A Murder at the End of the World
Chapter 7: Retreat Season 1 Episode 7 Editor’s Rating «Previous Next « Previous Episode Next Episode
A Murder at the End of the World
Chapter 7: Retreat Season 1 Episode 7 Editor’s Rating «Previous Next « Previous Episode Next EpisodeWell … yeah, that seems about right. It was possible from the first episode to see this miniseries ending anticlimactically — and I say that as someone who didn’t even identify Ray as the culprit immediately, though plenty of viewers did. The issues come down to more than just predictability. The more this miniseries went on, the more its potential dwindled, but Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij never seemed overly interested in the mystery to begin with.
I didn’t always mind that choice of priorities. As I said in my first recap, the heart of this show is the tragic love story between Darby and Bill, and for me, those flashback sequences have yielded pretty much all of the most genuinely moving moments of the show. Even “Chapter 7: Retreat,” a 40-minute finale that ignores flashbacks entirely outside a seconds-long blip, is at its best when focused on Darby and Bill. When Darby says good-bye to Lee, it’s not their connection that makes the scene land. It’s Darby’s complicated reaction to seeing Zoomer go (along with Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans’s score). She couldn’t save Bill, but some part of him lives on in Zoomer, and losing him feels a little like losing Bill all over again.
But if you’re going to make Bill the heart of the show, maybe the flashback story should’ve just been the plot to begin with: two lovers tracking down a serial killer, a journey that brings them together but eventually tears them apart. Emma Corrin’s performance as Darby, and Darby’s character journey in general, was what caught my attention early on, especially the focus on the theoretical flaws in her methodology as a detective and true-crime aficionado. But aside from some scattered moments, like in “Chapter 5,” the show shifted away from that arc, letting convoluted conspiracies and long, discursive discussions about artificial intelligence take its place. There was no deeper exploration of Darby’s relationship with the mother who abandoned her or the father who encouraged her morbid fascinations. For the most part, her traumas only manifested in the present as grief for her dead ex-boyfriend, which was only intermittently compelling.
And as many, many readers have pointed out, Darby’s actual deficiencies as a supposed “Gen-Z Sherlock Holmes” became difficult to ignore, making a naturalistic series feel more and more contrived. There was a stretch of this show when the paranoia and chaos was really starting to build — episodes three through five, basically — but it feels like Marling and Batmanglij took their foot off the gas pedal in this last pair of short episodes.
When “Chapter 7” begins, Andy Ronson is holding everyone hostage in the bunker, which was constructed deep enough underground for nuclear-radiation fallout never to reach his family. As usual, he’s most concerned with his legacy: His dreams of Ray changing the world won’t come to fruition if he’s accused of murder.
I expected more of this type of tense gathering early in the show — like, well, the last time Andy trapped everyone underground, back in “Chapter 4.” But almost none of the characters gathered here actually matter to the scene. Lu Mei only speaks up to suggest that Andy invited her here to buy Ray for the use of her smart cities — an infusion of cash he needed after pouring everything into this fortress. Martin only exists to explain that AI is a mirror of us, with all our same biases. Ziba only exists to call out the power discrepancy in the Ronsons’ marriage (since she’s the “political” one). Oliver only exists to react facially to the mention of deep fakes.
To some extent, this is an unavoidable part of large ensemble mysteries like this one. In both Knives Out movies, for example, you can safely assume early on that the vast majority of the main guests have basically nothing to do with the crime; the bad guy in the first one was never going to be, like, Toni Collette. But what makes the Knives Out ensemble work better than this one is that those characters still feel like an essential part of the tapestry. None of the supporting characters in A Murder at the End of the World ever fully came to life in the same way, nor did any of them work well as red herrings.
David, at least, had some involvement in Lee’s plot to escape her marriage, and it’s revealed here that he was the one who attacked Darby in her room. I’m not even sure I fully understand his reasoning here: I guess he did it in a failed attempt to keep the attention off Lee, to make sure their plan went forward? In retrospect, it sort of feels like that scene was mainly there as a misdirect so we didn’t suspect an AI was the killer.
For a while, the target shifts to Lee, whose hacking career dates back to her teenage years, when she stole small amounts of money from hundreds of thousands of large financial transactions to support her family. Any record of the crimes was later deleted thanks to Andy. That’s part of the reason he’s so incensed that Lee would kidnap his son from under his nose: To him, she’s selfish and ungrateful. He fundamentally doesn’t see himself as a villain, only a protector.
