After the first episode of A Murder at the End of the World took our characters to the end of the world and murdered one of them, episode 2 of this murder mystery begins the slow process of working out who committed the crime, and why.
Two episodes of this new Hulu (in the US) and Disney Plus (in the UK) debuted together on Tuesday, November 14, and if you've already read our episode 1 recap then you already know all about our main cast, our lead character and the death that ends the first episode.
Now it's time to follow the lead character Darby Hart (Emma Corrin) as she begins her investigation, and also find out about how she came to know Bill in the first place. We hope you like flashbacks because you're about to watch a lot.
So here’s our A Murder at the End of the World episode 2 recap, for the episode "The Silver Doe", and of course spoilers are set to follow.
Search for silver earrings
Darby runs away from the crime scene and tries to find help. She finds a hotel staffer who only speaks Icelandic, so goes to the room of Sian (Alice Braga) who comes down to Bill's room with her. Sian does CPR but Bill (Harris Dickinson) is dead.
This scene is interspersed with flashbacks of a young Darby as a child accompanying her dad to a crime scene. Several years after that, an older Darby goes to another crime scene with her dad, of a long-buried skeleton, and this one has silver earrings. It's the Silver Doe, which we already know about.
More people show up to the room including the hotel manager, host Andy Ronson (Clive Owen) and his security man Todd. The latter and his wife Eva take Darby up to her room, and Eva gives Darby some pills to help her sleep. After trashing her hotel room, Darby finally takes the pills and goes to sleep.
In another flashback, at school, Darby begins examining the earrings of her classmates. At the Silver Doe autopsy she's helping her coroner father with, she begins making assumptions instead of relying on evidence which annoys her father. She steals the earrings rather than box them up as her dad is going to label the death a cold case, and uses Google to do some research.
Darby finds evidence of other similar cases where the body was left with silver earrings and clearly becomes desperate for evidence, as she descends to the depths of using Reddit. There, she meets someone — clearly Bill, given the user name — who's also investigating it. They begin chatting and she gives him admittedly ropey evidence about her case, again laden with assumptions and guesses, but he still wants to jump on a video call with her. That's when they see each other for the first time.
The morning after
In the present day, everyone's very cheery at breakfast, until Andy tells everyone about Bill's death the night before. He says it was an overdose although Darby insists it wasn't. The police will be there before nightfall, and although some retreat attendees want to return home, Andy asks them not to. It's only when Lee Anderson (Brit Marling) says she wants the event to continue, though, that they agree.
Darby blocks up her toilet and asks the hotel concierge to fix it, and when he goes to do so, she uses his computer to imbue her smart ring with the power to open Bill's room door. She goes to the place and sees the body, before asking AI assistant Ray not to log any of the next questions she asks him.
Darby asks Ray about injection sites in drug bodies and uses this to decide that Bill didn't inject himself — someone else killed him. She also finds no fingerprints on the injector device he used, but at that moment someone starts to enter the room so she hides in a wardrobe.
It's Lee, who turns the room upside down looking for something. Darby is almost caught but there's applause from another room, which causes Lee to retreat as she's meant to be in that room.
In the room, it's retreat attendee Martin (Jermaine Fowler), the filmmaker, who's giving a speech on how he's using the AI assistant Ray to help him with his next project, which sparks a quick debate on the use of AI in storytelling. Lee slips in as does Darby behind her. Martin begins to play a clip of his film, and Darby uses the opportunity to speak to Lee.
Darby tells Lee that Bill was murdered, it wasn't a suicide — a surprising thing to confide given that she just saw Lee break into the dead man's room — only then asking what Lee was looking for. The woman gives a vague cop-out answer before telling Darby that all the cameras in the hotel are wireless, so can be hacked.
The hunt begins
Darby goes to Lee's website, as it was previously established that many of the girl's hacks are based on the woman's, but there's nothing she can use. She begins to try and dismantle some of the tech in the room to be able to hack but all of it is solid.
We get another flashback: Bill and Darby have grown close investigating the silver earring murders. They find evidence of someone who survived an attempted abduction and Bill wants to pick up Darby to go and speak to this person, but Darby is evasive. Despite this they're talking all the time.
At some point Darby is helping her father in the morgue and Bill calls, asking her to go to a location. She bails on her dad and gets on her bike, cycling through the town until she finds some street lights. Bill has hacked them and they blink in Morse code to tell her 'Happy Birthday Darby'.
The modern-day Darby gets inspired by this, and finds a smart lightbulb in the hotel. She uses this to hack the hotel's security system to examine Bill's room's smart doorbell's camera's log. It shows that before the murder both David and Ziba were nearby, but neither went in. The door suspiciously opens and closes... and sometime later, a creepy figure in a mask shows up. Darby doesn't watch anymore, as the police arrive at the hotel to take the body.
In one final flashback, Darby is going to a restaurant. In it, she meets Bill, presumably for the first time.
