[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 1 finale of Death and Other Details, “Chilling.”]
The most important thing to know about the season finale of Death and Other Details is that all the answers are planted, in some way, in the first episode of the Hulu murder mystery. “Technically, you could hit pause and see the ending, if you really, really knew where to do it,” series star Violet Beene tells Consequence. “That was really important to [the writers], to not create some solution to the mystery that didn’t make sense, where the audience would be going, ‘How is that possible?’ They really wanted to provide everything for you in the beginning.”
We’ll go ahead and spoil here one of the biggest clues. Or, rather, we’ll let co-creator Heidi Cole McAdams do it: “If you go back to Episode 1, you can see as Imogene is walking on the pool deck in her yellow bathing suit, and there’s That Derek filming the thing that ends up being the clue — and you can see Hilde Eriksen in the background.”
Hilde Eriksen, as we learn in the two-part season finale, is just one alias for Viktor Sams, the mysterious figure ultimately played by Linda Emond — who’s also revealed to be Imogen’s long-thought-dead mother Kira.
That’s just one of the show’s big secrets, though, amongst many planted by the writers over the course of the ten-episode season. “We told the audience that details matter,” co-creator Mike Weiss says. “And I think because we knew we were going to tell the audience that, we went a bit mad making this show. Hopefully, people delight in all of the many, many details that are strewn throughout the show. There are so many things. We went crazy.”
In a bit, we’ll get into a few of those details. But let’s go back a bit, to the project’s origins. McAdams and Weiss hadn’t written anything together before the two friends and veteran TV writers started kicking around the idea of, in Weiss’s words, “a classical murder mystery, but updated in every way for a 2024 audience.” Thus, they landed on the setting of a glamorous cruise, where a purposeless but brilliant young woman named Imogene Scott (Violet Beene) teams up with Rufus Cotesworth (Mandy Patinkin), the supposed World’s Greatest Detective, to solve an unexpected death that unlocks a whole new world of intrigue.
Updating a story like this for 2024, McAdams says, included leaning on modern technology as a source of clues, but a lot of what makes the series specific to this moment in time “comes down to who Imogene is a character. Rufus is modeled after the classic detectives, and Imogene is, ‘Okay, so what if a woman from today became the next world’s greatest detective?’ It all kind of starts and ends with her.”
In addition, Weiss says there are additional touches they built in which reflect the show’s askew take on the genre’s tropes. “Like, we really love the idea that midway through the season, you get to see Rufus Cosworth wobble, and he lets the audience in on something that he knows that only he could know, which is that there’s no such thing as the world’s greatest detective. And so, in a slightly post-modern way, we’re commenting on the fact that a lot of this is a put-on and an act that he’s playing, rather than that he was just born with these innate skills, like a walking supercomputer. We like the idea of messing with some of those conventions a little bit.”
