Beneath its contemporary trimmings and 21st-century themes, the most excellent “A Murder at the End of the World” (FX, premiered Tuesday), from Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij (“The OA”), is as conventional as can be — the nth-hundredth variation on an Agatha Christie-style country-house/isolated island mystery, in which the killer, the victim(s) and all the sundry suspects are cooped up in a single location from which no one is able or allowed to leave. Tropes of the genre abound, including a creepy butler, though he exists only as an avatar of artificial intelligence.
The story’s Nancy Drew (the other timeless literary touchstone), with a touch of Thom Yorke, is Darby Hart (Emma Corrin), a 24-year-old hacker and author, whose bleached bob recalls that of genius coder Mackenzie Davis in AMC’s “Halt and Catch Fire.” With her careless style and complicated emotions — she’s kind of shy (except where crime-solving is concerned, when she charges ahead), something of an outsider, a lonely loner — Darby is the model of a manic-depressive pixie dream girl.
It’s not Radiohead coming through her headphones as she makes her way along the streets of a city, but the Doors’ “The End,” which every film-literate person knows is a nod to the opening of “ Apocalypse Now,” and it’s not the last time, watching this seven-episode series, that you might think of a 20th-century film. Darby has come to a bookstore to read aloud her middling-selling true-crime memoir of how she solved a cold case six years earlier, alongside liberally tattooed Bill Farrah (Harris Dickinson), whom she met through an online network of amateur sleuths. “The L.A. Times called her Gen Z Sherlock Holmes,” someone will say. (We get a chuckle out of such references, but it doesn’t affect the review.)
Out of the blue, Darby receives an invitation to join a small group of big thinkers on a retreat held by Andy Ronson (Clive Owen), a tech billionaire in the recognizable modern mode; spaceflight, extraterrestrial colonization and AI, which he prefers to call “alternative intelligence,” are among the pies in which he has his fingers. Soon she is boarding a private plane to Who Knows Where, on which she’ll encounter the first of her fellow conferees: Lu Mei (Joan Chen), who designs “smart cities” in China; director Martin (Jermaine Fowler), who is utilizing AI on a movie; Sian (Alice Braga), who has walked on the moon, because in this fictional world that’s something a person younger than 88 has done; and Ronson’s business associate David (Raúl Esparza).