The whole thing plays out as a True Detective in the style of Michael Clayton—a prestige whodunit fused with a startling comedy about the nearly occult style of corporate rot. The characters often speak with ethereal poetry, as if they’re mediums channeling spirit voices from beyond the veil. Lee, for instance, telling Darby that the hotel’s security cameras are wireless, and thus hackable, says, “Footage of every door’s camera is flying invisibly through the air, through your body, through my body right now.” The slicing modern lines, grisly crime scenes, and snow-slicked plains of this series might tempt some to see an icy void at its core, but Batmanglij and Marling are romantics. Their Icelandic sublime is animated by terror and awe, ghastly magic and wonder in every sheer cliff and Wi-Fi router.
Viewed as a pandemic drama, A Murder at the End of the World is more than its depictions of isolation, surveillance, paranoia, and FaceTime. One of the show’s repeated emphases is on the space and imaginative freedom that isolation can bring. One of the retreat-goers asks, in a moment of TED talk profundity, “when we have the space to contemplate the radical future of humanity, where will that take us?” The show’s dark, disappointed answer is that it often brings us up against our own limitations. Instead of liberating ourselves of the norms that govern our minds and imaginations, we work to stabilize and reinforce them. Without spoiling, it’s fair to say that when we eventually see Ronson’s vision of “the radical future of humanity,” it looks a lot like humanity’s extractive, exploitative, VC-funded present.
The show is filled with case studies in the danger and allure of capitulation and compromise. Lee was once a rogue hacker, now playing trophy wife for a bloviating billionaire; an acclaimed young filmmaker who’s a guest at the hotel sells his soul to collaborate with AI on his latest script; even Darby seems uncharacteristically impressed by Ronson’s wizardly tricks at first. In fact, one of the show’s funniest, knottiest bits is Darby’s budding partnership with Ronson’s generative AI Ray, who’s accessible via voice command in nearly every scene. They have a sort of gothic meet-cute in Darby’s cavernous loft that ends with Ray delivering a genuinely sweet, disarming monologue about Lisa Simpson. By the third episode, Ray is Watson to Darby’s Sherlock, a confidant who provides her with a bottomless source of information and an invaluable sounding board in a lonely place. It’s enough to make us forget that Ray is everywhere, with everyone, part and parcel of whatever evil Darby’s trying to uncover.