Wicked Gay Pop Whatever #2: A Murder at the End of the World

It's another pop culture episode where I get into some tv shenanigans. Here's FX's A Murder at the End of the World. Gen Z's Sherlock Holmes has pink hair, she can hack like a saw (I mean computer-wise), and she wins a free trip to Iceland! Chaos ensues.

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Transcript

Ooooo, murder mystery! That’s right, it’s a murder mystery with a fascinating pink-haired sleuth, an unusual setting, and wasn’t Clive Owen a big deal for awhile? He doesn’t seem to get the same caliber roles he used to. Remember Closer? I love that movie. Where’s screaming really personal questions at Julia Roberts, and Jude Law is super-whiny and Natalie Portman’s a stripper. But yeah, Clive as a deal for awhile. He should call his agent cuz’ he’s good.. So, this mini-series is basically a Gen Z Agatha Christie tale, but don’t go by that because I actually liked it and, normally, anything using Gen Z as a descriptor is terrible. Ok, maybe not normally. But often. Anyway, murder mystery!

You’re listening to Wicked Gay, which is normally about gay people doing awful things, but not tonight. 

[music]

Hello! I’m your host J. Harvey and this is another one of those Wicked Gay Pop Whatever episodes where I discuss something pop culture-y that I found interesting and tell ya why and basically spoil the whole damn thing for you. So If you’re someone who likes to hear someone else’s opinion on stuff or having things ruined for you before you see them is your kink, this is your time. And let me reiterate - please dont expect a deep examination of the piece’s themes and subtext. I’m not that deep. I’m pretty much a himbo with a good vocabulary. 

Where was I before I was murdering myself? Right - murder show. Tonight, I’m going to talk about a Murder at the End of the World. It’s a seven-episode miniseries that debuted on FX/Hulu in November. 

It’s about Darby Hart. She’s (and I’m using “she” as a pronoun here because despite Darby’s portrayer being non-binary in real life, Darby never defines herself) Darby’s a 24-year-old amateur sleuth and true crime author who’s been invited by a billionaire tech genius to an Iceland retreat along with several other geniuses from the globe over who are the best at what they do. And here’s your first spoiler - there’s a murder. Darby has to solve it. That storyline is kind of intertwined with a second one, which is basically Darby’s origin story, and how she solved her first case and fell in love for the first time with a really nice guy with a really bad haircut.

And I want to talk about the poster for this series. It’s our main character, Gen Z Nancy Drew Darby Hart, and she’s standing looking at the camera. She has a pained expression on her face like she’s just tired of all these murders, and it makes for a really bad day; Clive Owen (who is kind of the biggest name on the call sheet for this one), Clive is standing behind her, and his face is half obscured by her head, and he’s supposed to look menacing, and like he’s looming over her and telegraphing that he might be the villain of the piece, I won’t spoil whether that’s true or not just yet, but instead of an evil villain who might harm Darcy…he looks more like he’s in line behind her to board the #9 bus. It’s awkward imagery. I’ll put it on Wicked Gay’s social media, and you can decide for yourself. 

Anyway, this is Wicked Gay Pop Whatever #2, A Murder at the End of the World.

A Murder at the End of the World was created by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij BAHT MAHN GLIJ and was also directed by them, and they wrote most of the episodes. Brit and Zal are longtime creative partners. They made a couple of these kinda under-the-radar movies that are thrillers that I found to be very intelligent with some nice twists, and they’re a little thought-provoking, and they felt sorta sleek and clean and feel self-contained. These two could do a lot with a small budget. So definitely check out Sound of My Voice and The East. 

