks, stepping inside and closing the door. She puts on her coat and grabs her book bag, and seems ready to make a run for out outside when her phone rings. “I do still love him,” she hears Rohan say. He’s breathing heavy. “I don’t want to talk to you, but I think I have to. It was me. I went to his room.” He tells her he wore the mask so there would be no record of his visit. “We had a plan. A good one, we thought. But Bill uncovered a secret. Something he wouldn’t say over the phone. When I got to his room, he had gotten high, waisted. I got angry, left. I see now he was drugged. He hadn’t got the chance to tell me, but I think I know what he uncovered.” Darby asks what, but Rohan lets out a painful groan and says, “Oh God.” She rushes out of her room past Todd, back towards room 3.

The door to Rohan’s room is ajar. Inside, Darby sees that his flask is tipped over, leaking out the liquid inside. The phone is off the hook, hanging by its chord. Todd follows Darby to Rohan’s room, and Marius arrives in a hurry, saying he got an alert from Rohan’s heart monitor company. They hear a scream from the library, and all rush there.

Rohan is on the floor, still. Sian tries to resuscitate him, but he has no pulse, and he’s not breathing. “He’s dead,” she declares. Darby drops to her knees in shock. She looks up at Andy, whose face has gone cold. “Todd, get everyone underground,” he orders.

A Murder at the End of the World now has two deaths in the present. Was Rohan murdered, or was this merely a poorly-timed death? We’ll hopefully find out next Tuesday, November 28th, when the fourth episode streams on Hulu. For now, I leave you with a description of the next episode.

“Chapter 4: Family Secrets” – Written by Brit Marling & Zal Batmanglij

There’s a killer on the loose and nowhere to run with a storm closing in. Darby breaks out of lockdown and discovers the retreat may not be what she thought it was.

Songs Featured in This Episode: