Moxie on Murder

A Murder at the End of the World grew on me over the course of the season, and by seasons end it had reached “definitely watch” status. Not the highest possible status, “Can It Be Tuesday Already Please?” which is, at the moment, held by Hulu’s new Shōgun series.

I rarely watch credits; sometimes to savor a great season finale, sometimes if there’s interesting music I want to hear out. With episode 6, it was a combination: an intense episode finish, building towards the season finale in episode 7; and an excellent electric guitar instrumental, Beni Said by 75 Dollar Bill, that began playing with the credits. For whatever reason, I was still watching the credits by the time they reached CO-STARRING, 1:51 from the end of the episode. And there, listed first: Moxie Marlinspike.

Moxie’s a legend in tech as creator of the Signal secure messaging app—and more importantly to cryptographers, the Signal Protocol and Double Ratchet Algorithm—and when I saw his name I immediately was looking for “technical advisor” credits. But no, this was actually CO-STARRING. I filed it away and determined to research it.

The following day I did a bit of searching, with little to show for it other than IMDB stating that yes, Moxie had indeed appeared in S1 E6. I refined the query a bit and finally got found a few some 2023 mentions of Moxie technical advising as well.

I use Kagi search, and beyond the core fact that, in stark contrast with Google, Kagi doesn’t suck, I’ve come to value its “Quick Answer” feature, which feeds search results through an LLM and generates an excellent summary with references. Here it is, wrapping up both aspects of Moxie’s contribution to Murder at the End of the World:

So I was right about the technical advisor thing; hacking is a significant part of Murder’s story, and it was accurately presented throughout the series. The only major tech flub I saw was the data center fire scene in episode 7. Maybe Moxie’s advisory contract had run out by then, or maybe they had a mini-GOT-gotta-finish-this-somehow brain cramp. But no need to go there, the final episode was still solid despite painfully stretched credibility in that scene.

I’ve never seen Moxie in person or even on video; maybe in a Wikipedia photo. So I had no clue that was him playing Max in episode 6. But I’m happy I noticed him in the credits and did this research.