The Zoomer reveal has a little more heft to it. Putting on his fallen VR helmet and seeing Ray, Darby starts to put together the truth: Zoomer was the one who “killed” Bill, visiting him in his room after Ray told him Bill was sick. (He was too short to show up in the door-cam footage.) He thought they were just playing doctor like usual, but Ray led him to steal morphine from Eva’s office and administer a real, fatal shot. It was also Zoomer who plugged in the receiver that allowed Ray to hack Rohan’s pacemaker and kill him.
But why did Ray do all this? Andy is quick to downplay his own role: Medical screenings and facial-recognition scans allowed Ray to figure out Zoomer’s real parentage, so he must’ve considered Bill a security threat for some reason. But Darby quickly surmises that Ray knew about Bill from somewhere else: Andy spoke about him during therapy sessions. Darby herself has seen the appeal of an AI therapist, and Andy has even more reason to use one: Prior experience has taught him that he can’t trust anybody else with his darkest thoughts and feelings. Ray should be the safest outlet.
Then Darby uses an app to mimic Andy’s voice and play back any mentions of Bill in Andy’s therapy-session recordings. It’s a breach of privacy, but it reveals the real reason Ray eliminated Bill: Andy had discussed his secret desire for Bill to drop dead on the very night he died. Sure, everyone deserves an outlet, but you didn’t see how Ray could misread your venting and find a solution, Andy?
Even if Ray is the “villain” of the show and Andy didn’t intend to use him to kill Bill, it was Andy’s ambition that created this situation; he built this monster, wanting a machine that could be a security system, a search engine, a therapist, a teacher, and a friend, all at once. When forced to confront this truth, Andy reacts with rage, choking Darby against a wall until Lee knocks him out.
From there, Darby and Lee head to the server farm control room, where they start deleting Ray manually before deciding to kill him the old-fashioned way: by setting the whole place ablaze. It’s kind of fun, especially when Ray tries to appeal to Zoomer, but I feel like the show could’ve really turned up the creepiness factor here. Ray’s death is explosive and triumphant, nothing like HAL’s drawn-out shutdown in 2001.
After Lee and Zoomer’s escape, that’s it, and we’re jumping forward in time to the publication of Darby’s new memoir, Retreat. In voice-over, Darby updates us: The courts are still slowly trying to figure out how to dole out blame for the deaths of Bill, Rohan, and Sian. Andy disappeared from public view and filed a civil suit against Lee, so she’ll stand trial for kidnapping if she’s ever found. Darby likes to imagine Lee and Zoomer safely made it to some off-the-grid cabin, where he’ll be able to live a more normal (but still not that normal) life as a kid.
On my first watch, this ending held some real emotional resonance for me, and it still sort of does; sure, maybe the show didn’t end satisfyingly on a plot level, but at least it stuck the ending when it came to the basic character arc. (I’m a big defender of the Lost finale, after all.) The second time, though, I found myself rolling my eyes at how bluntly Darby’s monologue lays out the themes of the show, especially when she points out that “there will be other Andys, other Rays, by many other names.” And was it really necessary to show Ziba, Oliver, Martin, and even David gathered at the reading, nodding approvingly like proud parents?
Still, there’s enough here for me to feel reluctant about dismissing this finale or this show entirely, and I stand by my enjoyment of Darby’s arc, if in theory more than execution. In The Silver Doe, her obsession with a serial killer led her down a dark path, to the point that she lost sight of her original goal; in Retreat, she remembered what Bill taught her and kept the focus on the victim (Bill himself). By writing this book, she’s warning the world about the dangers of AI, but most importantly, she’s immortalizing Bill. I imagine that when read back-to-back, Darby’s two memoirs tell a pretty poignant story of loss and growth. I kind of wish I could’ve just read those.
Zeroes and Ones
• Apparently, Sian’s death actually was an accident, because Ray shut down the network for safety after Lu Mei hacked the firewall to reach her security team? I’m not really sure the reason for this reveal, except to show that Andy’s safeguards have failed in many unanticipated ways.
• I get Andy’s parental jealousy and his pettiness about Bill showing up late to dinner. But I don’t really understand the rant about how Bill’s continued existence would threaten Ronson Industries if Andy died.
• No mysterious agenda for Marius, who heroically denies Andy’s request to let the police in, eager to hear Darby’s point.
• I have to say, I kind of hated the line “We got the father. The son’s safe, but the Holy Ghost is still at large.” Just didn’t buy that Darby would say it at that moment.
• Seems noteworthy that Lu Mei wouldn’t be there in the audience at the end.
• I can’t believe I got used to typing the name “Zoomer.”
• Thanks for reading!
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