Memory of a Killer Season 1 Episode 3 Has Angelo Questioning Things While the Bodies Pile Up

Critic’s Rating: 4 / 5.0

4

Angelo’s had his double life sorted for presumably a long time, and for every single aspect of his life to suddenly come crashing down at once has to be overwhelming.

But taking everything into account, it’s striking how well Angelo is handling things on Memory of a Killer Season 1 Episode 3.

He’s still lying, killing, threatening, and doing his thing, of course, but he’s doing it while barely breaking a sweat.

The show employs flashbacks sporadically, but whenever it does, it’s clear they’re important. And considering that both this hour and Memory of a Killer Season 1 Episode 2 began with flashbacks to Angelo killing Robert Parks.

Robert telling Angelo he got it wrong only increases Angelo’s doubt about Dutch, and this entire hour seemed designed to encourage us to question Dutch as well.

Since it’s still early in the season, we’re only just getting to know everyone, piecing together relationship dynamics and uncovering who these people are at their cores.

I’ve been suspicious of Dutch from the beginning, if only because I highly doubt Angelo has fooled him for all these years.

But aside from Angelo and Dutch being longtime friends and Dutch being his superior, we’re still learning about their history together.

Bringing Eddie and McGee into the mix was a little convoluted at the start because not only had we never met these people, but it was not at all clear how everyone was connected.

I was watching the four men in the kitchen, trying to piece everything together, but it didn’t make sense at first because it felt like we’d missed several conversations.

Had we actually met Eddie or McGee, or even heard about them before their appearance, it would have done wonders to help things, but instead, so much time was spent on parsing exposition and trying to figure out who these people were and how they were connected to Angelo and Dutch.

One of those abstract questions surrounding this whole enterprise has been how Dutch receives the names of the people who need to be killed and then gets it to Angelo.

I assumed that they came from various places, with Dutch being some kind of anonymous person on the dark web who gets the details and the money and hands out the assignments.

I hadn’t considered the police ever being involved directly, but it does make sense they’d sometimes need help covering up scenes or planting evidence to keep everything running smoothly under the radar.

It seems that’s where Eddie and McGee came in. But again, everything is blowing up for Angelo at the same time, so of course, some overzealous Internal Affairs cop would piece everything together and leave all four of them scrambling.  

Now, Dutch casually telling Angelo that the cops had been looking into him before was super suspicious, and I started to wonder if Dutch was playing games with Angelo.

There must be a part of Angelo that believes Dutch is a bit naïve for not catching on to Angelo’s other life, and maybe Dutch has hit a point where he’s almost toying with him.

And that would kind of make sense if he were indeed the Ferryman, because the Ferryman certainly wants to see him suffer.

In telling Angelo that he essentially saved him, Dutch once again seemed to be hammering home the point that he’s in charge.

He did it in Memory of a Killer Season 1 Episode 1, and he seems very much hellbent on asserting his superiority over Angelo, even if he does so subtly.

Angelo’s a grown man, and if he were in trouble, you would think his boss and friend would let him know. But instead, he supposedly shut it all down, to what? Make Angelo now feel like he owes him something?

The Angelo and Dutch dynamic is very tricky, and while I don’t trust Dutch at all, they’re almost doing TOO much now to paint him in a bad light and make Angelo question his loyalty.

I’ve watched enough television to know that if someone has a spotlight on them from every corner screaming, “That’s them! That’s the bad guy!” then they probably aren’t the bad guy.

Anyway, the plan to take out Garcia relied heavily on luck, from Joe successfully befriending his wayward son to the precise timing that made it possible to put it into place.

But as we’ve seen, things never go according to plan for Angelo.

Angelo’s a killer, and he doesn’t present as someone who lives in denial about the job that he does.

He didn’t seem super psyched to go after Garcia, but that seemed less about him feeling like Garcia didn’t deserve to die, and more about the larger scope of what it means to kill a cop.

But at the end of the day, Angelo’s going to protect himself, and in turn, his daughter.

So, the agenda to kill Garcia became his priority, and one of the more interesting aspects of these episodes has been seeing how Angelo and Joe figure out how to kill these people.

