Memory of a Killer Season 1 Episode 5 Explores Love, Loyalty, and the Cost of Secrets

Critic’s Rating: 4.2 / 5.0

4.2

If you’ve wanted to learn more about Angelo, this was the hour for you.

The mysterious hitman has been juggling two lives that are quickly melting together in a way he’s never experienced before, and considering we’re meeting this man right as it’s all going to hell, there are so many things we don’t know.

Memory of a Killer Season 1 Episode 5 did its best to fill in some blanks and, in the process, delivered its most significant and captivating hour yet.

We’ve known from the beginning of Memory of a Killer Season 1 that Angelo has kept his two lives completely separate, with Dutch seemingly unaware he had a family and Maria unaware of Dutch or her father’s real line of work.

But it was never totally clear where Michael fit into things. Or, for that matter, what Leah knew while she was alive.

This hour took us back to a time when life was good for Angelo, and he decided he wanted to leave New York and start the rest of his life blissfully in nature with Leah, whom we got to meet in more depth and who seemed absolutely lovely.

Angelo had reached a point where he wanted something more for his life, recognizing that he’d be unable to be a career hitman for the rest of his life. His desire for a safer, happier existence drove him to consider leaving the profession for good.

For starters, he was getting older, and he was tempting fate every time he set out on a new job. His time could be up at any moment.

Through early conversations with both Leah and Michael, one of my biggest questions was answered: neither of them knew about the other.

Can we just take a moment to recognize how wild that is?

Angelo and Leah were married for a long time, with an adult daughter, and not only did she not know that he was a hitman, which can be explained away by years of secrecy and lies, but also not knowing he had a brother?

Knowing how close Angelo and Michael are, it’s insane to think that Angelo never slipped up over the years with Leah and dropped a funny childhood anecdote. And why did he never tell Michael about his family?

I can understand why he would never tell Dutch anything because Dutch has no loyalties to anyone, as we would come to see during this hour. But Angelo clearly chose to keep his own brother at arm’s length because he couldn’t risk the two worlds ever mixing.

It’s pretty sad when you think about it — even if Angelo seemed to have a very happy existence with Leah and Maria for many years. But keeping so many secrets and continuously lying had to be extremely difficult to navigate, especially knowing that one false step could bring everything crashing down.

Angelo knew that cutting ties with Dutch wasn’t going to be easy, but he was also steadfast in it, motivated by the belief that escaping Dutch’s grip was the only way to secure a peaceful life, even if it meant he had to kill JB.

If watching The Godfather trilogy fifty thousand times has taught me anything, it’s that a man ordering the death of his own brother doesn’t shock me.

We’re still learning about Dutch — what kind of man he is, what makes him tick, and where his loyalties lie. And I think we can all confidently say now that his interests lie solely with himself, and he has loyalties to absolutely no one.

When Angelo was tasked with taking out JB, he pushed back for a hot minute, then accepted his fate, only to soon realize that the real thief in the organization was Michael.

It was gutting to see Angelo walk into Michael’s office and start piecing together what was going on with his brother. He quickly realized that protecting Michael would require difficult choices as he understood what was likely to come next.

Angelo’s not a very emotional person in general; he’s more clinical and desensitized. He rarely loses his cool or gets too high or too low, and even in finding out that his brother likely had Alzheimer’s, he wasn’t thinking the worst but instead figuring out how to get them both out of Dutch’s grasp in the safest way possible.

Michael seemed like a somewhat lonely guy, and I couldn’t help but wonder what life for both him and Angelo would have been like if a series of different choices had been made over the years.

But there was also a lot of unspoken animosity, at least on Michael’s side, and discovering that Angelo killed their father as a means of protecting Michael was something that clearly stuck with him.

His decision not to go along with Angelo’s plan of coming clean to Leah and then riding off into the sunset felt like him taking the opportunity to protect his brother, in the ways he believed his brother had been protecting him his whole life.

Memory of a Killer is a broadcast crime drama that’s not reinventing the wheel, but this hour was a fascinating look at grief, betrayal, and family dynamics.

Angelo didn’t even have the time to absorb Michael’s diagnosis because he had to set a plan into motion that would end with someone else’s brother being killed instead of his own.

And he’s lucky that someone was Dutch, who had absolutely zero compassion or care to give his brother a second chance or truly any chance to prove his allegiance to him.

The concept of Dutch genuinely asking Angelo to kill Michael after he revealed he was sick was, again, not surprising, but very sick and twisted. And he was so deadly serious about it as well.

All roads were leading to Angelo not going to Montana, as we already knew, but finding out how everything went down was both illuminating and incredibly sad.

Poor Leah. Our time with her thus far has been brief, but she truly seemed like such a vivacious, kind, and spirited woman who loved Angelo fiercely. And to know that before her death, the two of them were probably not on the best of terms adds a lot of context to the Angelo we’re seeing now.

It was hard for me to fathom Leah not having some suspicions about her husband, so I’m glad she admitted as much when he pulled the rug out from under her.

She may not have known he was a killer, but I’m sure there had been times when Angelo wasn’t where he said he’d be, or he missed a detail every now and again that gave Leah pause.

Angelo’s good, but he’s not that good.

Maria may have been too preoccupied in her own life to pay too much attention to her parents, but I’d venture that Leah knew much more than she ever let on, and she loved her husband too much, and knew he loved her, to ever rock the boat.

But imagine if she ever had? What would Angelo have done?

We may never know the answer to that, unfortunately.

One thing we’ve always known is that Angelo and Dutch are stone cold, and this hour proved yet again that these two will do anything to protect what’s theirs.

On the outskirts of all of this was Joe, and I’m glad this hour also gave him some agency as well as a backstory to better understand how he’s come to the position within the organization and also why he’s seemed so hellbent on earning Angelo’s respect.

Seeing how JB’s murder went down, Angelo doesn’t fully believe in Joe because the only reason Joe earned Dutch’s respect was because of a lie Angelo created and spoon-fed to Joe.

That, coupled with some screwups, hasn’t left Angelo feeling like he needs to befriend or put his faith in Joe, though there has been a bit of thawing out between them as Joe continues to prove himself in various life-or-death situations.

And that frosty relationship may need even further thawing on Joe’s end after that slip-up in the car.

Angelo didn’t actually admit to anything outside of killing his father, but I wonder how much the admission will affect Joe. Typically, Angelo is able to talk himself out of anything, but Joe already looks at Angelo sideways most of the time, so this may pique his interest enough to actually do some digging.

Or more like some remembering of his own.

As we creep closer to the end of the season, one would think that some truths are going to start to see the light of day, and they will probably be the biggest truths that Angelo has fought to keep hidden.

This hour made it painfully clear that many of Angelo’s actions have been driven by love, however misguided or destructive they may be.

His motivation has consistently been to protect those he cares for, but keeping secrets in the name of love doesn’t make them noble; it just means the fallout will be all the more devastating.

For years and years, Angelo has operated under the belief that he’s keeping the people he loves safe and protected, but he’s really been building a house of cards that was always destined to collapse.

Now we’re slowly but surely reaching that collapse, and it’s not a question of if everything will all fall down, but just how much will be left standing when it does.

Killer Notes

• I complain about Dave and Maria, but I kind of missed them this week.

• Dutch is truly diabolical. Ordering your own brother’s murder and then hosting his funeral is CRAZY work.

• Does anyone else get the feeling we are severely underestimating Joe and what he’s capable of?

This episode delivered exactly what was needed as we move into the season’s second half.

Let me know in the comments if you enjoyed the flashback hour, and where you think things may go from here.

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