The Company You Keep aired its final episode of season 1 on May 7, 2023. After taking us through so many twists and turns over 10 episodes, the series gave its characters an ending they deserved.
The Company You Keep mainly focuses on Charlie Nicoletti, a con-man, and Emma Hill, an undercover CIA officer as they fall in love while lying about their professional lives. When their worlds finally collide, their relationship is put to the test.
Charlie is part of a crime family that owns a bar as a front. After they steal $10 million from the crime boss Daphne Finch, she tracks them down to ensure that they pay her back.
Emma on the other hand comes from a family of politicians. She chooses a different route by joining the CIA, but she never reveals the truth about her career to her family. Her latest case involves tracking down Daphne.
When Charlie and Emma first meet in a bar, they immediately hit it off and feel a special connection. They spend a full 36 hours together in a hotel and open up about their respective lives, still never revealing their true jobs.
They continue to keep up the lies until one day Emma’s team finds out the truth about Charlie. Their opposing careers cause them to break up. Even still, Charlie agrees to be an asset for the CIA to help them take down Daphne Finch as well as her father, the Irish mobster Patrick Maguire.
The Company You Keep ends with Daphne deciding to collate with the CIA to help them arrest Patrick Maguire while he’s closing a deal with an illegal arms dealer. Their plan succeeds but Charlie and Emma decide to part ways after the whole fiasco is over.
1. How does Emma take down the Maguires?
After the CIA asks Emma to back off from the case, she decides to take matters into her own hands because she doesn’t want to let the Maguires walk free. She takes a few personal days off while she works on the case from Charlie’s apartment.
Daphne decides to help Emma so she can inherit her father’s fortunes after his arrest. In exchange, Daphne agrees not to release any incriminating footage that could destroy Emma’s family reputation.
Charlie joins the team, and so does Mason, Emma’s colleague, after she finds out Emma’s plan. Charlie and Emma pretend to be a couple so that the CIA officers tailing her don’t get suspicious of their actions.
Emma’s plan is to get Patrick Maguire to receive the shipping container of illegal weapons himself and then have the CIA arrest him in the dockyard.
To put this plan into action, Daphne convinces Patrick that his son, Connor, couldn’t be trusted with closing the deal and that’s why Patrick needed to do it himself.
At the same time, Emma meets with another colleague, Vikram, to ask him to keep a squad ready when Patrick arrives at the shipyard.
The plan works out almost perfectly- except for the fact that Patrick tries to escape after the ambush, with Emma held at gunpoint. The officers surrounding the area manage to shoot him dead before he can leave. Charlie also gets shot in the process, though not fatally.
Prior to this, Connor Maguire also dies after Emma shoots him. Patrick had sent Daphne to a location where he claimed the arms deal was happening, but Connor finds her and tries to kill her. Emma gets there in time to save Daphne, but Connor drowns in the ocean after being shot.
Both father and son are declared dead while Daphne comes out on top in the end.
2. Do the Nicolettis sell the bar to Frankie?
Frankie Musso, Fran Nicoletti’s ex-fiancé, visits Collar Bar to make a deal with the Nicolettis. He offers to pay them $4.5 million if they sell the bar. Since they are struggling with their finances and Leo Nicoletti’s medical treatments, they consider taking up the offer.
Charlie and his sister Birdie aren’t too pleased with the idea because they aren’t ready to give up the place just yet. But they soon understand that it might actually be beneficial for them.
Before Leo and Fran can finalise the deal with Frankie, Ollie, Birdie’s daughter, finds a pamphlet in Frankie’s bag with plans to raze all the buildings in the nearby area and create skyscrapers in their places.
This upsets the Nicolettis, but instead of confronting Frankie about it, they decide to take a different approach. They accept the offer anyway but make arrangements for something worse.
When the New York investors come to check out the area, Fran suggests that they go to a restaurant by the docks to celebrate. Right at that time, the police start firing their guns at Patrick Maguire and his associates, on the other side of the docks.
The investors get the idea that this area isn’t the safest place to invest in and so they back out from Frankie’s project. Finally, the Nicoletti’s get to keep their bar as well as a $450K escrow deposit.
3. What happens to David and Jennifer?
After David and Jennifer make a narrow escape from the bomb blast, they are both rushed to the hospital. David sustains minor injuries, but Jennifer is in critical condition.
It is later revealed that the bomb was meant for Emma, and it was set up by Connor on orders from his father to threaten her.
David almost gives up his candidature because he doesn’t feel like he’s cut out for politics. But when Jennifer wakes up from her coma, she convinces him to keep going, especially now that he’s so close to winning.
David then calls a press conference outside the hospital where he announces that he will take his job as Senator seriously and not make any false promises to his voters.
Just as we thought David was getting a happy ending, Jennifer gets a call from her mother to whom she starts speaking in Russian. It seems like she’s part of the Russian syndicate and her convincing David to run for Senator was actually a part of some elaborate plan.
It’s not clear what Jennifer’s intentions are but they certainly aren’t looking good.
4. Why don’t Charlie and Emma end up together?
Charlie and Emma had a rocky relationship throughout the course of the season. They kept huge secrets but still found solace in each other because they both opened up about their lives in ways they hadn’t done before.
However, at the end of the day, the major obstacle in their relationship was always their contradicting professions. Even though Charlie agreed to be an asset for the CIA, and Emma bent the rules a few times here and there, it wasn’t enough to keep them together.
Towards the end of the finale, both Charlie and Emma admit that they still love each other. Unfortunately, their love wouldn’t be enough to continue a relationship because their lives were just too different and neither of them would be able to change for the other.
So, they decide to go their separate ways but agree to still meet up for a drink once in a while.
Since Charlie and Emma are the main couple of the show and their feelings for each other haven’t disappeared yet, they’re most likely going to get back together in a potential season 2.
5. Does Emma leave the CIA?
Since Emma defies the direct orders of her superiors, her boss gives her an earful for interfering with what was supposed to be a more intricate operation, one involving the Maguires not being thrown into prison.
Emma figures out that there is something illegal going on between the higher officials and Patrick Maguire. She realizes that the CIA would rather protect a criminal than their own officer, so she quits the agency in retaliation.
Later, Emma finds out that Dalton Bridges, a higher official in the CIA, was using Patrick to get himself a seat in the Board.
Now that Emma knows about Bridges’ deal, she decides to form a team of her own to expose all the corrupt spies in the CIA. She recruits her former colleagues, Mason and Cas, and they agree to do their work off the books.
Even Charlie agrees to help Emma discreetly. In the last scene at the bar, we see him slide a pen drive to Emma, containing information on the money launderer who was seen photographed with Bridges.
If The Company You Keep is renewed for a second season, we could see Emma make Dalton Bridges her next target.
6. About The Company You Keep
The Company You Keep is an American drama television series created by Julia Cohen that premiered on ABC on February 19, 2023. The series is based on the South Korean television series My Fellow Citizens!
The show stars Milo Ventimiglia and Catherine Haena Kim in the lead. Other members of the cast include Sarah Wayne Callies, Polly Draper, William Fichtner, Tim Chiou and Felish Terrell.
It tells the story of con man Charlie, who is in debt to crime boss Daphne Finch alongside his family. With undercover CIA officer Emma attempting to track Daphne down, a night of passion ignites love between Charlie and Emma, who are on a collision course professionally.
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