Death and Other Details Creators Unravel Their Biggest Twist Yet

According to Mike Weiss and Heidi Cole McAdams, the co-creators of Hulu’s Death and Other Details, one of the guiding principles to creating a good murder mystery TV series is to not deceive the audience. When something happens, it needs to stick.

“You have to play fair with the audience,” McAdams tells Primetimer. “Each of your twists, when they all add up at the end, need to exist in the same story and not contradict each other.”

So when Winnie (Annie Q. Riegel), the soft-spoken deck waitress, confesses to the murder of Keith (Michael Gladis) at the end of Episode 4, audiences should believe her. Just don’t be naive enough to think that’s the whole story.

“We don’t go back and delete things that have happened earlier, so when Winnie says, ‘I killed Keith Trubisky,’ and has all of these details that make it clear it was her, that’s true,” Weiss adds. “But the question is, how is that a building block in a larger story?”

Winnie’s confession — obtained by seeing her sister Teddy (Angela Zhou), the crew manager and a secret dominatrix, imprisoned — is the end result of an episode that is profoundly pivotal to the entire case being built one clue at a time. Earlier in the episode, the hunt for disgraced head of security Jules (Hugo Diego Garcia) leads Imogene (Violett Beane) to discover he has smuggled Ukrainian stowaways onto the SS Varuna. The incriminating evidence (fake passports, wads of cash, general nefarious trappings) found in his room in Episode 3 was all part of an elaborate plan he began six months earlier, which involved saving Varuna owner Sunil (Rahul Kohli) from a fake mugging to get into his good graces and be hired on the ship so he could ferry refugees.

Like every other piece in this puzzle, the inclusion of Ukrainian refugees was intentional. “We are telling a very classical murder mystery that takes place on a vintage fantasy of a mid-century ocean liner, but the show takes place in 2024,” says Weiss, who also wrote the episode. “So, we wanted to be able to toggle back and forth between timeless genre touchpoints while also telling a super contemporary story. That’s how you get Ukrainian refugees being key to solving an old-fashioned, locked-room murder mystery.”

When Imogene discovers a young girl among the stowaways was moving through the air ventilation system and might have seen key clues in Keith/Danny’s death, she brings in Rufus (Mandy Patinkin) to interview her. The young detective in training leads the questioning for the first time, with Rufus coaching her in the delicate art of interrogation. Hinted at earlier in the season, this is the first time Imogene leans into her burgeoning skill of being able to mentally walk through the memories of others with Rufus over her shoulder, gently guiding her on what to mine from each interviewee.

“Talking it through with Sasha [Silver, Hulu’s Head of Drama Originals], she really pushed us and we had this moment where we realized this is the moment Imogene takes her first foray into what it really means to be a detective,” McAdams says. “Rufus is guiding her through it, but he is also letting her make mistakes and letting her figure herself out through this sequence. It became a really pivotal moment in the season and her journey.”

Weiss takes it a step further and points to this specific interrogation as the moment when it's made clear that this case is going to take both Imogene and Rufus to solve because each one of them brings something different.

“Rufus might have been able to get to the answer the two of them arrive at, but that journey would have looked very different,” he says. “He doesn’t have this skill that Imogene has, this unbelievably empathetic way of relating to suspects by entering their memory and the history of the crime. Rufus is brilliant and clever, but he lacks that ability. So this collaboration is beautiful because it shows the audience a way of working that neither one of them would have been capable of without the other.”

How this partnership evolves through the season is one of the pleasures of creating a murder mystery for Weiss and McAdams because, just like the audience, they get to throw their leads for a loop each week. Another one of those core tenets of murder mystery making is delivering a twist, a reveal and a cliffhanger every episode. The end of Episode 4 brings, perhaps, the most consequential cliffhanger yet when the ever-peculiar Leila (Pardis Saremi) confronts Rufus with some troubling information. Winnie may have confessed to Keith’s murder, but she’s part of something bigger. Then she utters the one name that throws Rufus off-kilter –– Viktor Sams. The suspect that got away in the murder of Imogene’s mother has haunted Rufus for nearly two decades and it seems the detective has stumbled into his web once again.

“From the very first episode, we have dangled the question of how what happened to Danny/Keith is related to Imogene’s mother’s death,” McAdams says. “By the end of Episode 4, we answer that it is certainly related somehow. The fact that Leila even knows the name of the man who killed Imogene’s mom means something.”

For now, the only thing the audience can do is sit back, grab a cocktail (from one of the crew members that didn’t kill a guest), and have faith in the masters of murder and mayhem steering this twisted cruise from hell.

“In a 10-episode show, all you can ask from the audience is a little bit of trust that this really is building to something bigger,” Weiss says.

New episodes of Death and Other Details drop Wednesdays on Hulu through March 5.

Hunter Ingram is a TV writer living in North Carolina and watching way too much television. His byline has appeared in Variety, Emmy Magazine, USA Today, and across Gannett's USA Today Network newspapers.