TV Recap: “A Murder at the End of the World” – “Chapter 4: Family Secrets”

Darby Hart’s time at Andy Ronson’s Icelandic retreat was about to come to an end when Rohan Ravjit collapsed, the second death at the billionaire’s summit. With a storm approaching and a murderer potentially on the loose, Andy ordered everyone underground. That’s where things pick back up in the 4th episode of FX’s A Murder at the End of the World.

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

Zoomer (Kellan Tetlow) is crying as his mom, Lee Andersen (Brit Marling), carries him downstairs with the rest of the guests. They’re led to a conference room six stories below the ground level, with Andy Ronson’s head of security, Todd (Louis Cancelmi), leaving to head up efforts to search the hotel to make sure it’s clear. Lee blames herself for inviting Rohan to the retreat. Lu Mei (Joan Chen) tries to comfort her, saying it appears Rohan had a heart attack. “Rohan told me that he had a pacemaker,” Darby Hart (Emma Corrin) shares with the group. She recalls that hotel manager Marius (Christopher Gurr) was on his way to Rohan’s room with an urgent message from HeartFront, and Darby suspects that the pacemaker company recognized that Rohan’s device had been hacked. Lee says the only way that could happen is if there’s a heart monitoring system in the hotel like one would find at a hospital. Their staff doctor, Eva (Britian Seibert), confirms not only that they have one but also that it was taken out and plugged in at some point that day.

Todd returns with bad news. Due to the storm, it will take the police between 48 and 72 hours to get there. Darby asks Marius if he’s spoken to HeartFront, but he refuses to answer any questions. David Alvarez (Raúl Esparza), who has grown increasingly irate, asks why Andy isn’t there with them. Todd tells him Andy is working on a solution, but David suspects that he’s just trying to keep himself safe. Darby asks what is to be done with Rohan’s body until the police arrive. She’s frustrated when Marius says it will be moved to the kitchen’s walk-in fridge because that would tamper potential evidence. She offers to examine the body and take notes but is refused. Todd says everyone will return to their rooms and remain isolated, with meals being delivered and security patrolling the halls. As each guest is brought to their room, Todd collects all of their electronic devices.

Moments after Darby gets to her room, she finds Sian (Alice Braga) outside her balcony knocking. “Are you VI or Emacs?”, Darby asks. It’s a sniff test to see if Sian knows enough about hacking to understand these two coding methods. She doesn’t, and Darby lets her in. Sian apologizes for not trusting Darby when she believed Bill was murdered. “If you want to see Rohan’s body, I can help you,” Sian offers. Since she helped Andy set up the resort’s security, she knows how to get around it.

Darby and Sian move through the halls with flashlights, using them to blind all of the security cameras they pass. They had to momentarily hide in the dining room kitchen to avoid being seen by patrolling security guards, but they are able to then sneak down to the main kitchen. Inside the walk-in fridge, they find Rohan’s body on a table under a tarp. Darby and Sian inspect Rohan’s body, finding the scar from his pacemaker implant. Sian asks Darby how a pacemaker could be hacked, and Darby shares how a cloud update would download a series of fatal attacks to the device. Darby checks Rohan’s pockets and finds the red flashlight. “It’s a signaling device,” Sian says, recognizing it. Darby tells Sian that Rohan and Bill had a plan, but she doesn’t know what it was.  She tells her about the night she followed Rohan and saw him use the signaling device to send a Morse code message, which was replied to with a blue light. “So we see whose on the other end of the light,” Sian says. Darby brings up the storm, but Sian dismisses it. “I’ve walked on the dark side of the moon,” Sian reminds Darby.

In the hotel’s garage, Sian opens up two cases, which contain suits designed to withstand extreme climates, including radiation and biochemical attacks. She believes they will have 3 hours before the storm gets really bad. They use a map to plot out where Rohan sent the signal from and the direction he was facing. Darby seems reluctant, and Sian offers to go alone, but Darby musters up the courage to join her on the back of a snowmobile. When they get to the cliff that Rohan climbed, they proceed on foot and talk about how Bill’s death wasn’t a hack, but the killer was tech-savvy enough to know how to break the hotel’s security protocols and make sure they weren’t visible on the camera footage (Darby believes they deleted themselves from it). “Lu Mei has the strongest motive because Bill’s Artificial Insanity was a takedown of smart cities,” Sian says. Darby questions why Andy even invited Lu Mei, as she’s his biggest competition. Darby also has a bad feeling about David. “If David was going to kill anyone, it would be Lee,” Sian shares. “She stole Andy’s focus from David.” Sian shares that when Lee got pregnant with Zoomer, becoming a father preoccupied Andy’s free time. “Zoomer is his life.” When they reach the top of the summit, Darby uses the signaling device to send an SOS. There’s no response.

Back on the snowmobile, Darby and Sian ride in the direction the blue light came from, talking through the communication device in their helmets. Darby suspects that Bill discovered something his first night at the resort and that he would’ve told her if she had joined him in his room. “It must be connected to whatever plan they had, to Rohan’s signal.” They reach the shore but don’t see a ship on the horizon. There is, however, a stake with a rope that leads into the water. Sian begins to reel it in and pulls in a capsule containing an inflatable boat labeled “Last Chance,” the name of Rohan’s boat. But there’s no time to search further, as lightning sounds behind them, and they see the storm is getting closer. It’s time to head back.

