And so we reach the end of A Murder at the End of the World, with the seventh and final episode of this chilly winter-themed murder mystery arriving.
A Murder at the End of the World follows Darby Hart (Emma Corrin), an amateur sleuth who's invited to a "meeting of the minds" in a remote hotel in Iceland. However, when her ex-boyfriend shows up (and is then murdered), she finds herself investigating a much deeper plot.
After three murder victims, many close calls and countless potential suspects, this is the episode in which we find out just who's to blame for all the deaths in the Icelandic tech retreat, and why they're doing it.
We'll walk you through what happened in that final episode of A Murder at the End of the World, and also answer any lingering questions you might have from the show.
A Murder at the End of the World episode 7 recap
The confrontation
After the events of the last episode, Darby, Andy (Clive Owen), Lee (Brit Marling), Oliver and David are on an elevator ride down to Andy's hidden bunker. They arrive and the other surviving attendees of the retreat are there: Lu Mei, Todd, Martin, Ziba and Marius. The only two missing people are Eva and Zoomer.
Andy tells everyone that he's keeping them in the bunker until he figures out who's been trying to set him up with the murders. David points out that the storm has ended and police will be on their way, but the bunker is hidden and so the police won't find them.
We learn a few random tidbits:
- Lu Mei is convinced that she was invited to the conference so that Andy could sell Ray to her, for use in her smart cities.
- David was the person who attacked Darby with a knife, though only to scare her off of Lee's trail.
- Lee had a big list of cybercrimes on her record when she met Andy, and he wiped her slate clean
Andy is teeing up an accusation of Lee being the murderer when Zoomer walks into the room. As Eva is hurrying him back out of the room, he drops his VR headset, and it makes Darby realize something. She questions the boy and we learn about what he was doing on the nights of the murders.
Since Bill was ill on the first night, he and Zoomer were playing doctor. That night, Zoomer visited Bill and gave him a shot from Eva's office at the behest of AI assistant Ray. Later in the stay, when Rohan was unwell, Zoomer again followed Ray's directions in setting up his remote heart monitor, which killed him.
Ray defends himself by saying that he was setting up a game for Zoomer to play, to help him learn visually. However Darby deduces that Ray thought Bill was a security threat. When she asks him about this he doesn't respond, and Andy doesn't want to ask, so Darby uses a deepfake voice app to pretend that she's Andy to get him to recount the logs of their therapy sessions.
We hear logs of Andy and Ray's discussions on the night of Bill's murder. In them, Andy is angry that Zoomer has naturally gravitated toward Bill (no-one knew at the time that Bill was Zoomer's biological dad). He makes death threats, which Ray seems to miscontstrue as threats against Ronson Industries. In the modern day, Andy defends this as saying it's confidential therapy talk.
However Andy decides to then attack Darby, strangling her against a pillar... until Lee knocks him out from behind.
The 'off' switch
Marius says that there's about 20 minutes until the police get into the hotel, and Darby and Lee decide they need to turn off Ray in this time. They go to his server room with Zoomer and can't figure out the password... except Zoomer knew it this whole time.
The two women begin trying to hack Ray's software but to no avail... until they realize that hacking is only a way to get into a place, and they're already in it.
Ray begs Zoomer not to let the adults turn him off, saying that they still need to finish their game, but Darby uses a fire extinguisher to bash open the window to the servers themselves.
Darby and Lee set a laptop on fire and throw it into the servers, and it quickly turns into a big blaze. Ray gives warnings about fire damage until he turns off, succumbing to the attack.
Before the police arrive, Darby agrees to help Lee and Zoomer get out of the hotel, and to Rohan's boat. She says a hasty goodbye, knowing she'll likely never see the mother again, before they disappear into the icy wilds.
Then the police arrive and everyone gets shepherded out of the hotel. We hear an epilogue from Darby: Andy disappeared from public view after the events of the story, and though he continued to hunt for Lee, no-one even knows if she escaped from Iceland.
The show ends with Darby giving another reading, like in the first episode, of her new book: 'Retreat' (which the show was originally titled, before it was changed to A Murder at the End of the World). The final thing we see is footage of what really happened with Lee and Zoomer: they got onto Rohan's boat after all.
A Murder at the End of the World ending explained
So who was the murderer?
There are three people who are all partially to blame for the deaths of Bill and Rohan.
Firstly, Zoomer is the one who physically killed both Bill and Rohan. He injected Bill with the morphine and overloaded Rohan's heart rate monitor, leading to their deaths.
However the child didn't do it intentionally. AI assistant Ray is the one who actually told him to do these acts, under the pretence of playing doctor with the two men.
Ray wasn't doing this as a rogue AI though, and he thought he was setting up the death of these two men as a way to protect Ronson Industries, his primary charge. That's because Andy used very strong and aggressive language in therapy sessions, that Ray couldn't indentify as just an expression of anger — he thought Bill and Rohan really were a threat to the company's security.
But who killed Sian?
Sian wasn't killed for the same reason as Bill or Rohan. No, she was just in the wrong suit at the wrong time.
Sian died because she was wearing the astronaut suit when Lu Mei tried hacking Ray to take the AI assistant out. Evidently Ray's programming was tied to the suit, so when he was temporarily compromised, it meant Sian's suit.
Why did Bill and Rohan die?
Bill and Rohan both died because they posed a threat to Andy's control over his child.
Bill was killed as Ray recognized him as Zoomer's biological father. Ray saw Andy getting annoyed about this, and saw that Bill posed a threat to Andy's company.
Rohan was killed because he was ready to help Lee and Zoomer escape from Andy, which would also threaten Ronson Industries and Andy.