Brit and Zal are mostly known for a fairly popular at the time 2016 Netflix series called The OA. The OA, whose first season I kinda adored, was this wack-a-doo show starring Brit (who tends to star in their movies and shows as she’s an actress, too). I’m about to give you spoilers, so if you haven't seen the OA and plan to, fast forward. Ok, the OA is about, and I’m not kidding, a young woman who is the daughter of a Russian gangster who is adopted by a Midwestern couple in the US, and she’s got like a supernatural thing going on because her magic sorceress friend from another dimension took her eyesight in a school bus accident, and anyway she vanishes when she’s in her 20s, and reappears years later but can see now, and you find out that all these years she’s been held captive in this mad scientist's cellar with a bunch of other people and he’s killing them to find out if there’s afterlife, and she gets away but she thinks she can go back and save her fellow captives including one that she loves if she can like teleport there with these interpretive dance moves and so she like reels in these high school kids along with one of the teachers to be her students. Oh, and she thinks she’s an angel. The original angel, hench The OA. And if you haven't seen this, I'm sure you're like interpretive dance. No, thank you. But I loved this show. It totally had me guessing as to what was going on, but it was completely arresting, and you got into the characters, and the end of Season One, for some reason, touched me completely, and I sobbed for about 20 min after that episode. Also, the show must have been good because captive narratives, meaning shows or movies where someone is being held against their will and not in prison, like in someone’s basement for years, and as we know, this is a real occurrence, those are horrifying to me, and I have trouble with them. The OA is a BIG captive narrative, but it’s so kinda spellbinding that I was engrossed and not grossed out. 

And then there was season 2. Which I only watched half of. Cuz’ it went meta. It went really meta. And there was a telepathic octopus, I’m told. It just lost me. We don’t need to pander to people, and we don’t need to tell the entire movie in the trailer so the dullards will come see it, but we do need to avoid being incomprehensible for the people with the average baseline intelligence. Right? Brit and Zal lost me in S2, and they must have lost a whole bunch of other people cuz’ Netflix killed it.

Anyway, a Murder at the End of the World is a lot more straightforward. It’s a murder mystery and a love story, and there’s also some stuff about true crime and climate change and our decaying capitalist society. So everyone’s happy. 

In ep. 1 Darby Hart’s trudging through the city and I’m not sure which one, I DON’T think they specified. She’s punky, not Brewster, I mean aesthetically, dressed how the kids dress nowadays, and she’s got pink hair. She’s also listening to This Is The End by The Doors on her headphones, and that’s cheery. She’s played by Emma Corwin. Emma Corwin is the non-binary actor who played the young Princess Diana in The Crown. Emma is non-binary, and they’re really good in this role. You really grow to like Darby, and you root for her to solve and survive this series. Darby has written a true-crime book called The White Doe, and it’s about how she solved her first crime and literally caught a serial killer at age 18. Darby does a reading of her book at the local bookstore, and it’s an I’ll Be Gone in the Dark type deal, except I’m sure if Darby were married, her husband would show more emotion over her death and maybe not sell it to HBO, cuz didn't Patton Oswalt seem kinda meh in that documentary? We all process grief differently, but something seemed off. Something seemed off with both of those people. Hope the daughter’s ok.

Anyway, you can tell Darby’s legit because the audience is completely apathetic to her at first, and some people leave, but she reads them at the end of her book, which is fun, and by the end of the reading, she’s completely engrossed them, and they like her and warmly applaud. We’ll learn that Darby, our super-sleuth who is crazy intelligent and includes being a coroner (I don’t know the verb for what a coroner do, coron?) and hacking among her skills, always focuses on the victims, and the only thing she cares about when it comes to the perpetrator is that he be caught. The rest of us ghouls should take notes.

We also learn that Bill, Darby’s boyfriend and fellow investigator in The White Doe and a super-sweet guy who’s kind of arty but not snotty and has a really bad haircut, is now her ex-boyfriend. Bill is played by a tall drink of water Harris Dickinson, and Bil’s kinda great. He’s the nicest person in this story, and even if he does end up becoming dead, Banksy. I’ll get to it.

Darby’s reading becomes a flashback of her and Bill on the trail of a murderer who kills women wearing silver jewelry. They met online, and they’re part of a whole subculture of online sleuths, which, as we know, is a real thing, and they’re sometimes helpful, sometimes not in the wrongly accused defamation of character ruins lives the type of way. Anyway, Bill is uneasy because they’ve managed to track down the dude they think might actually be the killer, and Darby’s all gung ho, and Bill's like, hi, we are basically children, and he’s brutally murdered several people, e and they argue but then they bust out some Annie Lennox on the iPod and sing along and hey, maybe chasing after a serial killer aint so bad, Bill. 

