Crime thrillers are getting very meta these days, because A Murder at the End of the World is a murder mystery in which our lead is a true crime writer herself!
The new thriller takes place in Iceland, where a "meeting of the minds" organized by a tech billionaire takes a nasty murdery turn (hopefully that's not a spoiler, it's in the title!). But there’s a lot more going under the surface, as some attendees of the conference are there for unknown reasons.
The two-episode premiere of A Murder at the End of the World hit Hulu in the US and Disney Plus everywhere else on Tuesday, November 14. If you’re going to be sticking with the show, this episode 1 recap will be vital, to help you remember all the early clues that were set up that may pay off later.
So here’s our A Murder at the End of the World episode 1 recap, for the episode "Homme Fatale", and of course spoilers are set to follow.
A murder close to home
We see a woman walking through the city at night: this is Darby Hart (Emma Corrin) who's listening to music from headphones that are over her hood, somehow. She goes to a bookstore where an author is finishing a reading, and she’s up next, ready to read from her debut novel The Silver Doe.
While Darby begins awkwardly, causing people to leave, she turns it around by talking about true crime facts that pique people's interest. She introduces the case The Silver Doe is about, and sets up the scene that she's reading as when she’s about to investigate the first known address of the killer, before we flash back to some time prior...
Darby is in a motel room with her boyfriend, another investigator she met on an online forum, Bill (Harris Dickinson). He’s reluctant to go to the house, but they do. Darby uses code she downloaded from the internet to hack open the garage door, but it actually opens all doors in the street — they quickly drive into the garage. The duo sneak through the house, which seems abandoned, into the basement.
There, they use a jackhammer to start pulling up the concrete, trying to find something underneath. Eventually, they take a break and accidentally fall asleep. They awaken as someone walks into the house above them. Instead of playing cautiously, they realize that the stairs they walked down are new — they rip them up and find buried underneath them a skeleton. The ring matches one that Darby pulls from an evidence bag in her pocket. They say it’s the suspect’s wife, Patricia.
Just then, a man with a gun appears at the top of the stairs. The duo begins to list names of the murder victims before Bill jumps in the way of Darby, just as the man draws the gun. We hear a BANG…
… and are back in the modern day at the book reading. At the Q&A afterward, Darby discusses that the book was dedicated to Lee Anderson, a hacking genius who was bullied off the internet years prior, and also is asked where Bill is but we don’t hear her answer.
A holiday, or an investigation?
Darby goes home, where she’s helping people on other cold cases by hacking files from the police. She receives a message from the assistant to Andy Ronson, a tech genius who’s married to Lee Anderson. After consulting with Reddit and some friends on video chat, she decides to open the file and download the app the assistant is sending her.
It’s an AR app, that lets Darby use her phone camera to see an AI man called Ray. He tells Darby that she’s being invited to Ronson’s annual retreat, a meeting of the minds for a week to discuss tech and the future. Also, Lee Anderson will be there, giving Darby a chance to meet her idol.
After calling her dad to tell him the news, Darby goes on the trip. She’s picked up from her apartment by a flashy car and taken to a private airport where she meets Ronson’s head of security, Todd, who asked a question at the Q&A of the book reading. Then Darby gets on the flight.
We meet several other attendees there, including a filmmaker reading Derby’s book and an astronaut, and we find out that of the nine attendees, five were invited by Ronson and 4 were invited by Anderson. No one knows which were which.
We also learn that Bill and Darby haven’t spoken for six years and that in that time, he became a famous street artist called FANGS. As Darby sleeps on the flight, she has a flashback dream to the motel after the investigation years prior, where Bill has dumped her and left via a note in the bathroom.
Then the plane touches down in Iceland.
Welcome to Iceland
Darby and the other guests go to the hotel, a luxurious yet remote place, where they’re given rings that let them access the doors. She visits her fancy room, enjoys eating from the minibar, and then re-dyes her hair.
As Darby walks to the welcome dinner, she sees someone delivering oxygen into a room. Through the doorway she sees Lee Anderson (Brit Marling, also the writer-director) before scurrying away.
At the dinner, we also finally meet Andy Ronson (Clive Owen) as well as his child Zoomer. He gives an introduction to the retreat, talking about how Iceland is one of the world’s remaining wilderness areas, and how the five attendees he invited are here to solve the climate crisis. He mentions that he doesn’t know what connects Anderson’s guests.
After the speech, we meet one more guest: Bill, which nearly causes Darby to choke on her food.
After the dinner everyone goes into a hot spring and we meet some more of the retreat attendees, however Darby leaves quite quickly. In the hallway she bumps into Bill, before punching him in the stomach and asking him for a drink. He instead suggests they go for a walk.
The duo walk into the middle of no-where in Iceland and he says he liked her book. He tells him that the reason he went for the conference is that he “came for Lee”. He then tells her that he broke up with her because she scared him, and that she was reckless. However then he asks her to sleep with him, telling her that he’s got something else to tell her, but she turns him down.
Back at her room, Darby starts doing some Google research and sees paparazzi images of Lee Anderson meeting Bill (as FANGS). Then she plays on her headphones an Annie Lennox song they sang in the car together in the flashback, and is motivated to go to his room.
Outside, she can hear Bill moaning — perhaps he’s already got company? — until that moaning becomes crashing and bashing. She leaves his room and goes outside to find another way into the room, where she sees through the window evidence of a struggle and blood. Bill is there and he’s dying, and Darby can’t make out everything he says through the window. Then he dies, and she runs away into the night.