With Garcia, they couldn’t jump him at his house; instead, they had to find a way to make it look like an accident. The spiked insulin was a very smart play that would most likely have worked had Garcia been home to take it.

I’m learning early on that this is poised to be another one of those shows where you really have to suspend your disbelief, like A LOT of broadcast television shows, and I’m good with that as long as the entertainment value is high.

Joe becoming best friends forever with Garcia’s son, to the point that he got into his house, tracked him down later, got his phone, and got the exact coordinates of Garcia’s location, was A LOT.

But, hey, without all that foolishness, Angelo never makes it to the middle of nowhere and right to a random camper just in time to see the exact moment it’s revealed that McGee is a big ol’ rat.

Once the McGee reveal came, it made much more sense why he was so aggravated during that kitchen meeting. He was clearly overcompensating for his duplicity.

This episode would have been average at best, but it was saved and propelled by the final act, which saw one of the most creative kills I’ve seen in a minute.

With McGee being a snitch, it didn’t really behoove Angelo or Dutch to kill Garcia, since McGee would just run to someone else to run his mouth. But Garcia still needed to be dealt with, and killing McGee and blackmailing Garcia was savage but also genius.

McGee telling Angelo not to trust Dutch right before his death feels like overkill, because there is no way that three episodes into this series, they are so blatantly giving away the big reveal that Dutch is the one trying to ruin Angelo’s life.

I don’t trust Dutch, and it’s pretty obvious that Angelo is starting to feel the same way, but I no longer think he’s the Ferryman.

They’re being way too obvious about painting him with this sinister brush to distract us from something bigger.

But back to the killing, Dutch gambled on Garcia being the kind of man to help his son bury a body as opposed to turning him in because it’s what he would have done.

And Angelo going out to help Garcia shovel the grave was an effective way to again establish his self-awareness.  

He’s a killer, but he’s also a father, and that desperation dripping off Garcia was something he could understand.

Garcia was being set up by Angelo, but he wasn’t taunting him, and instead, the two of them had this sort of odd moment of bonding over the incredibly messy situation that now tied them together forever.

While all this was going on, we were getting cuts to Maria and Dave spending the day together, chit-chatting, shooting guns, and Maria tagging along to a murder scene.

Of course, she had no idea the dead body she was gawking at was the man who tried to kill her and was then subsequently killed by her father!

Maria and Dave are another instance of the show refusing to give us any context.

They seem very content to let us piece things together rather than info-dump, and I will be the first to rage against info-dumps, but sometimes they are necessary.

We have zero reason to be invested in whatever Maria and Dave have going on because we don’t know a single thing about their relationship. They’re giving us drips and drabs about their past, but none of it is wholly intriguing.

Right now, it seems like they may have had a thing in the aftermath of Leah’s death, but she was in college, and he was married.

They now have this light, somewhat flirty tension and are dependent on each other in some way, even though Maria is now married and with child.

I love a messy triangle as much as the next person, and I don’t like Jeff, but this one is dry and uninteresting right now.  

Memory of a Killer wants to drop us right into these stories, and that’s all well and good, but they also can’t expect us to always get it or care when we’re still wrapping our heads around who these people are and why their choices matter.

They’re expecting us to swim by dropping us in the deep end, but unless we get more context, viewers may just walk away instead of swimming along.

Killer Notes

• I figured we’d see Nicky again, but I’m unsure how she’s meant to fit into the story here.

• My heart stopped when it was revealed that Angelo called Maria instead of Dutch after killing McGee. Imagine if he had said anything else!

• Angelo talking his way out of having that newspaper clipping in his pocket was impressive. He’s had a lifetime of talking his way out of things, and it shows.

• Gina Torres was such a brilliant casting choice for Agent Grant because she’s so good opposite anyone, and she has the innate ability to always look like she’s peering into someone’s soul when she talks to them. She was analyzing the crap out of Angelo in that grocery store, and he knew it.

• I must have missed something, because how did Angelo piece together that the bullet apprentice knew who the Ferryman was?

Three episodes are plenty of time to figure out if you’re into a show or not, so what say you, Fanatics?

Are you into Memory of a Killer?

What’s working, and what’s not working as much?

Let me know in the comments below so we can chat!

You can watch Memory of a Killer on Mondays at 9/8c on Fox.