When we last left Darby Heart, the lead character in FX’s A Murder at the End of the World, she had just been trapped under a glass pool cover in Andy Ronson’s high-tech hotel’s spa. A shadowy figure stepped into the frame just before the credits started to roll. In the penultimate episode, “Crime Seen,” we pick up where things left off.
(Chris Saunders/FX)
“Chapter 6: Crime Seen” – Written by Brit Marling & Zal Batmanglij
The mystery person watching Darby Hart (Emma Corrin) drown under the glass pool cover walks away. Darby goes unconscious, her body still as she sinks with her arms over her head. She doesn’t see the person reappear with an axe they pulled from the fire alarm, using it to break the pool cover open and reaching their arms into the water to pull Darby out.
When Darby’s eyes open next, the world is upside down. She sees Lee Andersen (Brit Marling) leading the way for whoever is carrying her. The next thing she sees is Lee and David (Raúl Esparza) speaking in hushed tones by a fireplace. Darby is shivering as she watches David hug Lee and exit. Darby is disoriented as Lee tries to help her up.
(Chris Saunders/FX)
Lee finishes drying Darby’s hair in the women’s changing room of the hotel spa as Darby comes to. She asks Lee if she sent the Morse code message instructing her to meet at the pool. “Of course, the phones aren’t safe here,” Lee replies. The hotel’s security system isn’t active in bathrooms or the spa for privacy reasons, which is why she wanted to meet there. Darby asks Lee if the pool cover is on the grid, presuming the killer hacked it. Darby shares that she’s having a hard time trusting Lee, bringing up the fake passport and Lee’s general aloof nature.“Everyone I’ve told the truth to is gone,” Lee tells Darby. “Everyone except for David.” She was withholding information in hopes of keeping Darby safe, but it’s time to come clean.
Lee describes Andy as becoming increasingly more controlling of their son Zoomer. It started with small things like Andy referring to Zoomer as “my son” instead of “our son” in conversations where Lee was present. On visits to this Icelandic resort while it was being built, Andy was too paranoid to let Zoomer play outside, fearing that he would be kidnapped. The boy was only allowed to play indoors, and Lee tried to give him a normal life, letting him ride his bike through the circular hallways. But on one occasion, Zoomer fell and got hurt within Andy’s sight. His instant reaction was the strike Lee across the face, with Zoomer witnessing the domestic violence and rushing to his mom’s aid. “The thing Zoomer needed protecting from is Andy,” Lee shares. She came to the realization that once the resort was complete, she and Zoomer would be stuck in the underground home Andy was creating for them forever. “I knew I had to get him out, but I just didn’t know how,” Lee says.
Married to a powerful tech billionaire with the President of the United States on speed dial, Lee knew she couldn’t go to the authorities. But she remembered an old classmate who moved to a Nova Scotia cabin to live off the grid in a place nobody would ever look for Lee or Zoomer, so she made a plan to escape. One day, she picked Zoomer up from school like normal and broke the routine by taking him to a Six Flags amusement park. She found another blonde woman with a boy around Zoomer’s age and secretly put her phone in the woman’s purse to throw off Andy’s tracking. Knowing that the park’s security cameras would be connected to facial recognition software, Andy disguised herself with a dark wig and glasses that would blind cameras, redressing her and Zoomer in merchandise they bought. And in the parking lot, Lee switched to an old car that was waiting for them. She drove for eighteen hours, only stopping briefly to refuel, using a fake ID to cross the border into Canada with just $213 in her pocket. She arrived at her friend’s cabin after dark, finding him on his porch talking to someone whose back was to the driveway. She carried Zoomer up the driveway, eyes full of happy tears thinking she had made it. And then the other person turned around… the person she was running from… her husband, Andy Ronson (Clive Owen).
“You can go, Zoomer stays.” That’s all Andy said to Lee on the private flight home. Lee doesn’t know how Andy found out about her plan. “There is no leaving him,” she concludes to Darby, adding that Andy has only grown more obsessed with their son. “So he wanted to know Bill to know his own son more deeply?”, Darby asks. Lee shares that she wasn’t aware that Bill was Zoomer’s father, and that when Andy invited Bill to the retreat, he declined. Darby realizes that Andy invited her as bait to lure Bill there. Lee shares that once she knew Bill was coming, she contacted him to ask for his help escaping. Bill asked her to invite Rohan, and they devised a plan to sneak her and Zoomer out of Iceland aboard Rohan’s ship. David was also in on the plan, and Darby realizes that’s why David was lingering outside of Bill’s room the night he died. She presumes the three teacups were for Bill, Rohan, and David.
“Andy’s too smart to invite Bill to his retreat and have him murdered, especially if he knew about the maternity,” Lee says when Darby brings up the potential for Andy to be the murderer. Darby feels like an idiot for pointing accusations at Lee to Andy. Lee doesn’t hold it against her. “I fell in love with Andy, and there are whole parts of me that love Andy still,” she explains. Darby says it was a good plan, but the flaw is that somebody murdered Bill to stop her. “Someone murdered Bill to try and stop you, and now they’re trying to kill me,” she says, finding the strength to stand up and declaring that she wants to have another look at Bill’s room. “I’ve been focusing on trying to find the killer when I should be trying to understand the victim,” she says. Lee tells her that Andy should be in his treatment with Eva for another 15 minutes, buying her time to join.
As they move toward the door, it starts to open. Lee calls out to ask if it’s David, but there’s no response. She grabs a decorative stone off a table as they see a shadow coming from around the corner – Oliver (Ryan J. Haddad). He had headphones on, so he couldn’t hear them. “David sent me,” Oliver explains. “He said he’s keeping Todd busy.” David wants them to wait in Oliver’s room since nobody is looking for him, but Darby announces that she’s going to Bill’s room. Oliver asks to join them, having gone stir-crazy from the solitude.