So Darby and Bill make it inside the suspect's house because Darby uses a hacking trick to open his garage door that she learned from an infamous female hacker named Lee Anderson, who mysteriously vanished after the world turned on her and she was doxxed. Remember that name. The house is for sale or something, and they go to the basement and dig up the concerted and nope, nobody, then they knock down the basement stairs, and yep. Body. And the body has a silver ring on her finger, and Darnby notes that this is the killer's wife, and then the killer shows up, and he’s got a gun, and it’s kind of suspenseful because these seem like ok kids, they sang along to Annie Lennox, and Darby and Bill have no weapons of their own, save the victim’s names which they begin chanting in an I guess some hope that he’ll change his mind about killing hem, or melt into a wicked witch puddle or the spirits of his victims will appear and smite him. Anyway, Bill stands in front of Darby to shield her as the gun goes off. 

After the reading, Darby gets a knock on her appropriately grimy loft’s door. There’s no one there. At least it looks like there’s no one there, and then she uses a VR app on her phone to display an AI! That looks like a man standing in her hallway, and she brings him in, and it’s all very future-y, and his name is Ray, and he’s here to invite her to a retreat thrown by a man named Andy Ronson. In this universe, Andy Ronson is kind of a combination of Elon, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. He’s a super-intelligent tech giant billionaire. Andy is gathering all of the experts in their field for a whole intelligentsia. Let’s solve the world’s problems, including climate change, and revel in our omnipotence type thing gathering at Andy’s futuristic luxury hotel in Iceland. And, of course, Darby goes. Don’t be silly.  And we can tell Andy is indeed cutting edge by the fact that his AI can show up in person at your door in lieu of a Brightevent email.

On the private jet to Iceland, we meet Joan Chen, remember Joan Chen from Twin Peaks? Where has she been? Apparently, she’s been on a private jet to Iceland because she’s playing Lu Mei, who builds smart cities…which, according to Wikipedia, are a technologically modern urban area that uses different types of electronic methods and sensors to collect specific data. Information gained from that data is used to manage assets, resources, and services efficiently; in return, that data is used to improve operations across the city. But is there enough parking? There’s never enough parking, and hence, you now know why we have a climate change problem; multiply me by a zillion. Also on the plan besides Darby and Lu are filmmaker Martin (Jermaine Fowler), who’s reading Darby’s book; astronaut and Ronson's best friend Sian Cruz (played by the lovely Alice Braga). Venture capitalist and a man whom we learn was Andy ROnson’s former partner David, played by Raul Esparza, who was on SVU, and is a Broadway staple and also was FANTASTIC in one of my favorite TV shows of all time - Hannibal. And Oliver, a disabled and snotty tech genius played by Ryan Haddad.

Iceland is frozen in the Arctic, and the hotel is round and all polished wood and stone in the middle of a glacier and very techy. That AI Ray kinda runs the whole show. Darby gets into it, and she re-dyes her hair before the big Agatha Chrsitie-type dinner, where all the guests gather to snark at each other. and Darby sort of combs her hair into a boyish wave, and she’s wearing a bowling shirt as dinner wear, and she’s like adorable. I kinda wanted to make out with her a little. Dinner is cool until two big things happen. First, Darby learns that missing hacker Lee Anderson is and is Any Ronson’s wife and the mother of his kid, named Zoomer. The show’s creator, Brit Marling, plays this crucial role. And Yeah, the kids named Zoomer. It's not quite the level of what Grimes and Elon named their kids, but it’s up there.

The other big dinner event is that seated across from Darby is Bill! Her ex. What the hell is Bill doing there? Well, we learn in the five years since he left Darby, he’s become a celebrated outsider artist who calls himself Fangs, oh dear, and he creates art that basically criticizes what everyone else at the table is involved in. We also learn that Fangs and Lee are good friends, if not an old item. He gets along with Zoomer really well, and that will be very important later. Darby is appropriately WTF about the whole thing.  Oh and it should be mentioned that Andy Ronson is scary in that cold, Clive Owen I could snap on your ass and start bellowing at any moment type way.

After dinner, Darby and Bill go for a walk amongst the polar wastes. They’re awkward but obviously still in love with each other, and it looks like they might make a go at it again when they part. That is until Darby heads back to his room later, hears some scary moaning, goes outside and around to Bill’s room’s window, and watches him die. Yep, Bill’s murder is THE murder at the end of the world. And the one Darby becomes determined to solve. 

So Darby is determined to solve Bill’s murder, even if the hotel doctors and the security personnel determine Bill OD” ed. She’s all upset, so they give her a Valium or something, and she passes out right into a flashback where we learn she grew up in IOWA and she’s the daughter of a single dad, who is also the town’s coroner. So she’s been viewing autopsies since she was like 8. She’s 18 now, a senior in high school, and a loner at school. Her favorite thign is to accompany her father to crime scenes, he’s teaching her evertything she knows, and to get high and chat with er fellow online sleuths on Reddit, and try to solve cold cases. The latest case is the body of an older Jane Doe with silver earrings. She goes online with this info and meets Bills.

Back in the present day, Darby is on the case, and she clogs her toiler on purposes to make her key a skeleton key, and she breaks into Bill's room, where his body is under a sheet; I mean, it's not like there’s any danger of decomposition, it's freezing in Cieland. We learned that Ray was a recovering addict, and Darby noticed he shot up in the wounded arm, and there was no fingerprint on the syringe, which was helpfully left by the body.  AI Ray, who is kinda like the Watson to Darby's Sherlock Holmes in this piece, fills her in on junkies not using their nondominant hand to shoot up, and they're not likely to wear gloves either. See, we’re scared of AI because we want to keep our jobs, but they do know a lot of stuff. 

Darby has to hide cuz Bil’s ex, Lee, comes into the door, and she's looking for something. Darby confronts Lee later, and we’re not sure if Lee is a good guy or a bad guy, but she says there’s security room footage of all the goings on outside of the rooms, so Darny later hacks into the mainframe using a lightbulb, Im not a hacker, I don't know and she’s watching the footage outside of Biulls room at the time of his death, and all of a sudden a really creepy person in a mask gives us a jump scare, and i like eerie, and I like the Scream films while stupid can also be delightful and who Scooby Doo, where are you? 

As Darby starts her investigation, we meet some other folks who are guests of either Andy’s or Lee’s, like Rohan (Javed Khan), a climate activist and friend of Bill's. We also get to know some of the staff, like Tomas (Daniel Olson), a waiter who admits to Darby that he brought three tea cups to Bill’s room. It's a couple of night slaters, and Darby follows a hooked figure in a big winter coat into the Arctic wastes and up into the cliffs. And it's suspenseful and dark and the hooded figure nearly catches Darby but doesn't, and the mystery person flashes “One down, still a go” in Morse code, using a red flashlight to someone out in the tundra who flashes back. Darby also notes that the mystery Morse coder has red shoelaces. A CLUE> 

Darby sorta befriends Sian, the astronaut who tells her, “Impact isn’t just about having something to say; it’s about having the power to be listened to when you say it.” LEe later offers to pay her to solve Bill's murder, which she declines, and Lee notes that No one sees a 24-year-old girl coming.” This makes sense because she’s a young woman with pink hair, and David refers to her as a smart little girl and Andy Ronson describes her as fragile. She isn't fragile; she just followed a flasher out into the hills!  We also learn that Bill was basically the best guy on Earth. Not only did he lure Darby out of her introverted shell to help solve a mystery back in the day, but he got Lee out of hiding, where she would meet and marry Andy Ronson, and we learn that he was basically Rohan’s sponsor. As Rohan is a recovering alcoholic. 

The next day is crazy because first, no one’s really reacting to the fact that someone died, and second, they go on tis hiker led by Andy Ronson, who leads them to a mountain overlooking this giant scary techno hole in the ground that’s being built by … ok, has anyone ever heard of a company called Boston Dynamic? They build these incredibly chilling robot dogs that move on their own like actual dogs, and you know they're gonna snap and kill people, and I only live like ten minutes from Boston, and we’re all doomed. Well, Andy has built a fleet of them, and they're building that techno hole. Andy says they're for building society in inhospitable places, and no thank you, robot death dogs. I'd rather Skynet launch the missiles than interact with those things. Seriously, I went to a tech fair where Boston Dynamis had a demonstration, and those gos are training. They can jump. Do I need to say more? Anyway, it's not his trip that Darby figure out Rohan’s got the red shoelaces. 

Darby and Zoomer play with his VR game that Daddy created, and Ray runs for him. she asks Zoomer about overhearing his parents fighting. Andy strolls up, and he’s radiating heavy evil, and he gives some spiel about how Walt Disney thought in three dimensions was one of those dimensions racism and treating our employees shabbily when they wanted to unionize. I'm kidding. He's great. He also says he knows she’s been sleuthing about and broke into the security system and tells her to GTFO. 

Back in Flashback Land, we learn Darny likes coffee with coke. A cola, not the bolivian arching powder, which i mena combing those two she’d be up all week. That's gross, right? Bill tries it and thinks so, too. Bill is really sweet, by the way. He genuinely cares about Darby; They're falling in love.

We also see Bil and Darby meet with the silver jewelry killer’s only surviving victim, and Darby demonstrates her empathy and superpower and asks the woman questions no one else has. We learn the killer left a piece of silver in the woman's car after the attack. Darby is eventuallu able to talk to Rohan and he says Bill was involved or on to something big but before he can tell her what the hell he’s talking about (it was him in the security defying mask by the way) he has a heart attack and dies int he llonny. You see, he had a pacemaker, and they learn later someone triggered it to malfunction, and, yes, Mudder #2. 

We learn about the pacemaker after Andy’ 's head of security, stone face Todd, takes everyone underground into a war room time thing for their safety after Rohan croaks on the lobbies floor. They're allowed to go back to their rooms, but Andy makes today collect everyone's electronics, and can he do that? Probably, it's his hotel. Darby mentioned that her phone is half her brain, and yeah, Same. Id freak. We all would expect people in the woods. 

Darby and Sian have chemistry and they end up teaming up to try to figure out what;s going on, It gets very subtxty lesbiamn and I like ti. So Darby tells Sian about Rohan’s coding, and they decide to set out into the Arctive wastes to figure out what's going on. Keep in mind it's gotten super cold, and there’s a terrifying storm on the way. Sian and Ronson had designed these suits that people can wear that will help them survive the world dying. They come complete with airtight helmets. So the ladies don these and ride a snowmobile out to see what Rohan is flashing at. The suit is very techy and, like the scary mask from earlier, lends a different feel to the show, a sci-fi one, and I like it. There’s some genre colluding in this, and I like that in my media. We learn that Rohan was signaling to someone offshore who had teamed up with Rohan and Bill for some reason and left a zodiac boat for them in a big case on the beach. 

Their snowmobile breaks down, and it looks scary cuz the snow is closing in, and the suits won't save them, but they find an SUV (??? in parentheses), and Sian hotwires it. The most terrifying conversion in the entire country takes place when Sian informs Darby that Andy’s original plan to settle people on he mood to avoid the world ending due to climate change is a lie, actually suing the robot dogs to build a techno hotel shelter for SOME people cuz he knows he scant save everybody. Sian also says that Andy has figured out the terrifying end of the climate crisis, which is much, much closer than we know, so I did some rescinding, and Andy’s not wrong. Sian notes that by 2050, heat waves and floods will have destroyed our lives. I take back my joke, another parking quiz shit. I'll be 70, but my poor nephews and all the kids are high. 

Anyway, the SUV crashes and Darby makes a decision; they 're rescued and brought back, and Darny is being checked out by evil, seeing Eva, the hotel doctor. Then, the horror genre intrudes when Sian’s helmet is hacked and is locked to her suit, and her remaining oxygen is almost gone. It’s super tense and scary, and I really don't want to watch Alice Braga suffocate to death. She doesn't because THEY GIVE HER A TRACHEOTOMY TO SAVE HER. This is after they try to use a drill to get the helmet off her head. It’s icky. She lives, though, For now.

While Darnuy is unconscious, we get another flashback, where she and Bill find another body, And they go on a cross-country journey to solve the case. I guess school was out for the summer, and there’s a fun sequence where Bill's ingenuity gets them a free hotel room and they're pretty much down for each other, but them Darny tries ot initiate sex and Bill shuts her down, for gentlemanly reasons, she’s been drinking, he;s an older dude with a girl just out of high school, but then changes his mind, 

And this ep ends with Darby hanging out with Andy and Lee’s kid Zoomer again. Who, when Darby opens a curtain to let the sunshine in, he sneezes. He has something called autosomal dominant compelling helio-ophthalmic outburst (ACHOO syndrome). Guess who else had it? Yep - Bill. Bill is Zoomer’s real dad. I didn't see that coming. Im 50 50 with this shit, sometims i Can see plot twists coming a mile away other tiems i Have a head full of rocks and completely taken unawares. TO cement her suspicion, Darby takes a big whiff of Xoomer, which is weird, but apparently, he smells like his real dad cuz Darby has super scent ability. My husband has that, too. T

