“Memory is a motherfucker,” detective Rufus Cotesworth (Mandy Patinkin) declares in Hulu’s Death and Other Details. Humans, he means, are prone to accidental forgetfulness, self-indulgence, and, on occasion, trauma-driven memory loss. How, then, will Rufus, the so-called “World’s Greatest Detective,” crack a case that relies on both his own and witnesses’ memories over the last 20 years?
The inciting incident is the murder of entitled richling Keith Trubitsky (Michael Gladis) aboard a luxury ocean liner, establishing an Agatha Christie-style closed circle of suspects, as the killer must be on the ship. Trubitsky, it turns out, was invited as a friend of the Colliers, whose family business is on the brink of financial ruin. They chartered the boat as a last-ditch attempt to schmooze potential investors, the Chun family, who’ve hired Rufus to do due diligence.
Rufus has his own agenda: to finally solve the 20-year-old murder case of the Colliers’ former assistant. And he quickly realizes, with the help of the victim’s daughter, Imogene (Violett Beane), that the two murders are linked by one name: Viktor Sams.
Death and Other Details is tightly plotted, with dexterous pacing and sustained tension throughout the eight episodes made available to press for review. As the central detective duo, Rufus and Imogene bounce off one another with whip-snap dialogue, and Viktor Sams, whose identity remains unknown, keeps them—and us—braced for his next move.
While its setting invites obvious comparison to Death on the Nile, Death and Other Details is fiercely contemporary. The series repeatedly acknowledges the technological surveillance of our modern age, as represented through both the mysteriously omnipresent Viktor Sams and the rising young TikToker “That Derek” (Sincere Wilbert). Similarly, the series alludes to contemporary human rights issues, one of which sends Imogene and Sunil (Rahul Kohli), the owner of the ship, on a detour to Malta—the catalyst, incidentally, of a romantic subplot.
The show’s exploration of memory also gives the proceedings a meta quality. How, it asks, are the stories we tell skewed by the limitations and subjectivities of our minds? The theme of memory is treated most ambitiously in “Chapter Seven: Memorable,” in which Imogene literally walks through Rufus’s memories of her mother’s case, trying to find what he missed. Though at times jarring, this heavily stylized approach is effective in illustrating Imogene’s innermost thoughts as she stands at the precipice of an investigate breakthrough.
While the premise of Death and Other Details may seem derivative, the series is much more than a simple imitation. It’s a keenly modern, thoughtful meditation on the simultaneously distortive and revelatory nature of the human memory.
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