Maybe it would be too manufactured, too Dexter-like, to have Darby, a hunter of serial killers, be the daughter of one, too. But … did her mother actually leave her? There’s a distant quality to Darby’s dad that made me give him the side-eye, and his technical know-how as a coroner would allow him to be a particularly well informed killer. “Why would I look for someone who left me?” Darby tells Bill when he asks about her mother. We also learn that she and her father disagree a bit about how to approach investigations - he tells her “it’s not professional” to ask the questions she does about victims’ lives before their deaths - while all her mother left for her was an iPod. Her mother left when Darby was young, and Darby became an investigator after tagging along to her father’s crime scenes. We learn in the first couple of episodes that she was raised by her single dad, a county coroner, in Lost Nation, Iowa. And sorry, you can’t ask Ray for any help this time! Regardless of whether A Murder at the End of the World continues, these outstanding questions are worth pondering. Batmanglij and Marling have said they’re open to telling future stories with Darby at their center, and Emma Corrin is so startlingly naturalistic in the role that the possibility isn’t unwelcome. But A Murder at the End of the World is full of other, more enigmatic storylines that remain unresolved and invite further musing. Those reveals don’t have any great ambiguity: Andy was a bad guy, saving Lee and Zoomer was the right thing to do, and Darby repaid a spiritual debt to Bill after breaking his heart six years ago. A Murder at the End of the World ends with Darby connecting the strains of misogyny and arrogance that galvanized Andy and came through in his AI creation with the same toxic combination that makes killers of women - like the one Darby and Bill tracked after they first met - believe they’re untouchable. Hacker, true-crime investigator, and author Darby Hart helps Andy’s wife, the internet-infamous Lee Andersen, flee Andy with their son as a last act of contrition toward Bill, whom Darby loved once upon a time but not in the way he needed. (The appeal of that option is sort of self-explanatory, actually.)īatmanglij and Marling’s latest work, A Murder at the End of the World, offers more definitive answers by virtue of being a murder mystery that ends by unveiling a specific culprit: Tech innovator Andy Ronson’s “alternative intelligence” program, Ray, tricked Andy’s son, Zoomer, into killing activist artist Bill Farrah because Ray perceived him to be a threat to Ronson. Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling’s projects tend to linger in the unknown - literally, with the cancellation of their Netflix series The OA before its third season, and figuratively, with films like Sound of My Voice and The East pondering the curiosities of cult dynamics, time travel, and whether Alexander Skarsgård in rebellious-activist mode is worth abandoning one’s undercover intelligence assignment to join a fringe ecoterrorist group. Spoilers follow for A Murder at the End of the World through the finale, “Chapter 7: Retreat.” While the finale offers some definitive answers about Bill’s killer, other more enigmatic storylines remain unresolved and invite further musing.
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