Back in flashback land, Bill is getting super concerned cuz Darby is obsessed with the silver jewelry serial-like case; she’s gone fill on Claire Danes in Homeland with the pics on the walls and the strings on the pushing, and I'm sure there’s an n ugly cry coming, and she’s also snorting Adderall to stay awake and alert. Snd Nills liek hey girl, slow down, im woorrie dbaout you. Darby does react well to this and is like, I'm solving this with you or without your haircut. 

Back in Iceland, Darby makes, maybe evil Dr Eva to take her to Andy’s roo. Which is ten floors…DOWN. Yeah, he lives ten floors down in a multi-level underground bunker condo. Im a little clautrophnic and this journey made me think of th eOA and how cretors Brit and Zal had kidnapped peopekl in glass cases int he basement, and im worried Darby i going to be downstairs for aw hile. Darby confronts Andy, who admits that he’s sterile but also has an alibi for Bill’s and Rohan’s murders. HE notes that whoever killed Billy had knowledge of the security systems cuz they timed it for some time when the camera was nonentity on or something. Oh, I should note that Lee doesn't know Andy is sterile. 

So Darby and Andy join forces, and we get the classic integration scene, where they talk to all the guests to try and glue out whodunnit. They narrow the suspects down to obnoxious David, Andy's old partner, Oliver, the genius in the wheelchair, and Joan Chen. David and Olvier have alibis they were fucking, and thank you for reminding us that disabled people fuck too, cuz im not sure anyone thinks about that. As for Joan Chen, she basically puts it all on Andy’s wife. Zoomer's mother, Lee, and we learn Lee had the opportunity to kill her baby daddy. 

The interrogation clatch breaks up, and Darny goes to Zoomer’s room to find Lee and kind of cluelessly let her know that her husband is sterile. LEe panics and becomes a serial killer, and she throws up in the bathroom while Barby finds passports and a black wig in Lee’s bag. You think Lee’s going to kill her, but then Andyu shows up, and they send her back to her room to be licked in or something. Todd, the security guy, actually likes Darby, so he gives her her room key back. 

Darby confers with Sian again, who tells her that she thinks the Azodiace boat is Lees and Roiahn, and Bill might have been helping Lee leave Andy with Zoomer, whom, as I said, Andy is obsessed with. Then Sian dies. I guess the tracheotomy wasn't a good idea. Darby's a mess cuz everyone she actually liked at the hotel is now dead, so she goes back to her room and racks lines of Aderal. And gers really mad at the AI Ray, who reminds her that she’s got a concussion and that it is probably not a great idea to do rails and 

In flashbackville, we see Darbh accidentally set the motel room on fire, and Bill accuses her of being mentally ill, what with the drug use and the murder session, andyourelikle uh Bill - you're the one who stole his uncle's car and sort of inspired that journey. So she’s in crisis, and her lamp, I'm not kidding, flashes a more code at her and has her meet…her lamp…in the jacuzzi area of the hotel, where she goes for a swim, and then someone shuts the pool cover on her. That's scary.

She's rescued by Lee and Asshole David, who it turns out isn't the asshole we think he is. Also, I think he and Oliver make a cute couple. And then we earn a much of shit - David and Lee are working together, and Lee’s been trying to keep Darby safe! Lee’s been communicating with Darby through the lamp because it’s out of the hotel security system’s purview! It looks like the pool cover was hacked to kill Darby because she’s getting close to the truth. And also, im not going to stay in one of those hotels in tehfruew where tech runs eveytrhign because pool accidents and ronot dogs, need i say more?

Lee then spills the whole story about her and Andy. Andy is super physically and emotionally abusive and basically used Lee is an incubator. He saved her from the doxxing crisis where it seemed like all of the comics were incel types were trying to kill her. And he was the wealthiest and most powerful man in the world. So how cold she says no at first. It runs out. He’s obsessed with Zoomer, basically trying to turn him into the perfect specimen, and was keeping him from Lee, as well as beating her, so she split with the kid. Andy found them and told her she was free to leave him, but Zoomer stayed. And can you imagine this man’s lawyers? So she stayed to try to protect her kid and somehow get him away. 

