‘A Murder At The End Of The World’ Is The Mystery Show We Need Right Now
An amateur detective, an anti-capitalist artist, a robotics expert, an off-the-grid climate activist, a rich investor, an astronaut, and an Iranian activist are invited by an obsessive tech billionaire to a remote Icelandic hotel for an exclusive conference — and someone is picking them off one by one.
Created by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, A Murder at the End of the World is on Disney+. The limited series follows 24-year-old hacker and sleuth Darby Hart (Emma Corrin), who’s racing to solve the murder of her ex-boyfriend at the Icelandic retreat of tech billionaire Andy Ronson (Clive Owen). Isolated from the wider world, Darby’s only allies in her investigation are Andy’s ex-hacker wife, Lee Ronson (Marling), and an experimental AI installed in the hotel, Ray.
And the mysteries only continue to stack up. Why did Andy really invite each of them here? And why Iceland? Is solving the climate crisis, as Andy claims, the real reason each of them is there? Who is the killer among them? Are they human or machine?
There are no simple answers. Protagonist Darby Hart has spent her adulthood as part of an online amateur sleuth community, which works on finding serial killers from cold cases. She’s a true original thinker, but her success at solving mysteries is also a testament to how the sharing of information online provides the opportunity to solve the unsolvable. In the present, experimental AI Ray is proving invaluable to her investigation, even if he’s also a glaring example of data privacy breaches.
Even enigmatic and somewhat antagonistic tech billionaire Andy seems to represent the complex capitalist conundrum. Innovation is a vital element of addressing climate change. However, in our current society, private enterprise is more likely to finance such innovations than governments wrapped up in oil and coal. This set-up also empowers billionaires to ransom humanity’s future. While Andy’s proposed innovations would be a boon for humanity’s survival, they’re also entirely controlled by him.
Right off the bat, Batmanglij and Marling intertwine themes of climate change resolution, the tech industry’s benevolence, and the complex role AI plays in it all. Like their previous cult sci-fi series, The OA, Batmanglij and Marling opt for connection over comfort. A Murder at the End of the World doesn’t offer answers to these big philosophical questions so much craft a story that explores each element that must be considered before we ask them. All this is wrapped up in a wholly unique and compelling whodunnit.
A Murder At The End Of The World is streaming on Disney+.