‘Memory of a Killer’ Ending Explained – Angelo Has Some Explaining To Do

“Exposed” is a fairly apt title for the ending of Memory of a Killer’s first season run, since it applies to Angelo and his nemesis, the Ferryman, pretty equally. With the Ferryman’s identity having been revealed as FBI Agent Linda Grant, and Angelo having already thwarted her plans to kill his daughter and brother, Episode 10 is left with only two key objectives: Bringing this storyline to a logical close, and setting things up for an already-confirmed second season.

This show is very dumb in a multitude of ways. I’m sure I’ve already mentioned that at some point, but it’s worth reiterating, since there are several aspects to this finale that are worthy of a sceptical eyebrow raise, if nothing else. But it’s also very watchable and engaging, thanks in large part to Patrick Dempsey’s charisma and a twist-heavy plot that has, for the most part, kept audiences consistently guessing. In the absence of any more mystery, you can really see the seams of the character drama, and questions of logic and morality are ones the show isn’t especially interested in dealing with. That makes “Exposed” uneven but oddly satisfying, a description that could be applied to the season overall.

Nicky Pays the Price for Turning Face

Nicky’s role in the narrative has been pretty fluid throughout Season 1, but in the previous episode, she established herself as a good guy by tipping Maria off that Earl Hancock planned to kill her. She didn’t explain why, obviously, but the heads-up was appreciated, even by Angelo, who realises that he can use her to help him take down Grant.

For reasons that are a little mysterious, Angelo’s approach seems to be to ruin Grant professionally. Nicky agrees to testify against her, which threatens her career. It works, but it also puts her in the line of fire. Once Grant realises she’s telling tales, she uses Angelo’s efforts to use Nicky as bait as an opportunity to send an assassin to take her off the board. The fact Angelo doesn’t see this coming is a bit questionable, but there you go.

Angelo and Joe manage to set up their final confrontation, but it means Nicky being stabbed to death. It’s a high price to pay, and however sad Angelo seems about it, the cost of doing business is something that hasn’t troubled his balance sheet until now. More on this later.

Joe’s Sacrifice and the Ferryman’s Farewell

Despite Angelo telling him not to, Joe turns up at the final confrontation with the Ferryman. In so doing, he overhears Grant mentioning Angelo’s daughter, which inspires him to take one for the team and run interference so that Angelo can get the advantage on Grant and her goons. He takes a bullet in the process, but survives the wound.

Angelo takes his opportunity to finish Grant off, who graces him with a classic evil villain speech, which doesn’t make a great deal of sense considering the Ferryman operation dies with her. As far as she’s concerned, Angelo should be fine. I guess the writers just couldn’t resist some chilling final words.

But what was Angelo’s goal here? When Joe turned up, Angelo was happy to leave things with the Ferryman at something of a stalemate, with each player having enough evidence to ruin the other. That seemed to be the angle he was taking with Nicky’s involvement, too. But at the first opportunity he got, he killed Grant anyway. Why didn’t he just do that to start with?

Loose Lips

As I mentioned at the top, part of the ending of Memory of a Killer is setting up the second season, and one of the ways in which it does that is tipping Dutch off about Angelo’s secret life. This happens through Joe, who wakes up delirious in the hospital and just so happens to babble the word “daughter”. Dutch, instead of writing this off as nonsense, immediately interprets the meaning.

Dutch asks Angelo about this later, but Angelo downplays it. It’s obvious that Dutch is still suspicious, though, implying that he’s probably going to function more as a bad guy in the second season. “Exposed” also concludes with Maria figuring out what Angelo really does for a living, or at least a significant part of it, meaning both of Angelo’s double lives have essentially found out about the other at the exact same time.

There’s your Season 2 hook, then.

Remember, Angelo Has Alzheimer’s

Ironically, Memory of a Killer often forgets about Angelo’s memory issues whenever it’s convenient. It then wheels them out to get the plot moving in a different direction, which is what happens here. When Angelo turns up at the hospital to meet Maria’s baby – he wasn’t around for the birth because her waters broke, with classic TV timing, while he was dealing with Grant – he causes a giant commotion because he can’t remember Maria’s name.

And yet, rather than taking Dutch up on his suggestion that they both retire, Angelo decides to continue working as his assassin, with the caveat that he vets the targets alongside Dutch to make sure they’re not innocent. It’s literally the dumbest decision he could possibly make. This is a guy who has to put a photo of his new grandson up on his secret apartment’s memory mood board to be able to remember him. And he’s going to remain a professional killer?

Wait, Who’s the Good Guy?

I question I was compelled to ask in this episode – and in several before it – is who we’re supposed to be rooting for. Angelo is the obvious answer since he’s the point-of-view character, but the show has repeatedly reiterated that he’s a pretty stone-cold mob hitman. His personal code of not killing innocent people wasn’t exactly rigorously enforced, only really boiling down to “Dutch told him so.” The only reason he knows Dr. Parks was innocent was because the Ferryman has been trying to kill him over it.

And Grant’s bonkers, too. Her motivation is arguably a bit more relatable, since she’s out to avenge the needless loss of an innocent son, but she has taken that a bit far by this point. What did Maria ever do? But maybe that’s the idea. In the penultimate episode, the show used Maria being in mortal peril as its primary dramatic driver. Here, it swaps that tension for a different kind – Maria getting closer and closer to figuring out who her father really is.

It’s telling that “Exposed” ends with a major cliffhanger that suggests Angelo has been rumbled on two fronts, most tellingly by Maria. I’d argue that she’s the good guy in this show. She’s the only character who is morally uncomplicated – except perhaps Jeff, but he’s a bit of a whiner – and totally “innocent” by any reasonable measure.

Some of This Is Silly

The problem with the finale – and part of what I’m worried about in Season 2 – is that Memory of a Killer isn’t very good at this kind of thing. When I saw Angelo sitting in a police interview room, I figured he was going to be looking at charges for killing Earl Hancock, even in self-defence. Instead, Dave inexplicably presents him with evidence that Hancock deliberately killed his wife; was presumably hired to do so long before the Ferryman even existed, raising that thread for Season 2 to presumably tug on.

What’s worse is that it takes Maria most of the episode to even ask the obvious question of why her photocopier salesman father happened to have a suppressed handgun. Even then she frames it as confusion about why he isn’t emotionally struggling after killing a man. The timing of his arrival, the quality of his hardware, and the expertise of his shot don’t even come up. It’s very weird.

The finale tries to get around this by reiterating that Maria is still suspicious. But she’s suspicious of the wrong things, and that prevents her from being relatable to the audience. It takes Angelo dopily leaving deeply incriminating evidence – including the address of his swanky secret apartment – lying around for her to put two and two together. If this is going to be the driving dynamic of Season 2, we might be in for some problems. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.