‘A Murder at the End of the World’ is about resisting domination

In a sea of Dead Girl Shows, it’s a breath of fresh air

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Editors note: The following contains spoilers for Episode 1 of A Murder at the End of the World, but not the later episodes.

Film and television have long struggled to reckon with violence against women without normalizing or replicating that violence. In a landscape filled with murder mysteries and crime procedurals, only a few series stand out as successfully disrupting the genre’s masculine gaze. In Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake, Robin (Elisabeth Moss) uses empathy as a tool to understand violent crimes. In The Fall, Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) is ultimately just as vulnerable as the victims of the serial killer she’s chasing. Unbelievable focuses on the effects of sexual assault rather than the perpetrators, and Veronica Mars does all of this and more from the POV of a high school girl. 

So many contemporary detective stories are the legacy of what Alice Bolin calls the Dead Girl Show, a genre established by Twin Peaks and Laura Palmer, the ultimate Dead Girl. In Top of the Lake and Veronica Mars, what Bolin calls “the two great feminist Dead Girl Shows,” both detectives are trying to solve an external mystery while also looking for answers about their own rapes. In these stories, women’s bodies are intimately tied to sexual violence, something these detectives know from personal experience. They in turn use this knowledge in an attempt to help others. The Dead Girl resides within. 

Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij’s FX series A Murder at the End of the World is not really a Dead Girl Show. First, there is no sexualized female corpse, only human bones. Marling revealed that they chose to show the women in this corroded state to strip them of any eroticism while still illustrating the specter of death and loss that these remains represent. Second, the murder noted in the title, the murder that kick-starts the entire mystery, is not the murder of a girl. 

The series follows Darby Hart (Emma Corrin), a young hacker and amateur sleuth. The modern-day timeline sees Darby at the launch of her first book, which tells the story of her quest to catch a serial killer of women alongside fellow online sleuth Bill (Harris Dickinson). The parallel timeline, set five years prior, tracks Darby and Bill on their journey across Middle America, following the clues that no one else bothered to look for. In the present day, Darby is asked to attend a retreat in Iceland hosted by Andy Ronson (Clive Owen), a tech billionaire married to Darby’s elusive hacker hero, Lee Anderson (Marling). 

Darby is the show’s detective, our heroine, but she doesn’t occupy any familiar archetypes. She’s not a victim of sexual violence herself, but as the daughter of a medical examiner, she has been in close proximity to death for her entire life. To be clear, making the lead of a murder mystery show a woman is not inherently progressive. The new season of True Detective: Night County exemplifies this fact, as Jodie Foster’s prickly character buys into the same sexist, racist, violent systems of her male predecessors – the same tired narrative in different trappings. But Darby positions herself against these old systems – her status as a hacker is emblematic of more than just her technical prowess.

In 2020, Brit Marling wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about the shortsightedness of the so-called “Strong Female Lead” trope. Marling argued that these roles simply took the characteristics that made male leads ‘strong’ – ambition, physical fortitude, level-headed rationality – and gave them to women. There was no consideration for how traits typically associated with women might be defined as strong instead. 

As a response to this Strong Female Lead trap, creators run the risk of generating characters who embody these ‘feminine’ traits – empathy, nurturing, and the like – to an almost hyperbolic degree, thus turning women characters back into symbols rather than real people. Darby doesn’t inhabit either of these extremes. She is not soft or particularly warm – she’s a Gen Z hacker with pink hair who thinks she knows everything. Rather than taking a cold psychological approach à la Criminal Minds, Darby hears the bones speaking to her, and she is driven to tell their stories to the world. Her superpower, as it were – don’t these detectives always seem a little superhuman? – is storytelling. She’s a hacker who doubles as a writer, which proves to be a dangerous combination. 

The show’s commentary on gender is not as straightforward as it might appear. It’s not as if Darby intrinsically understands these victims because of their shared womanhood. What’s more relevant is Darby’s status as an outsider. She’s a young woman, she’s queer, and her hacker occupation literally places her outside the prevailing social and governing systems. Emma Corrin’s casting of Darby is significant in this regard. It’s not as if a straight, ‘gender normative’ actor couldn’t have played Darby, but Corrin’s public discussion of their own non-binary gender identity and queerness connects Darby to life off-screen. Darby’s queer orientation, if you will, allows her to see the world from a unique perspective. She’s not interested in making herself palatable to others, but she is determined to be heard.  

