Murder At The End Of The World’s Deaths Explained: How & Why Each Victim Was Killed

Warning! This article contains spoilers for A Murder At The End Of The World.

As surprising as it may seem, the three deaths in A Murder at the End of the World‘s central retreat are not exactly interconnected. Created by Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling of The OA fame, A Murder at the End of the World unfolds like a typical murder mystery thriller, where one primary character gets killed in the opening episode and one sleuth character sets out to solve the mystery. In A Murder at the End of the World‘s storyline, the first character who meets his doom is Bill. While the central sleuth character, Darby, struggles to figure out who might have killed him, another guest, Rohan, dies from a heart attack.

Darby gets closer to solving the overarching murder mystery with each episode, but it is not long before she watches another guest, Sian, die. Chaos ensues when everyone seems equally suspicious but no concrete evidence points in anyone’s direction. However, in A Murder at the End of the World‘s ending moments, Darby finally connects the dots and deduces the reason behind each character’s death and the identity of the central killer at the retreat.

Bill

Ray Killed Bill Through Zoomer

When Darby and Lee check the doorbell security camera footage of Bill’s door, they notice that he had opened his door for someone on the night of his murder, but no one was there in his doorway. They see the light from his room cast on the opposite wall, confirming that he had opened his door. However, since the camera shows no one standing at the door, they assume the killer must have edited themselves out of the security footage. In A Murder at the End of the World‘s episode 6, Oliver, Lee, and Darby notice that Bill had highlighted some words from his copy of Darby’s book before dying: “The killer was the outcome of faulty programming.”

In A Murder at the End of the World‘s finale, Bill’s words make sense to Darby after she takes one look at Zoomer’s Augmented Reality helmet. She wears the helmet and sees Ray inviting Zoomer to play a game with him. This leads her to suspect that Ray might have killed Bill through Zoomer. When she asks Zoomer whether he visited Bill’s room after the retreat’s opening dinner, Zoomer confirms that he did. As Darby asks him more questions about the night, Zoomer also confesses that he gave Bill a morphine shot because he thought he was playing doctor with Ray and believed Bill was sick.

After learning that Ray “programmed” Zoomer to kill Bill, Darby wonders why Ray would do such a thing. That is when she recalls how she confided in Ray when she felt lonely, making her wonder if Andy must have done the same. Although Andy refuses to reveal his private conversations and therapy sessions with Ray, Darby uses a deepfake app to emulate Andy’s voice and orders Ray to recite his conversations with Andy from the retreat’s opening night. The chat discloses how Andy felt infuriated by Bill’s presence because he was envious that he was Zoomer’s biological father.

Out of frustration, Andy called Bill a threat to his company’s future, claiming that if something ever happened to him, Bill would destroy everything he had created for himself and his family. An early scene from A Murder at the End of the World disclosed how Ray does not understand metaphors, which confirms that he took Andy’s claims of Bill being a threat at face value. Believing that Bill was a genuine threat to Andy’s safety, he formulated a plan to kill him. Because of his lack of physical form, he used a young, impressionable child to execute his plan.

Rohan

Ray Killed Rohan Through Zoomer

Before his death, Rohan tells Darby on the phone that Bill had uncovered a secret on the night of his murder, which likely got him killed. While A Murder at the End of the World does not reveal what this secret was, Bill had likely figured out that Zoomer was his son. Rohan, on the other hand, had realized Zoomer had killed Bill after being controlled by Ray. Therefore, before Rohan could expose the truth to everyone else, Ray took him out by asking Zoomer to plug in his pacemaker’s receiver. Once that was done, Ray used his abundance of programming knowledge to hack Rohan’s pacemaker and give him a cardiac arrest.

Sian

Lu Mei Accidentally Got Sian Killed By Ray

Since Sian was the third person to die at Andy Ronson’s retreat in A Murder at the End of the World, it was hard not to wonder whether she, too, had been murdered by the same person who killed Rohan and Bill. However, several details from the early episodes contradict this idea. For instance, Sian was always at Andy’s side. Although she was unaware of how Andy treated his family, she was not actively planning anything against him. No details in the early episodes suggested that she was a part of Rohan and Bill’s plan for the retreat. This nearly killed the possibility of her being the killer’s next target.

An early theory also suggested that the killer was targeting Darby, but he accidentally ended up murdering Sian. According to this theory, Darby was supposed to wear the malfunctioning helmet. However, Sian eventually wore it, and Andy had to do a tracheotomy to save her. While the tracheotomy saved her from suffocating to death, she later caught an infection because the procedure was not performed in a sterile environment. A few hours after the procedure, she died from the infection. As convincing as the Darby helmet theory may seem, A Murder at the End of the World‘s finale reveals that Sian’s demise had nothing to do with Bill and Rohan’s murders.

In A Murder at the End of the World‘s episode 6, Andy permits Darby to interrogate his guests. When Darby starts questioning Lu Mei about the murders, Lu Mei cracks under pressure and confesses that she hacked the hotel security’s firewall to get in touch with her security team. She explains how she feared for her own life after Bill and Rohan got murdered. Therefore, she wanted her team to get her out of the retreat. In A Murder at the End of the World‘s episode 7, Darby deduces that hacking the hotel’s security system caused Ray to temporarily shut down all technology connected to the hotel’s central network. Owing to this, Sian’s helmet stopped working in A Murder at the End of the World episode 5, which ultimately led to the events of her death.