Summary
Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2 is right on the cusp of ending, but most of its problems remain unsolved in “Propaganda from the Cowardly”. However, Coop’s efforts to take his destiny into his own hands solve at least one issue, albeit not in the way he expected.
In a broad sense, Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2 has been about Coop losing control. Ever since Ashe found out about Coop’s extracurricular activities, he has had him over a barrel, with nothing to do — or so he thought — but play along. Episode 9, “Propaganda from the Cowardly”, is about Coop taking that control back. Throughout it, he realises that he has a card that’ll make him essentially untouchable, but he has to work up the courage to play it. That means being willing to risk his own neck instead of someone else’s. Naturally, it all goes completely wrong, but for perhaps the first time, his heart was at least in the right place.
You can see why Coop’s back is against the wall. At the end of the previous episode, he was kidnapped, and at the start of this one, he’s still a captive. A masked man shows him a video of him going to see Liv, and tells him that the money stays where it is. The assumption, contrary to a popular theory — espoused even by me — that Coop was going to become an informant for the Feds, is that these are Ashe’s people, making sure Coop continues managing his dough.
But when Coop later confronts Ashe about this, he’s clueless. You can tell he’s sincere, too. But outside of Ashe, who has a vested interest in making sure his money remains untraceably invested? It could be his lawyer, DeMille. It could be someone else. This is one of the lingering mysteries that the show leaves us with heading into the finale. Whoever cares about his money being protected will likely also care about the fact that, by the end of the episode, he’s dead.
The death’s an accident, to be fair. Coop doesn’t decide to kill Ashe to eliminate his own problems. What he decides to do instead, inspired by Lu, is tell Jack where the money came from. This decision gets Liv fired for sitting on the truth and trying to butter Jack up about it, but other than that, Jack is largely unbothered. It turns out his cancer has returned, and he doesn’t have long to live. There are some fights he just doesn’t have time for anymore, so he offers to return the money and handle the fallout internally. The task of plugging the $400,000,000 hole in the Excelsior fund should keep him busy. It’s a nice moment between these two, who have historically always been at odds.
And with that, Coop has, essentially, taken his destiny into his own hands. Lu told him that he was only vulnerable before he made a decision; now that he has, however the chips fall, he can’t be leaned on to go one way or the other. All that remains is the small matter of telling Ashe. He accompanies Barney and Nick for a boys’ night that finds Ashe high as a kite on a cocktail of narcotics, and clearly in the mood to sow some seeds of discord. He mentions, in front of Nick, the money that Barney and Coop were laundering through his gyms. Coop, in response, tells him about his money being returned. Things take a turn.
Ashe, furious and unstable, pulls a gun. A scuffle ensues, which hilariously ends with Ashe’s dressing gown on fire as he jogs down the hallway, taking potshots at Coop, Barney, and Nick as they flee. Out of nowhere, Ashe slips and cracks his skull on his fancy marble floor. Just like that, he’s dead. And the other three are all complicit.
This is technically where Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2, Episode 9 ends, but there are some bits and bobs to go over elsewhere. For one thing, Ali seems to have disappeared. Coop spends some time looking for her, including asking Sam to find out where she might have rented an apartment, so she might turn up in the finale, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Elena also turns up at Coop’s place looking for the proceeds from the sale of the baseball card, which are delayed because it needs to be authenticated. Elena has gotten incredibly short shrift this season, and she’s in a much bigger predicament than her allotted screentime would suggest. Here in “Propaganda from the Cowardly”, her annoyance is mostly just used to shunt Coop along his own arc, but her personal crisis remains unresolved for the time being.
Then there’s Mel. She has an interesting hour, since she’s still smarting from accidentally killing and then very deliberately burying her neighbors’ dog, not to mention the loud ticking of her own biological clock. These two things in combination lead to a few different things happening. The first is that she almost sleeps with Coop at Barney and Grace’s “Baby Sprinkle” — which is the geriatric pregnancy equivalent of a baby shower, I guess — and then she actually sleeps with Miguel, and not in a dream this time. It’s nice for Mel to have gotten over a hump — and she seems to have gotten away with the dog thing — but she still feels a little too superfluous to the overarching plot to me. I still think she and Coop are destined to end up together, though.
Oh, and Barney’s had a vasectomy, which at this point is the least of his problems.