(Chris Saunders/FX)
Bill’s room has been thoroughly cataloged, with all of his possessions sealed in plastic bags. Darby examines the itemized list of his personal items, opening one of the bags to smell Bill’s sweater and remembering the first time they met face-to-face. She asks Lee if the door cams have playback ability, and gets frustrated that she doesn’t have her laptop when she finds out they don’t. Thankfully, Oliver didn’t turn over all his electronics, pulling a tablet out of his bag and offering it to Darby. She connects it to the hacked network and pulls up the security camera footage to show Lee and Oliver the time when Bill’s door opened and closed. She believes someone edited themselves out of the footage in lieu of deleting it and leaving a noticeable gap in time. Lee and Oliver believe that’s too much work, so Darby changes her presumption. Bill must’ve thought he heard something, opened his door to see, and then closed it. Oliver points to a copy of Darby’s book, “The Silver Doe,” which has blood stains on it, implying that Bill picked it up after he hit his head on the fireplace. Darby examines it, realizing that the bloodiest pages are in the last chapter. Lee believes it significant, since Bill could’ve spent his dying minutes trying to call for help and chose to open Darby’s book instead. They encourage Darby to read aloud.
(Eric Liebowitz/FX)
As Darby reads, we see her flashback. She and Bill Farrah (Harris Dickinson) were in the basement of the Silver Doe Killer’s house, having torn apart the stairs to find the remains of his wife, Patricia Bell. The door opened, and Frank Bell stared down at them, holding a gun in his hand. They read off the names of the women he murdered. He held out his gun and, thinking this was the end, Bill moved in front of Darby to shield her. Instead, Frank shot himself in the head, sending blood splattering all over Bill’s face. Bill’s ears were ringing so loudly he could hardly hear Darby as she asked him to help move the washing machine so she could use it to climb out of the basement and go for help, since their phones were dead. She pulled out the man’s wallet to confirm that he was indeed Frank Bell.
(Eric Liebowitz/FX)
A neighbor, Dorothy (Annette Wright), answered the door for Darby, initially not believing her story that two people had been murdered in the Bell house across the street. But when Darby told her one of them was Patricia, the woman realized she was telling the truth. She grabbed the phone, beginning the 9-1-1 call and telling the responder that Patricia didn’t skip town but was murdered. Darby took the phone and told them that she had evidence linking Frank Bell to eleven murders across seven states.
Back at the motel that night, Bill took a bath, sitting in bloody bath water. He invited Darby to join him, thinking things would be different now that the case was closed. But all Darby wanted to talk about was Frank’s motives and how he was likely watching their subreddit as they tried to find him. “Who cares about him?,” Bill asked in anger. “He’s nothing, he’s the result of faulty programming.” He describes murderers like Frank as a bad string of code that gets replicated in people like a computer virus, killing those it comes in contact with. “You want the killer to have meaning. He doesn’t have meaning. He’s just a killer.” He wanted to know what Darby was feeling. “I’m just tired,” she said, getting out of the tub and going to bed. Bill sat there, looking deflated.
Bill couldn’t sleep that night, laying awake and watching the motel neon sign change colors. At one point, Darby woke up and looked at him but said nothing. She rolled back on her side and went back to sleep. The next morning, she woke to find that Bill was gone, having left her the car keys. Going to the bathroom, she found his farewell note on the mirror. Turning around, she stared at the bathtub full of bloody water and noticed something in it. She pulled up a laptop with the name “Fangz” on it and a cellphone. A clear message that she wouldn’t have a way to contact Bill again. She hunched over the tub and began to sob.
Reliving the memory caused Darby to sob in the present as well, reading a part of the book she hadn’t touched since she approved the galley. “I didn’t want to see all the ways that I had left him before he left me,” she explained her reasons for avoiding it. “I didn’t want to believe that I’m not able to be loved.” Both Oliver and Lee share that they can relate to that sentiment.
Oliver wants to focus on something Bill said in that passage, a reference to a killer being the result of faulty programming. “I think it means Bill knew his killer, knew the killer was a hacker, and he was trying to communicate that to Darby,” Lee agrees. Oliver adds that David’s leading theory is Lu Mei, a suspect boosted by Bill’s artistic criticism of smart cities. Darby adds another suspect to the list, the hotel’s doctor, Eva, who had access to the morphine that killed bill and the pacemaker monitor that killed Rohan. Darby believes Eva is in love with Andy and points out that it’s possible they’ve been working together to frame her. Darby believes it’s important to get Lee and Zoomer out of the hotel as soon as possible. “Sian and I made it to the coast,” she shares, “It’s not far.” Lee asks how they would get a message to Rohan’s boat. “I don’t know, but a boat never leaves its captain behind, and they left a Zodiac and flares,” Darby explains, believing that the boat is waiting offshore.
Their conversation is interrupted by a yell from the hotel hallway. They move to the door and watch as the camera monitor turns on. David is outside their door, so they open it. His face is bruised like he’s been beaten up, and his arms are bound behind his back by Todd (Louis Cancelmi), Andy’s head of security and Eva’s husband. “There’s my wife,” Andy says as he steps out behind Toddy, his eyes void of emotion.
A Murder at the End of the World comes to an end next Tuesday, December 19th, exclusively on Hulu. I leave with a concise description of the finale.
“Chapter 7: Retreat” – Written by Brit Marling & Zal Batmanglij
The remaining guests gather and discover the killer among them.
Songs Featured in This Episode: