Summary
Your Friends & Neighbors takes an unusual approach in the Season 2 finale, remaining content to allow very little to happen while nurturing various plot threads for a continuation down the line.
When bad things happen in Your Friends & Neighbors, they tend to happen all at once, often without much warning. But the ending of Season 2 is content for those bad things to barely happen at all. This is not to say that “The Night of the Hunter” is especially positive; on the contrary, worse things are happening than ever, and the only feasible outcome is that they continue to get worse. But we won’t be getting any resolution to those things until Season 3, which the lion’s share of this finale is devoted to setting up. (For what it’s worth, the third and presumably final go-around has already started shooting).
The knock-on effect of this is that “The Night of the Hunter” feels a bit disappointing and low-key on its own terms. There isn’t a great deal to break down since we don’t have very many compelling answers to most of the key dramatic questions. Elena remains oddly underserved, we still don’t know for sure who had Coop kidnapped, and the fragile social dynamics are fraying without quite exploding at the seams. Season 3 is sure to be great, but that doesn’t do much to see Season 2 out with the bang it probably deserves.
Three Can Keep A Secret
After the cliffhanger ending of the penultimate episode, Coop, Barney, and Nick have a decision to make. Ashe seems pretty dead. If the Feds come snooping around, all of them would be persons of interest, at least. They might even be prime suspects. It’s decided, after some back and forth, that the best-case scenario is to clean up the scene and dump the body, which means Coop and Nick take on the majority of the responsibility, since Barney’s recent vasectomy prohibits him from any heavy lifting. To make matters worse, as they’re carrying Ashe’s body through the foyer, Sam walks in.
Sam is horrified, obviously, but for self-serving rather than moral reasons. This is the second man she was romantically involved with who just so happened to end up dead, and now she has become a witness, she has also become complicit. This, and perhaps an innate tendency to do what’s best for her instead of necessarily what’s right, makes it easier for Coop to sell her on the idea of dumping the body where nobody will ever find it. She even tells him about a local property which has a deep hole dug for a pool, with concrete due to be poured in it any day now. If Ashe is buried in there, nobody will ever find him.
It doesn’t get that far, though, since Ashe, who wasn’t dead after all, springs awake in the car and resumes attacking Coop, Barney, and Nick at high speed. In the scuffle, the car plummets into the lake. Ashe never breaks the surface. But even though the others do, they have to swim back down to move him from the back seat to the front, to create the impression of an accident. This is an opportunity for them, but it also binds them together with the cohesive power of a terrible secret. And you know what people say about how hard one of those is for three people to keep.
Two Weeks Later
Ashe’s body isn’t found in the ending of Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2, leaving everyone to speculate on his potential fate. He was, after all, a shady guy. It’s easy to imagine a weapons-trafficking billionaire might disappear for any number of reasons. Nobody is especially concerned, except of course for Nick, who is struggling mightily with the idea of being complicit in a murder.
To add insult to injury, Coop lets Delilah stay with them for a while, though to be fair she isn’t especially bothered. She hated Ashe, and not in the way that teenage girls tend to despise their parents. She knew, intuitively, that he was a bad guy. She’s going to stay with an aunt, which means she’ll also be leaving Hunter, but whether she’ll return in a subsequent season is anyone’s guess. At least they get a nice goodbye. Nobody really expected their relationship to be the show’s most authentic, but here we are.
Sam is also planning on leaving town. As a parting gift to Coop, she gives him Ali’s likeliest address, and he eventually turns up there in the middle of the night. He doesn’t tell her anything, but he does spend the night. He also returns the $600 million he was managing to Ashe’s estate as a goodwill gesture, hoping to wash his hands of any connection to his dirty money. But his altruism doesn’t help Elena, who is still waiting on her share of the money wrapped up in Nick’s gyms, which, thanks to the involvement of Interpol and the FBI, he’s too frightened to touch.
Father’s Day
Most of the ongoing subplots in this season take major turns on Father’s Day, celebrated by a lavish night out at the club. In suburbia, life goes on no matter who disappears, who is cheating on whom, and who is quietly harbouring a killer. But Nick hasn’t settled into life as a criminal. He’s mostly annoyed at Barney for taking financial liberties with his gyms, which leads to a fight between the two that Coop has to try and intervene in. Coop and Barney end up being put through a table, and Grace, knowing that Barney is lying to her, tells him that he can’t go home with her and the kids. Nobody knows quite what’s getting between these three men, but everyone knows that something is amiss.
Father’s Day isn’t going well for Elena, either, since Felix breaks into Nick’s place and starts stealing stuff to repay her debt, punching her in the face for the sake of authenticity but also as a warning that she’s pushing her luck. Even though the items he stole outweighed the cost of the original loan, something tells me Felix isn’t going to be satisfied, which will continue to bind Elena to Coop and Barney. Perhaps, even, her problems will become theirs.
And Coop definitely still has problems. Despite a nice night bowling with his family at the alley his father used to frequent, Coop receives a message from Ashe’s lawyer, DeMille, who hands over the incriminating footage of him stealing from Ashe’s house, as per their arrangement, but also tells him that he’ll be sending the money Coop returned to the estate back to his account. Apparently, it wasn’t just Ashe’s finances that Coop was managing, so he’s still in over his head with some unsavoury types. And DeMille also strongly implies that it was Cricket Birch, not he or Ashe, who arranged for Coop’s kidnapping.
Ironically, it might be Mel who proves to be the biggest wildcard, almost without realising. Since she can’t sell a book on menopause since it’s boring and out of fashion, she, on her publisher’s advice, begins writing a memoir about the scandal surrounding Sam and Coop. To make matters worse, Season 2 of Your Friends & Neighbors ends with someone fishing on the lake where Ashe’s body sank to the bottom. Just in time for the credits, he gets a bite.