Another obstacle is thrown in Sian and Darby’s way as the snowmobile’s engine stalls. Sian says they can make it on foot in their suits, but the winds are so strong that walking is difficult. They are relieved to come upon the yurt, which has a black SUV parked outside. The doors are open, so they enter and take off their helmets. Darby’s eyes go wide as Sian pulls out the car’s terminal and hacks it to start the car. Darby is noticeably less trusting of Sian as she drives them back to the hotel. Sian talks about how Andy thinks the climate is changing faster than scientists are estimating. She reveals that her lunar colonization project is out of capital. “I think he’s draining the funds for something else, probably this place, but he won’t say why, and neither will Lee,” Sian reveals. The roads get worse. Sian has a hard time keeping control of the SUV. Black ice sends them flying off a cliff, rolling to a crash. Darby opens her door and collapses into the snow, bleeding from above her left eye as she passes out.

A flashback finds Darby waking up in the bed of a truck with Bill Farrah (Harris Dickinson). “Today, we find out if this is Carmen Perez’s pin,” he said, holding up the piece of silver they got from Marta. Soon after, they were with a friend from The Doe Files, Sue (Samantha Jones), and a medical examiner (Derek Peith) who confirmed that this Jane Doe’s teeth matched the dental records of Carmen Perez, the owner of the pin. Darby and Bill asked for the evidence that was collected with the body. In the box, they found a silver wedding ring with the inscription “E. Bell” on the inside of the band. As Sue walked them out, Bill sneezed, and she asked if he had a cold. He told her this is normal for him, a condition called ACHOO Syndrome (Autosomal Dominant Compelling Helioopthalmic Outburst). It makes him sneeze when he transitions from dark to light. “It’s genetic, my father has it too.” They hugged Sue goodbye.

Back in Bill’s uncle’s car, Darby lamented about having to spend another night sleeping in the car. Bill said he had an idea. They drove to the Big Horn Lodge and hung out in the parking lot, watching as the Miller family loaded up their car and drove away. Bill and Darby went swimming in the hotel pool, then went to the lobby dripping wet to say they had left their keys in room 115. When the receptionist (Sean Dillingham) asked for the name on the reservation, they said Miller, and he printed them a key. As they walked to the room, Bill asked Darby if she wanted to have kids someday. She hadn’t thought about it. Bill shared an anecdote about his mother, who went to a psychic who predicted her son would have just one child with a woman he slept with only one time. He wanted to prove that psychic wrong by having seven kids.

As they relaxed in the room, Bill clicked through the songs on Darby’s iPod, complimenting her taste in music. Darby shared that the iPod belonged to her mother, who abandoned her as a child. He asked if she had ever thought about looking for her, and Darby said no because if her mom wanted to see her, she knew where she lived. Darby drank mini alcohol bottles from the hotel fridge and tried to talk more about the case, suspecting that this ring belonged to the killer’s first victim, someone close to them. Bill asked to take a night off of the case. Darby went to the bathroom to fix her hair. When she rejoined Bill, she tried to make a move on him and got rejected.

The following day, Darby woke up alone in bed as Bill returned with a coffee and Coke for her. He told her that since they were investigating women who died at the hands of men, he wanted to be sure he wasn’t taking advantage of her. Sober, he asked what she wanted. She asked him to hold her, then kiss her, and they began to make love.

Back in the present, Darby comes to, finding that Sian is dragging her back to the hotel. Sian has a helmet on, while Darby’s bleeding head is exposed. She blacks out, and the next thing Darby knows, she’s in the hotel’s medical room being attended to by Eva. Sian tells the doctor that Darby was unconscious for 25 minutes and has a concussion. Darby watches as Sian struggles to take her helmet off unsuccessfully. “Is that morphine?”, Darby asks with alarm as she sees a vial of clear liquid pulled from a fridge. She says she doesn’t want it, but Eva insists on administering a milligram for the pain. Todd tries to help Sian out of her helmet, but it won’t release. Andy Ronson (Clive Owen) enters, angry with Sian for leaving the resort, but that conversation will have to wait as Sian’s helmet is indicating that there’s just 2-minutes of oxygen left. He opens a laptop, trying to hack it open, but he can’t get it to go. Todd joins in, trying to drill a hole through the helmet, but it’s impenetrable. Andy tries to crack the visor to no avail. Out of time, he asks Eva to perform an emergency tracheotomy. Eva’s never done this procedure before, but as Sian begins to pass out from lack of oxygen, she breaks through and watches her eyes open as she inhales through a new hold in her neck. Darby passes out.

Lee tends to Darby, waking her up intermittently to check on her concussion. One of the times she wakes up, Zoomer is using his toy medical kit to check on Darby. She asks how long she was asleep, and he doesn’t know. Feeling better, Darby gets out of bed and goes to the window to pull back the curtains. Sunlight shines into the room, causing Zoomer to sneeze. It makes her blood go cold. “What did you just do?”, she asks Lee’s son. “I sneezed,” the intelligent boy responds. “It’s called Autosomal Dominant Compelling Helioopthalmic Outburst. I sneeze from the light.”

That’s all for this week. A Murder at the End of the World returns Tuesday, December 5th, exclusively on Hulu. Here’s what’s coming up next.

“Chapter 5: Crypt” – Written by Brit Marling

Darby confronts her prime suspect only to find the tables turned and an unexpected alliance formed…Until someone else dies and her own life is threatened.

Songs Featured in This Episode: