The bodies continue to fall in A Murder at the End of the World episode 5, though the last episode didn't increase the kill count, so some catching up needs to happen! Our protagonist Darby Hart (Emma Corrin) has more suspicions, though she's a little quick to point the finger.
Debuting on Tuesday, December 5, A Murder at the End of the World episode 5 brings us one step closer to the end of this 7-part murder mystery. By the end of the especially-long episode, there are now three people dead, but many more who may be suspects.
AMatEotW is about a murder mystery in a remote Icelandic hotel at a conference for artists and tech icons, but we're starting to see more and more that the "End of the World" part of the title may have added meaning.
This was a nearly-feature-length episode of the show, so let's stop wasting time and dive into the A Murder at the End of the World episode 5 recap. Obviously, spoilers for the show so far will follow.
Questioning the suspects
Episode 5 ends where the fourth did: Darby has figured out that the child Zoomer is actually the child of Bill and Lee, not Andy and Lee. We flashback to Darby and her then-partner Bill (Harris Dickinson) as they see a forest fire while in a gas station.
Medic Eva (Britian Seibert) arrives as Darby is concussed and has brain swelling. Darby confronts her on the stolen morphine. Eva admits that it was stolen from the medical room, and also that the hack that killed Rohan was indeed carried out from there too. Darby storms out to confront Andy, and Eva follows.
Andy (Clive Owen) is having dinner with Lee Anderson (Brit Marling) and Zoomer, and they leave when Darby shows up. Eva also does, as Andy dismisses her. Darby makes her first accusation in this episode: she says that Andy killed Bill after Bill made claims to Zoomer's paternity, and murdered Rohan to cover this up.
Andy denies this but gives us some more secrets. Firstly, he's sterile, yet never told Lee. Secondly, he's been receiving treatments from Eva to extend his life, and doesn't want anybody to know. He thinks that the murderer is trying to set him up, with the guilty party someone close to him.
Andy has an entire scan of the hotel which he shows Darby. Apparently, it scans constantly but doesn't look into bedrooms, and stops briefly at 11:59 (which is when Bill's murder happened, so they can't see who was with him). After looking at different time codes, they think David (Raúl Esparza) seems suspicious so they call him in.
After much coercion, David implies that he was in the hallway for some "special business", and when they subsequently call in Oliver (Ryan J. Haddad) he's quick to admit that they were hooking up. Mystery over? Not quite, as David left for an important phone call at one point in the night.
Next, they interview Lu Mei (Joan Chen) who has an alibi for the crimes, but she admits that she hacked the hotel's software to bypass its firewall so she could try to contact her security team at home. She was unsuccessful.
Finally, Darby wants to interview Lee, but Andy is reluctant. Instead, they try to find out who called David who was so important, and they find out that the call came from Bill's room. As far as Andy and Darby know, Bill and David didn't know each other.
Intruders
This investigation is interrupted by the hotel concierge, as the Wall Street Journal has found out about the deaths and wants an interview. Andy is furious that someone leaked the information but leaves Darby to her own devices. She snoops around Andy's apartment and finds Lee.
Darby tells Lee that she told Andy about Bill's parentage of Zoomer — evidently, Lee didn't know that Andy knew, or that he was infertile. Lee goes to the bathroom to be sick and Darby snoops through her belongings, finding a wig and a fake passport under a different name. Lee finds her red-handed, but before she can do anything Andy shows up and makes Darby leave.
Security man Todd rescorts Darby back to her room, making an ominous statement that his loyalty is to the family as he does. When in her room, Darby starts having a panic attack so she goes outside into the storm, and then crushes some medication and snorts it. She phones David to ask him why Bill called him, and doesn't get an answer. When she calls back, David has set his room to do-not-disturb mode. While this happens, AI assistant Ray is nagging her to stop taking questionable meds and to get some sleep to make her concussion better, so she rips out his panel in the wall.
A hotel server called Tomas comes by to offer Darby food, and she only wants something pre-packaged. However someone is in her room: they tackle her and play a recording from their phone in which a computer-generated voice tells her to stop investigating. It makes the curious implication that Bill is still alive.
We get another flashback to Bill and Darby during their previous murder investigation. He asks her when she fell for him, and he tells her when he fell for him. She's reluctant to respond and distracts him as they receive more information about the owner of the 'E. Bell' ring.
He stops the car and goes for a walk. When Darby joins him he maligns what mobile phones have done to everybody. So she tells him that she fell for him through their phone texting.
The next death, the next accusation
Darby wakes up in the present, and the masked intruder is gone. She visits the ailing Sian (Alice Braga) who's now awake, though seems unwell after her emergency tracheotomy. Darby apologizes to Sian for what happened, and they talk about the recent break-in.
Sian also mentions that while Andy loves Zoomer, Lee might not. She also mentions that Zoomer makes hundreds of thousands of dollars every day thanks to trust funds, which Lee has access to. However soon after Sian mysteriously flatlines and dies.
Afterward, Darby makes her second accusation of the episode to Andy: she thinks Lee might be the culprit. He's not willing to listen though.
Outside, Lu Mei and Ziba have snuck out and are having a little bonfire. Martin and Oliver also join them, while Darby tells them that she thinks this hotel is actually a doomsday bunker Andy is making. The hotel concierge wants them to come in as another storm front is arriving, but they refuse.
The aurora borealis appears, and Ziba suggests they have a little ceremony to honor the dead. They do so, but Andy is seemingly unwilling to mention Bill, perhaps suggesting she's not sure if he's dead.
We get yet another flashback: Darby wakes up Bill. She's stayed up all night to track the lineage of the E. Bill, and now she possibly knows where the murderer lives. However Bill wants them to go home — Darby has taken lots of Adderall and is seemingly cracking. She denies this but accidentally sets fire to the hotel room.
Bill's estimation of Darby seems reflected in the present when the woman adds more substances to her system, this time chugging some alcohol from the hotel minibar. After getting a pep-talk from AI assistant Ray she notices that one of her lamps is blinking in Morse Code: it tells her to go to the hotel pool at 10 pm, as this person knows why Bill called David before the murder.
At 10, Darby goes down to the pool. It's cooler around it than in it, so she gets into the water. But when she goes under the surface, someone closes the pool cover, trapping her underwater... and then the episode ends!
