It is to be said that murder always follows Darby Hart and we now get to follow along with her in the newest Hulu FX limited mystery series, ‘Murder at the End of the World.’
‘Murder at the End of the World’ is a mystery and psychological thriller ongoing TV series, with the first two episodes releasing on November 14, 2023, and new episodes now coming out every Tuesday. The series will be releasing only seven episodes, with each episode lasting around an hour. The show was created by Zal Batmanglig and Brit Marling who also stars as a major character in the show. Other cast members include Emma Corrin, Harris Dickinson, and Clive Owen.
The story centers around Darby Hart, a crime enthusiast, hacker, and author of a true crime book, in two different timelines. In the past, we see Darby and her “partner in crime,” Bill, attempting to solve a case that Darby will end up turning into her true crime book in her future. Flash forward into the present, Darby has been invited by a famous billionaire to a retreat with eight other guests. Everything seems to be going somewhat fine and normal till an unexpected guest shows up at dinner. Later, after dinner, Darby finds the aforementioned unexpected guest unresponsive, who is later proclaimed officially dead. She then starts feeling as if the cause of the victims death is not natural, and instead is a murder. The mini-series revolves around Darby trying to solve the case and find the murderer before there are any new casualties.
So far only two episodes were released and I’ll be honest, I barely was able to tackle them. I did not like the show at all. The concept was there. It seemed interesting, and when you read the synopsis of the show, it really gets you curious and eager to watch the show, but once you start watching, it’s chaos. The show got me screaming and rolling my eyes at the screen and not in a good way. Not only that, the story had many jump scares, especially those where it is silent and then something jumps out from a corner, which I was really unprepared for, due to not knowing that the series was actually horror.
Praising this show is really hard for me, since there are barely any parts to the show that I actually enjoyed in the duration of the two episodes I’ve seen. I will say though, the show’s creepy, mysterious ambiance was done really well, and you can really see that the creators of the show put in a lot of work to keep it that way. I didn’t enjoy it, since I am not a fan of scariness and spookiness in general, but people who do enjoy these sort of horror-like movies, for sure will end up enjoying this detail of the show. From there, everything went downhill for me. The part that I disliked the most about the show was the dual timeline. Don’t get me wrong, I typically like flashbacks and flash forwards in time to see how things were or how they turned out. Here though, the time jumps were really confusing and it was hard for me to distinguish if we are in the past, present, or in a whole new timeline, which got really complicated and a bit muddled. Not only that, there were several times throughout the episodes where something would happen, but then in the next scene everything is perfectly fine, and the episode continues on as if that particular event didn’t just happen, which also ended up really confusing me throughout the two episodes I’ve watched.
In the first 2 weeks of releasing, the show was evaluated by several websites including Rotten Tomatoes, receiving 87% overall, and 7.6 out of 10 stars on IMDb. With only a couple episodes being released so far, there aren’t many reviews yet, but then there are some out there from magazines and newspapers like the “TIME Magazine” and “The New York Times.” Both sources referenced how much the series is similar to other movies and shows including the 2022 ‘Knives Out 2’ and a TV show dating back to 2016, ‘The OA.’ “The New York Times” went on to also describe the show as “An Agatha Christie scenario and spins it into a chilly, stylized cyber-noir with ideas about artificial intelligence and some familiar Marling/Batmanglij themes of global consciousness.” “Vulture magazine” also wrote a similar review about “Murder at the End of the World” also mentioning the many similarities between the series and Agatha Christie classics saying “This is in many ways a good old-fashioned Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery, as you may have suspected from the title and probably realized once the setting shifted to a remote home owned by a shady billionaire.”
As of the week of November 16, 2023, the ‘Murder at the End of the World’ ranks on “Reelgood,” a site that specializes in everything about new or upcoming movies and series, as the most watched series/movie from all streaming services including Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV and other notable streaming programs. It ended up beating the movie “Haunting in Venice” (Hulu), “All the Light we Cannot See” (Netflix), “Blue Beetle” (HBO Max), and many more. Overall this series seemed like a hit or miss one, but if you like shady, horror-like mysteries this one is most likely to be a hit for you.
