‘Memory of a Killer’ Episode 1 Recap – A Functional Pilot Shows Promise

You might have a memory of Memory of a Killer, a Belgian novel that became a Belgian movie and was remade with Liam Neeson in 2022 under the simpler title Memory. If you don’t, Episode 1 will give you a familiar feeling either way. This pilot employs a few tried and true tricks of the trade to generate interest, including casting Grey’s Anatomy’s Patrick Dempsey out of character as a suave mob hitman who is juggling a double life.

But that isn’t the hook. The hook is that Angelo Flannery’s two distinct lives – a murderous bachelor for the mob and a loving photocopier salesman father to his pregnant daughter, Maria – are about to intertwine for a very particular reason. Angelo begins to exhibit signs of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, which runs in the family, since Angelo’s largely non-verbal brother suffers from the disease and is in a long-term care facility. That doesn’t prevent Angelo from using him as a sounding board as the only person who knows about his double life, though, which doesn’t strike me as an especially good idea.

This pilot, then, is all about establishing these simple particulars, and it does a very good job of that. One of the key things to communicate here is just how distinct the separation between Angelo’s personal and professional lives is, and Dempsey does a good job of selling that. When he’s interacting with his boss and long-time friend Dutch, he’s a very different person from the persona he adopts around Maria and her largely useless boyfriend, Jeff. It’s subtle, but it’s very much there, though increasingly these lines begin to blur.

At first, it’s circumstantial. One of Angelo’s recent victims turns out to be the brother of another mob boss, Carl Mosher, and Angelo begins to believe that Mosher is seeking the kind of revenge that wouldn’t be contained to Angelo himself. This sense of paranoia is compounded when we learn quite late in the episode that the man who killed Angelo’s wife has been released from prison much earlier than expected. That’s a double threat, and enough for Angelo to be worrying about at the best of times. It’s only made more complicated by his worsening forgetfulness and confusion.

You’d think that the easy solution to this would be for the hitman to start killing everyone, or at least Mosher, but Memory of a Killer Episode 1 does a respectable job of explaining why this can’t happen through Angelo’s relationship with Dutch. Angelo has a point that killing a crime boss’s brother is probably something he should have been told about ahead of time, but Dutch won’t allow for any retaliation, and he’s extremely clear – and explicitly threatening – about it. Long-time pals or no, Dutch isn’t the warm and cuddly type. In the mob world, even Angelo’s allies are only his allies circumstantially. But sometimes self-preservation takes priority, so Angelo batters Mosher to death with a baseball bat.

This seems to come back on him pretty much immediately, since the pilot ends with Angelo joining Maria and Jeff for lunch, but the former becomes the target of a sniper. Angelo manages to get her out of the way and rushes out into the street to try and catch the would-be assassin, but he has already fled. It’s kind of surprising he had an escape plan, given he was stupid enough to use a very obvious laser sight on a scoped weapon during a secretive assassination attempt.

This would be bad news at the best of times, but Angelo’s Alzheimer’s symptoms are definitely worsening. It’s fairly subtle for now; he has to hesitate a little to recall his apartment’s security code, and the morning after a tryst with a bartender named Nicky, she leaves the apartment with considerable haste after looking in the fridge for a bottle of water and discovering a handgun that Angelo left in there by mistake.

I currently have a relative in the deeper stages of Alzheimer’s, so I’ll be interested to see how the show portrays the disease going forward. It does seem like effort is being made to maintain realism, and apparently, there was a neurologist on set as a consultant. It’s a complicated topic that has often been prone to lazy, cliched on-screen portrayals – see, for instance, His & Hers over on Netflix – so this could very well be the thing that makes or breaks Memory of a Killer. Time will tell.

In the meantime, though, things are off to a pretty good start.