So Lee, Darby, David, and Oliver in the wheelchair are now a team. Lee lets them back into Bill’s room where she fully investigates things, and we learn that Bill was killed when he hit his head while overdosing, lest a message for Darny in blood in her book The Seller DOe. Which basically tells her the killer is a hacker, but we knew that, didn't we?

We go into a flashback tp the day of the shooting. It turns out the silver jewelry killer killed himself, and the blood and brains went all over Bill. Bill was super traumatized, but Darby wasn't and was overly concerned with the killer, why he did it, and who he was. This freaked Nill out, and ultimately, he went off on her about how the victim matters, not catching the killer, some she took to heart because Bill left her in the middle of the night, and she didn't see him again until Andy’s dinner years later.

And back to the present, David shows upbeat to shit by the security guy too, and Andy is here, who is almost convinced he is the killer now.  So - oh, oh. Back we go in the elevator, 50 meters below the earth, to Andy’s creepy condo.  This living area, by the way, is designed to survive the end of the world. The cops are on the way, and so it’s time to find out whodunnit! We find out that Lee did some criminal stuff back when she was hacking full-time, and Andy erased her entire record for her, so she was kinda using him as much as he was using her. But that's small potatoes, considering Zoomer comes in looking for playmates, and Darby, on a hunch, puts his VR helmet back on, playing the game to its conclusion. Long story short - THE AI DONE IT. See, Ray, the AI programmed by Andy, came to see Bill and Rohan as threats to Zoomers, so it, under the guise of the VR game, tricked Zoomer into killing both of them. Zoomer, playing doctor, gave Bill an injection that Ray had led him to steal out of the infirmary, and Ray also tricked Zoomer into messing with Rohan’s pacemaker. Sian, it turns out, eventually died because of Ray's safeguards against hacks, which caused her helmet to malfunction. Ray the AI is the actual killer, Zoomer was a five-year-old patsy. As the cops arrive, Darby and Lee realize Ray’s got to go, so they break into the server room, which is basically the size of Mauritania. It looks like several football fields. You gotta be a pretty complex AI to be tricking children into murder. Darby and Lee try to hack Ray to death but, in the end, set a laptop on fire and use it to set Ray on fire, ending his threat. Don’t tell me that this kinda shit isn’t going to go down eventually. A self-driving car has already killed someone. I know I sound like a boomer, but come on, we need to be a little careful here. 

In the end, Darby gets a book out of it that reinforces a lesson that Bill had taught her - it isn’t the killer; it’s the victim. It’s something we all already knew, all of us in the true crime biz especially, but it bears preparing. Oh, and Lee and Zoomer get away from Ronson, but he gets his big techno-hole robot dogs and cave condo for the end times, so it's not a total loss. 

I’d give A Murder at the End of the World a B minus, maybe B? 

I enjoyed "Murder at the End of the World," it was stylish, it had some pretty good twists (I liked AI convincing a child to kill everyone, and it did tension well in parts (the part with the helmet was kinda terrifying).  And the performances, especially Harris Dickinson as the very sweet if kinda enigmatic Bill, Clive Owen as nasty Elon I mean Andy, and the charismatic Emma Corwin, especially as Darby elevated the entire enterprise. While I wouldn't label it as the best whodunit I've ever seen, it certainly stood out as a pretty captivating and less predictable mystery. In comparison to "Knives Out," which I personally found overrated and somewhat annoying, 

And that’s Wicked Gay Pop Whatever #2. Please join us near the end of the month for the next regular installment, and check Wicked Gay out on social media under wickedgaypod (mostly on TikTok and Insta these days). If you’d like even more Wicked Gay, meaning exclusive episodes and bonus content, subscribe to Wicked Gay’s Patreon at patreon.com/wickedgay, and if you like this podcast, tell a friend. And follow and subscribe on your favorite podcatcher. And rate reviews, click stars, all that good stuff. Our cover art is by Paul Chapman, and audio engineering is by the other Mr. Harvey. And music off of Pixabay.And remember, you are more than enough; you’re absolutely necessary. I’m not sure that even makes sense, I’m just tyring to keep it positive. Good night