Summary
Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2 starts to add in a bunch of welcome complications in “We Were Never Supposed to Get This Old”, with Coop on the back foot already.
It’s kind of impressive that Coop managed to keep his side hustle a secret for the entirety of Your Friends & Neighbors’ first season, since it only took him two episodes of Season 2 to get rumbled completely. As predicted, though, Ashe has a bit more going on behind the scenes than cookie-cutter appearances suggest, and his new leverage over Coop allows him an opportunity to flex his financial muscles. For now, if Coop plays ball, it’s convenient for Ashe not to call the authorities. But as Episode 3 makes clear, that doesn’t mean that Coop is in the clear. In fact, he might be getting in deeper than ever.
This is a theme expressed in multiple other ways throughout “We Were Never Supposed to Get This Old”, especially through Barney, but also, in a sense, through Elena, Ali, and even Hunter, too, albeit for very different reasons.
Initially, it seems like Ashe just wants Coop to return the book he stole, which turns out to have been a gift from his late wife, carrying a ton of sentimental value. This process is more difficult than expected, though, since Lu has already sold it to a private collector for double the price. That means that Coop has to not only return the $100,000 she paid him for it, but the additional $100,000 she sold it for.
This is mostly a ruse. After acquiring most of the cash to meet with the buyer, the buyer is revealed to be Ashe. As well as giving Coop the runaround for his own amusement, he also has a business proposition. He’s on the Office of Foreign Assets Control list, which means that some of the clientele of his totally not-legitimate shipping business aren’t exactly on first-name terms with the U.S. government, making his shipments vulnerable to seizure. Ashe is deliberately vague about what the shipments contain, but given the rumour around town is that he’s smuggling arms, it isn’t difficult to imagine.
Where Coop comes in is using his financial expertise and contacts to manage a sizeable hedge fund investment to keep the wolves from the door. Initially, he’s reluctant, since he deems the task to be impossible, but Ashe has him over a barrel, so he eventually agrees and, in typical Coop fashion, finds himself rather enjoying the process.
Meanwhile, Elena has officially received her U.S. citizenship – her surprise party goes much better than Tori’s did – but still needs to move the rest of her family over, which means continuing to work with Coop on his extracurricular activities. For now, he doesn’t tell her about having been caught by Ashe, but he does tell Barney, who is planning to launder the money from the thieving through Nick’s gyms.
Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2, Episode 3 devotes a lot of its runtime to Mel, who is still struggling with various things, not least among them Tori’s decision not to attend Princeton. To reverse her rejection, she gets all dressed up and visits the admissions officer, though we don’t see the conversation – or perhaps more? – that goes on inside. Either way, though, Mel gets what she wants. Which, of course, is not what Tori wants.
Fed up with her mother’s meddling, Tori moves in with Coop and Ali, who has started her new job teaching music at school, though she is struggling to break through to the kids. The only person who things are really looking up for is Hunter, since Ashe’s daughter basically throws herself at him, telling him he needs to “do something about” his girlfriend. He certainly plans to, though Coop isn’t sure that his ingratiating himself with Ashe’s family is necessarily the best idea, given the circumstances.
Still, all of these emerging complications are undeniably pleasing and create a chaotic energy that really suits this show. Things aren’t looking great for Coop, especially given the risk of his enterprise with Ashe, considering he isn’t taking his usual fee. Being blackmailed doesn’t look like much fun, but to be fair, neither is having your prized possessions stolen, so I suppose fair’s fair. Not that fairness is the top of anyone’s agenda at the moment either, but we’ll see how things go.