If Darby is our dogged detective, then Bill is the show’s heartthrob. Dickinson is irrefutably charming in the role, and we fall in love with him just as easily as Darby does. If you’re willing to make a rather reductive comparison, he’s also the show’s Dead Girl, though he has little in common with someone like Laura Palmer. In addition to gender, the big difference here is that Bill has interiority and depth. He’s hot, to be sure, but he’s not chiefly a flashpoint for lust or a symbol of perilous sexuality. His presence illuminates the fact that you don’t need a sexy, innocent-cum-wild girl to drive a story forward. It’s Bill’s kindness and his moral compass that guides Darby on her hero's quest. 

All detective shows are about power. The power of the killers over their victims, the power of the detectives (and the institutions they represent) to catch the killer. Even as they illustrate the failures and corruptions of these institutions, these series rarely critique the way power functions within such systems. It’s all about digging through the noise and trying to fund justice in an often unjust organization. Because it takes place quite literally out of reach of law enforcement, A Murder at the End of the World can critique these systems of domination without falling back into implicit propaganda. 

Most centrally, the series is a critique of capitalism, which manifests itself as a story about tech. Andy’s innovative use of AI only makes the gap between the haves and the have-nots that much wider; capitalism is his guiding principle. This topic is relevant not just because it’s today’s most pressing technological problem, but because, as Marling puts it, “AI is a force multiplier for capitalism.” The series also touches on the inequalities wrought by climate change, an existential threat that Andy believes he can fix with money and luxurious exile. 

Power is not an easy subject to define, nor is it a singular, immutable force. Responding to feminists’ difficulty delineating how power functions within patriarchy, Amy Allen proposes three different modes of power. There is power-over, which she defines as” the ability of an actor or set of actors to constrain the choices available to another actor or set of actors in a nontrivial way.” It is similar to domination but not synonymous with it. Then there’s power-to, which is “the ability of an individual actor to attain an end or series of ends.” This is roughly synonymous with empowerment, though doesn’t always equate to resistance. Lastly, there’s power-with, which is “the ability of a collectivity to act together for the attainment of a common or shared end or series of ends.” This is not synonymous with solidarity because it can be wielded by groups like the military, but solidarity is an example of this type of power.

Andy clearly wields power-over, using his money and influence to control his guests and the world at large. Darby has little power to speak of, not socially nor institutionally. As a Gen Z queer woman, she’s not taken seriously by the people in charge. Yet she uses her skills and her unique POV to empower herself and spar with the all-powerful Andy. Though she eschews the system of law enforcement, Darby is invited into the belly of the beast of techno-capitalism. This access allows her to uncover the insidious nature of money and power. 

She initially wields power-to to solve the Icelandic murders, though she later teams up with the other guests to iron out the mysteries. In the earlier timeline, she works not only with Bill to solve the serial murders, but with other online sleuths as well, exerting a sort of tech-centric power-with that’s a far cry from Andy’s solo domination. Even as Darby solves these murders, she never lords her power over anyone’s head, not even Andy’s. Darby wants to share what she knows, rather than use the truth as a bargaining chip. She’s a writer, after all. 

This framework of power – heightened by the presence of wealth and condensed by the setting of a locked-room mystery – contributes to the series’ singular perspective and Darby’s view from below. It’s not Darby’s gender or sexuality that gives her the ability to find answers or see crime in a distinctive way. Rather, it's her understanding of systems of domination and her penchant for storytelling that allow her to run up against power personified and come out alive. Indeed, another of the story’s notable elements is the fact that Darby is not ground down by the machinations of the systems she’s fighting against. She is not punished for her disobedience because she was never obedient to begin with.

In other Dead Girl Shows, such as the first season of True Detective, our grizzled male (anti)heroes’ lives are destroyed by the mystery of the Dead Girl, even as they attempt to use her as a form of redemption for their sins. Darby is not a blank canvas on which violence is enacted nor is she a wayward soul in need of atonement. Rather, she is a conduit for truth in a world built on inequality – a necessity of power-over. A Murder at the End of the World offers us, if not a way out, then at least a way forward or around these violent structures of power. If she’s able to survive it all, maybe we can, too.