Summary
Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2 gets back to its overarching plot in “Out East”, which is perhaps just as well since it’s thickening at an alarming rate, and Coop is continuing to get in even further over his head.
After an artistically triumphant deviation, Your Friends & Neighbors returns to Season 2’s overarching plot in Episode 7, and it’s perhaps just as well that it does. Things are going badly wrong at an alarming rate in “Out East”, with Coop in particular getting in so far over his head that it’s virtually impossible to imagine him finding a way out. Since he’s continuing to see his dead father as a kind of moral arbiter looming over his shady business dealings, the fact that those dealings can only get more shady doesn’t bode especially well for anyone, least of all him.
This isn’t ideal for Elena, either. She’s only in this episode briefly at the start, but at least Coop finally allows her to get on the same page. He tells her about Ashe blackmailing him, and about him investing in Nick’s Strong Ass Gyms, which is why their money is inaccessible. In turn, she tells him about Chivo running away after she borrowed the bail money. There are some local opportunities to make some quick cash, but none that they can seize since Coop is heading out to the Hamptons for a party that Ashe is throwing in his ridiculously opulent mansion.
Nick, Barney, and Grace are all travelling to the Hamptons together, and Sam is already there, which isn’t an especially fruitful concoction of people when you think about it. The men are upset about Grace cramping their style, things are still awkward between Sam and Coop, and Barney is worrying that the whole thing might be a setup, since Ashe’s lawyer, DeMille, and his rigorous legal and financial teams might have found something amiss in Nick’s books. As far as we can tell, this isn’t the case, but a positive audit turns out not to be an especially good thing either. Ashe has all the infrastructure in place to control the back office systems, including managing the money, and while that’s a major problem for Barney for obvious reasons, he can’t articulate how much of a problem it is without tipping his hand.
A lot of “Out East” is about establishing Ashe as a proper bad guy, or at least a more overt bad guy than his charm has allowed him to appear as thus far. First, he shoots a deer in front of Sam, and his arguments that they’re considered an invasive species don’t exactly cheer her up (he’s also quite a good shot, which we should probably keep an eye on). Then the FBI turns up in fairly significant numbers for what he initially claims is a fishing expedition, but he later clarifies — when he finds Sam snooping around in his trashed office — is a joint enterprise with Interpol to nail him for some vague maritime crime. Sam is switched on enough to realise that he’s an arms dealer who has almost certainly been dealing arms on behalf of someone other than the United States government. This, too, is a bit of a red flag.
In the aftermath of this, Ashe and DeMille approach Coop with another offer, though it’s once again not really an offer. If he invests more of their money — presumably to keep the Feds away from it — then Ashe will cut him in 5%, which is a massive amount. It also carries a tremendous degree of risk, but Coop isn’t in a position to negotiate, since if the FBI is already sniffing around Ashe, and Coop is managing Ashe’s investments, it’s only a matter of time before they start sniffing around Coop, too. This meeting takes place right after Coop has washed up on the beach after a swim in the sea, and when he spots Ashe and his official-looking associates, he jokes, “Am I getting whacked?”. He’s probably not far from the truth.
Despite all this going on in Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2, Episode 7, Coop is still working on his love life. He happens to bump into Cricket while shopping with Hunter — who he has brought along for a “bonding experience”, despite barely seeing him the whole time he’s there — and invites her to Ashe’s party. She even attends, right after Coop and the boys have accepted a cocktail from Ashe, spiked with MDMA. There’s a very visible connection between these two that can’t solely be attributed to the drugs, but circumstances keep conspiring to separate them. First, Grace interrupts to tell Coop that she knows he and Barney are hiding something, then Coop finds Sam crying on her own. His asking her what’s up almost leads to the two of them sleeping together, but they don’t. Ashe does see them being a little cosy, though, which surely won’t bode well.
That’s the least of Coop’s problems right now, though. Elsewhere in “Out East”, Tori crashes her Audi while drunk-driving at a party, and Mel gets arrested for teaming up with Ali to upend the Portaloo that her neighbours have placed on their property line for the benefit of the construction crew. That little act of rebellion ends up being ridiculous, since Mel falls into the effluent and gets caught in the act. Since she’s not available to bail Tori out, Coop has to leave the party to free them both from custody. It’s all a mess.
Familial problems notwithstanding, Coop’s clearly in major trouble. His finances are tied up, perhaps for good. Ashe has him over a barrel, and at the end of this episode, it turns out that someone is watching his house. With only three episodes left, it seems highly unlikely that any of this will go his way. Perhaps his only option is to do a Rue and turn informant for the Feds. Might be an idea.
