A Murder at the End of the World Quashes the Myth of the 'Ethical Billionaire'

[Note: This post contains spoilers for Hulu's A Murder at the End of the World finale, "Retreat."]

There's a "Mister Police, I gave you all the clues" quality to the big reveal in Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij's stylish whodunit A Murder at the End of the World. For the past seven episodes, Gen Z sleuth Darby Hart (Emma Corrin) has slowly investigated the murder of ex-boyfriend Bill Farrah (Harris Dickinson) and two other guests — off-grid activist Rohan (Javed Khan) and astronaut Sian (Alice Braga) — at the remote retreat hosted by enigmatic billionaire Andy Ronson (Clive Owen).

Along the way, Darby has survived multiple attempts on her life, uncovered the truth about Zoomer Ronson's (Kellan Tetlow) paternity, and learned about Lee's (Marling) plan to run away from her controlling husband, who's so obsessed with protecting Zoomer from the impending climate apocalypse that he built a colony of bunkers underneath his Icelandic hotel.

Nothing that precedes the finale, "Chapter 7: Retreat," makes Andy look good, but for reasons that never quite make sense — especially considering her initial skepticism about the retreat — Darby is inclined to trust him. Time and time again, she gives Andy the benefit of the doubt, even after he refuses to consider the possibility that Bill's death was a murder (his team rules it an accidental overdose), boasts of his plan to "colonize the moon," and unveils his army of massive, self-organizing robots designed to rebuild civilization in "new climate extremes."

It's not until Episode 5, "Crypt," that Darby becomes suspicious enough to accuse Andy of killing Bill, Zoomer's biological father, but Andy denies it, offering an alibi and an explanation. "I've known since day one that Zoomer is not my biological offspring," he says. "I felt nothing but gratitude towards Bill. He provided the hardware; I provide the software. And we all know it's the software that matters."

The admission is enough to convince Darby that Andy is "being set up" by someone who wants to "destroy" him, and they proceed to team up to interrogate the other guests and find the killer. Their partnership is short-lived, as Darby soon learns about Lee's thwarted escape attempt ("There is no leaving him," Lee says of Andy), but the fact that Darby is so willing to ignore the many red flags surrounding this so-called "ethical billionaire" reflects the hold rich and powerful men like Andy have over the rest of us, even those who should know better.

By the time Darby comes to the obvious realization that Andy, for all his posturing about wanting to save humanity from the climate crisis and his appreciation for Bill, is a liar, it's too late: Three people have died. Initially, Marling and Batmanglij, who co-wrote the finale (Batmanglij also directed), point fingers away from Andy, who accuses Lee — a celebrated coder in her own right — of masterminding the murders in order to ruin his reputation and flee with Zoomer. But as Andy becomes increasingly aggressive toward his wife, Darby surmises that the murderer is someone, or something, with even more technological expertise: Andy's A.I. creation Ray (Edoardo Ballerini), which combines his language-processing algorithm with his home-security system into one unsettling, all-knowing package.

Ray is so advanced that he instantly recognized Bill as Zoomer's biological father, and, as Darby detects, crafted a game of "doctor" that involved the child "treating" Bill by injecting a lethal dose of morphine into his arm. The A.I. also dispatched Zoomer to "help" Rohan with his "heart computer" (his pacemaker); Ray then hacked into the system and delivered a series of intense shocks to Rohan's heart, killing him.

But that's only half the story. "We know how the murders were committed, but we don't know why," Darby explains to the guests assembled in Andy's bunker. "Why did Ray think that Bill Farrah was a security threat?" As she works through the answer to that question, Darby finally realizes what viewers have known since the premiere — and that anyone with a passing knowledge of the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world can plainly see: that Andy is a small man ruled by his deep-seated insecurities, particularly his feelings of inadequacy surrounding Zoomer's paternity. As a result, Ray, the only "person" Andy felt he could trust and confide in, internalized those same insecurities, and they became baked into his programming.

"You mated your security A.I. and your therapy bot, and you created a monster driven by your greatest fears," Darby tells Andy. "Three people have died here for your safety and your security, for the maintenance of your empire. To protect a corporate fortune that you could pass down to your son, at the expense of anything or anyone that got in the way."

When Andy reacts with violence, leaping up and strangling Darby against a concrete wall, it's hardly shocking. This vindictive, chauvinistic man is the real Andy, the one Darby refused to acknowledge until it was quite literally staring her in the face.

There's a similar inevitability to the about-face done by aerospace magnate Paul Marks (Jon Hamm) in The Morning Show Season 3. Like Andy, Paul insists he's a different breed of billionaire — not one motivated by greed, but by a desire to combat "fake news" and "fix" the fourth estate, hence his interest in acquiring legacy media company UBA.

And like his Murder at the End of the World counterpart, Paul has no problem abandoning those principles when they no longer serve his needs: With his main business, Hyperion, hemorrhaging cash, he plots to sell UBA for parts and funnel the money into his struggling (and fraudulent, it's later revealed) space program. He successfully convinces anchor Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston), the only UBA staffer swayed by his claims of altruism, that a fire sale is "a chance to create something new, something better," and together, they craft a mutually-beneficial plan that would leave Alex in charge of her own studio (the only thing she's ever wanted), and Paul with enough cash to send as many penis-shaped rockets into orbit as he'd like.

As the season progresses, Alex's colleagues warn her about Paul's dark side and his history of silencing dissenting voices, but it takes until the finale, when Alex discovers he's been surveilling her, for her to admit they're correct. In an attempt to right her wrongs, Alex blows up Paul's deal by proposing "a merger of equals" with rival network NBN and confronts him with evidence that he's been lying to NASA about Hyperion's progress. She ends the season on top, having saved the network and outfoxed her big, bad boyfriend, though she stops short of exposing him outright; instead, she offers to bury the story, provided Paul "make[s] it right with the people [he] hurt."

Darby and Alex choose to overlook the truth about the billionaires in their lives for different reasons: While Darby is legitimately convinced of Andy's innocence (until she discovers otherwise), Alex believes she can use Paul's influence to amass her own. But otherwise, their journeys are remarkably similar. In both cases, they're so dazzled by these powerful men and their visions of progress that they ignore their instincts and plunge head-first into danger.

What's surprising isn't the outcome of A Murder at the End of the World or The Morning Show Season 3 — that the reclusive tech titan and his sinister AI are behind the murders, or that the ego of a space-obsessed plutocrat becomes his undoing — but that it takes Darby and Alex so long to get there. Both on screen and in real life, these billionaires haven't hesitated to show us who they really are. Perhaps it's time to start taking them at face value.

A Murder at the End of the World is streaming on Hulu. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Claire Spellberg Lustig is the Senior Editor at Primetimer and a scholar of The View. Follow her on Twitter at @c_spellberg.