I'll admit this, I've only read the graphic novel, and I love it, but I hate that being the ending, even though i know it makes the most sense. Here's why: If the narrator killed them, there's no motive. It's a random act of violence, and there's no way to sympathize or understand that. And it makes Raguel almost completely impossible to figure out. He just gave a free pass to a madman, why would he do that? That's why, even though it seems like denial, I resist reading the ending that way. As for the elevator, it's almost like he was dying, wasn't it?
Out of rebellion against God for his part in the whole mystery in the City of Angels, perhaps, or because love was involved (or had been, at one point), though the entire conversation between Raguel and the narrator at the end is fairly cryptic. Raguel says that he's still doing his job as he sees it, and that he didn't fall with the others. And the elevator scene seemed like that to me as well, which is the main thing I have trouble figuring out about the whole story.
Actually, I think he meant that there was no Fall—if God made Lucifer rebel, than all the demons are really still angels. They just don't know it yet.
To me, at least, what Raguel did was fairly obvious. He destroyed a murderer, after all that is his function. He just did it by burning his memories, not his body.
In all the time the narrator is speaking, does he ever sound like a madman? Is the motive for what he so obviously did ever apparent? No, he comes off almost as confused by the whole thing as we are, even as it seems like something keeps trying to tell him exactly what he did.
Maybe Tink rejected him, like in the angel's story, but no one will ever know. Whatever brought him to that murder is gone, burned away by the angel's kiss, giving to him the peace Raguel probably wishes he'd taken when offered. All that's left is a shell, a body that killed three people with a mind that cant even conceive the idea, let alone do it.
Whether that is appropriate vengeance (or justice) is left as an exercise for the reader.
I have the audio play on CD and I've listened to it more times than I can count. I love Michael Emerson's voice. So what does everyone think happened in the end? It seems fairly clear that the narrator killed Tink, her daughter and her roommate and that Raguel's "gift" helped him forget it had happened, but what was Raguel's motivation? And the one thing I've never quite been able to pin down: what happened in the elevator?
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