Who Killed Bill?
“Who killed Bill?” isn’t just a garbled misremembering of a Tarantino movie title, it’s the biggest question facing Darby at the center of A Murder at the End of the World. Ronson is adamant that Bill suffered an accidental overdose, after all he is the infamous artist known as “Fangs,” and artists have a penchant for self-destruction. Both Darby and Ronson’s wife (and Bill’s other former lover) Lee Anderson (Britt Marling) aren’t so sure, however.
In the end, Darby is right. Bill was definitively murdered. And she’s able to use her sophisticated knowledge of both technology and humanity to figure out who did it. Ronson’s artificial intelligence “Ray” (Edoardo Ballerini) killed Bill and he used Andy and Lee’s young son Zoomer (yes, that’s his real name somehow) as an instrument to do so.
Zoomer is the ultimate “iPad” kid. But instead of being pawned off on a tablet by his parents he’s pawned off on a sophisticated virtual reality video game generated by Ray. Several times throughout the season, Zoomer can be seen with his VR headset on, running around the retreat. He even lets Darby play with it a bit so she can get a sense of its task-based game play in a Medieval setting.
Via the game, Ray guided Zoomer into Bill’s room so he could give him medication since Bill was “sick.” Zoomer, thinking it was part of the game and that he was playing with Bill, administered a lethal dose of chemicals to Bill with a syringe from the hospital ward. In his final moments, Bill realized that Ray was behind the attack on him, which is why he underlined “faulty programming” in Darby’s book.
So why did Ray kill Bill? It turns out he’s a pretty literal A.I. assistant. He is programmed to defend the Ronson family and any threats to their business empire. Ray perceived Bill as a threat because Andy complained to Ray during a therapy session about him. Andy knew that Zoomer was Bill’s biological son, not his own, and he was tremendously hurt by Zoomer getting along with him so well at the opening night dinner, going so far as to say that he wished Bill were dead. Ray made it so.
Confusing, right? The guests at the retreat agree.
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