A Murder at the End of the World – Chapter 2: The Silver Doe

By: Gladys Luna

Darby Hart (Emma Corrin) runs in search for help to the front desk of the hotel asking for a doctor, but only a security guard (Karl Melberg) who also identifies himself as an MT is there to help. That does not seem to be enough for her right now, so she asks him to tell her Sian’s (Alice Braga) room number. Once he does, she goes straight to her room and tells her about what is happening with Bill (Harris Dickinson). Sian tries to do CPR on him but unfortunately it is already too late to save him. While Darby was heading to Sian’s room, she recalled the first crime scene she went to with her father (Neal Huff) when she was younger (Anastasia Lee). Even though he asked her to wait for him in the car, she didn’t listen to him and witnessed first-hand everything happening there. Back to the present, Bill’s room soon start to get crowded as the security team, commanded by Todd (Louis Cancelmi) along with Andy (Clive Owen) arrive to the room. Still in shock and unable to process what is happening, Darby scans the room looking for any clue that might tell her what happened and she sees a syringe as well as her book with blood spots on it. Marius (Christopher Gurr) takes Darby out of the room alleging this is a private matter they need to take care of. When she reaches the hallway, she crashes with a man servant (Daniel Olson) making his tray to fall on the floor. Andy goes out the room and gives her his condolences as well as he apologizes for everything that happened. Then, Eva (Britian Seibert), Todd’s wife, arrives so Andy asks them to take her back to her room and make sure she is taken care of. Eva tries to comfort her and gives her a couple of sleeping pills and suggests for her to have some rest then asks for Ray (Edoardo Ballerini) to set up a straight dial to her cellphone in case Darby needs something. The young girl enters into a crisis mode getting herself half-naked and throwing things left and right in her room. However, after a while she decides to take the pills and the meds start to kick in slowly until her eye lids can’t take it anymore finally closing.

Back to the past, we are taken to another crime scene which is about the teenager that Darby has described in her book. A human skeleton has been found but the only belongings that were found with it are a pair of silver earrings. She goes to the morgue with her father and while he is working on the human skeleton, they talk about the possible cause of death and everything related to it. But the big hit for her comes when he tells her that given there is no way to know who she was. Darby decides to keep the girl’s earrings and start an investigation on her own as a way to bring justice for her. So, that night, while surfing on a site called “The Doe Files,” she sees a message of a user interested in working on these kinds of cases. She decides to reply to the message and start a conversation with this person who turns out to be none other but Bill.

At the hotel, morning has come, and Darby’s first thought goes to Bill. She goes straight to the dining room and sees everyone having a good time completely unaware of what had happened. Lee (Brit Marling) sees her walking in and her first instinct is to hug her and find her a seat for her. Everything goes as though it was a slow-motion movie in front of her eyes; the world keeps going on but for her, nothing is the same. When everyone is finally gathered there, Andy gives them the terrible news about Bill’s passing assuring that he died from an overdose and implying that he had taken his own life. No one can believe what they’re hearing, and Andy takes the chance to request complete secrecy about it, at least until they have informed his whole family. He also lets them know that the ambulance will arrive later today to take the body. Rohan (Javed Khan) to whom we haven’t been properly introduced yet, starts crying inconsolably but David (Raúl Esparza) manages to calm him down. Darby does not believe that he hurt himself saying that he had been sober for a while but Sian tells her that they hadn’t seen each other for six years so maybe she didn’t know who he was anymore. Ziba (Pegah Ferydoni) and Lu Mei (Joan Chen) suggest that maybe they should all return to their home, but Andy is not willing to give up on what they had accomplish so far, finally being able to be together after a couple of years of failing attempts. He even dares to assume that Bill would want them to continue, and he ends up convincing them to stay. However, Darby cannot take it anymore and leaves the room.

Darby is not one to sit down and do nothing so, as it is expected, she makes a plan to figure out who killed Bill. The first thing she does is to clog her toilet and then begins to look for Marius’ assistance to help her with the situation. While the man is entertained with this task, she changes her ring settings giving herself full access around the hotel and this is how she enters Bill’s room looking for a clue that might help her clarify his death. While she is there, she also changes the privacy settings of the room and asks questions to Ray about how addicts would procced when wanting to use some drugs and that is how she gets some answers that would completely vanish the possibility that he killed himself. She pours some powder on the syringe that he supposedly used, but there are not fingerprints on it which makes the whole thing even more suspicious. Suddenly, she hears noises and hides herself in the bathroom while Lee enters the place. The woman looks at Bill’s body and then rummages through his stuff looking for something. When she is about to enter the bathroom, she hears people clapping at distance. It tells her it’s time to go while Darby chases her. Both women arrive to a living room where Martin (Jermaine Fowler) is giving a presentation about how he used AI on his latest film to what Ziba does not seem to agree so much with. Lee finds herself a place at the back of the room and Darby sits next to her. While the whole presentation is in full swing, Darby tells her that she saw her at Bill’s room and assures her that he was murdered. Lee confesses that every door camera has her own network so she has to figure out the password it in order to see the actual footage.

Back to the past, at this point Darby and Bill have spent every waking moment together even though they didn’t live in the same area. They were constantly talking and looking for clues together to solve the “John Doe” cases that had been forgotten. One morning Bill suggests her that instead of looking in the dead women cases files, they should try to find someone that had actually survived to that so they decide to hack the databases until Darby finally found the person they were looking for. Bill offers to drive her himself to where this woman lives but she does not feel ready for it yet. One night, while she was helping her father with a case at the morgue, Bill called her and asked her to go somewhere because he needed to show her something so she followed his lead while he was on the phone giving her directions until she found herself in the middle of the railroad. In that moment the call drops and she doesn’t know what to do so she thinkst he has just played her. However, just then the light lamps set at the edges of the road start to blink giving her a message in morse code that would say “HAPPY BIRTHDAY DARBY” making the young woman smile. This gives Darby an idea about a way to access the cameras footage so she dismantles a LED light bulb and removes an electronic board out of the bulb that she connects to her laptop. That helps her obtain the password she was looking for giving her access to all the footage she needed. She looks for room 11 footage and sees that David, Ziba and even Bill himself had been in the hallway the prior night but then, all of a sudden, a person wearing a black hoodie and a white mask showed up on the camera and the rest is history. Darby starts to hear some noises so she goes to her balcony and sees how an ambulance is taking Bill’s body. Then, she remembers the night they met; it was at Ray’s Tavern. Darby arrived there and entered the place scanning for his face but he was nowhere to be seen until, his figure showed up there at the bar, looking nervous and a little distracted until he noticed her among the crowd and welcomed her with the biggest smile.