Diksha Sundriyal
Apple TV+’s ‘Your Friends and Neighbors’ takes Andrew “Coop” Cooper on a tumultuous journey where he loses everything he has ever loved in quick succession. Things come to a head when he is arrested for the murder of Paul Levitt. With the evidence stacked against him, Cooper is advised by his lawyer to take a plea deal, which means he won’t have to spend more than 6-8 years in prison, which looks quite good in comparison to the 25 to life that he would receive if he were found guilty at the end of the trial. At the same time, the 6-8 years is unbearable to Cooper because he is innocent. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Coop Almost Gives Up on His Freedom
At first, Coop is steadfast about taking the case to trial because he is innocent and must fight for it. But when he actually looks at the evidence and sees that his innocence doesn’t matter if it cannot be proved in court, he realizes that taking the plea deal might be the best option for him. To ensure his family’s financial freedom, he shifts his assets into Mel’s name and ensures that, should the law come for him, everything that should go to his children remains untouched. He even tells Kat to set up a meeting with the prosecution so they can negotiate the deal. However, when Mel finds out about it, she confronts Coop and encourages him to fight rather than give up so easily. So, he decides to go with that.
While sharing his thoughts with Kat, he looks at the evidence in front of them and notes that while he and Sam had many calls and messages during their affair, her call records don’t show him at all. This means that she has another phone, which she kept a secret from Paul and did not reveal to the cops either. When he and Kat take this to the cops, they mention that without the actual physical phone, they cannot do anything. Kat quickly declares it a dead end, but this is the only way for Coop to prove his innocence, so he goes all in.
He knows that he needs to break into Sam’s house again to find the phone, and for that, he reaches out to Elena. Because Sam’s maid is on a break, Elena offers her services, and with Sam out of the house for a couple of hours, they have enough time to look around for the phone. While they don’t find the phone, Elena does find a secret compartment in one of the drawers where she discovers a note from Paul, which confirms that he died by suicide, and Sam hid this from everyone, letting the cops blame Coop and send him away to prison for life.
Why doesn’t Coop Go Back to His Old Job?
The evidence found in Sam’s house clears Coop’s name, but that is not the only good news of the day. He gets a call from his old employers, Bailey Russell. It seems that since his firing, the company has struggled to keep its clients around. These are the accounts that Coop used to handle, and without him, the clients don’t seem to have much faith in the company. Now that they are falling apart, they want Coop to bring the clients back. This gives him an upper hand in the negotiations where he asks for a bigger share of the profits, considering that his value to the company has been revealed. Not surprisingly, they agree to his demands, which only goes to show how desperate they are to get him back.
Because they need to mend things as quickly as possible, they ask Coop to fly to Switzerland that night to secure one of their biggest accounts. Coop reveals that he has something to do that night, but they are not too keen on his excuses. At the moment, the deal seems too good to pass, especially considering the financial bind that he is in. It seems that he will take the job back, but when the time comes, he does not show up at the airport, confirming that he is not going back to Bailey Russell. Moreover, because his former boss is flying to Switzerland that night, Coop knows that his house will be empty, so he sneaks in and steals a painting that is sure to fetch a good price on the market. One would think that Coop would wise up and stop the robberies after such a close brush with the law. However, he seems to have developed a knack for it.
He steals from his boss’ house as an act of revenge. While they may have called him back, it doesn’t erase the fact that they completely derailed his life, which threw him into a destructive spiral. He cannot forget how his boss blacklisted him such that he couldn’t get a decent job anywhere else, and how he took away all of Coop’s money. Now that they need him, they want him to come running to them. If he were desperate enough, he would have accepted the offer, but he also realizes that going back to the job means going back to the way things were: to not seeing his family as much as he would like to, to drown in work such that he had no personal life left. And that’s not what he wants anymore. Moreover, he is too invested in the thievery now, and this is the career that he cannot let go of. So, he gives up on his past life and looks forward to the future, as criminal as it might be.
Do Coop and Mel Get Back Together?
One of the first things that Coop lost was his marriage. His work and other endeavours took him so far away from his family that one day, he returned home to find his wife in bed with one of his best friends. However, after getting fired and finding new avenues of making money, Coop also finds a way to reconnect with his kids and his wife. Now, he is on much better terms with them than he was years ago, and with all that happens between him and Mel, it is clear that they are still in love.
Mel had already been struggling with her relationship with Nick for a while before her feelings for Coop started to resurface, and she slept with him while on the trip to Princeton. She reveals this during a public argument with Sam, putting an end to her and Nick’s relationship. She tries to reach out to him to apologise, and eventually, he comes around. However, he also confesses that he should have seen it coming because he always knew Mel was in love with Coop. While Mel acts like she doesn’t know what he is talking about, she still has feelings for her ex-husband, which are reciprocated.
At an annual fundraising gala, when Mel and Coop reunite on the dance floor, she reveals that even though she is broken up with Nick, she will take some time off for herself. She does not want to be in a relationship at the moment and believes that she should explore her singlehood for a while. Coop makes a similar claim, especially after how badly things turned out between him and Sam. However, it seems to be a matter of time before the duo is back together. When we see them again, there is a good chance that they will try to figure out whether they still fit together. However, the fact that Coop has decided to continue with his criminal endeavours means it is inevitable for his secret to come out and sabotage the relationship with Mel all over again.
What Happens to Sam? Does She Go to Prison?
One of the major mysteries of this season has been the death of Paul Levitt. When Coop finds him dead in Sam’s house in a pool of blood, he doesn’t have much time to think about what may have happened to the guy and who put the bullets in him. The cops also come to the same conclusion, and that almost has him pinned for the murder. But then, he turns his attention to Sam, believing that she is hiding something, or at least, that she is hiding the secret phone she used to talk to him. While he doesn’t find the phone, he does find the suicide note, which proves that Paul killed himself.
It turns out that the night of his death, Paul called Sam, as he had been trying to win her back. He was on FaceTime with his ex-wife when he shot himself. In a normal situation, she would have called 911, but she realised that his death being ruled a suicide would mean that she wouldn’t get the millions of dollars in insurance money which she desperately needed because her ex had not been as good with finances as she believed. The insurance money is the only thing she has to secure her children’s future, so she flies back home in the middle of the night, shoots two more bullets in Paul’s already dead body, and makes it seem like murder. Sam didn’t intend for anyone to get framed for it. She just thought that the case being a murder would allow her to claim the insurance money.
But then, Coop was arrested for the crime, and she decided to let things unfold on their own because her children were more important to her than Coop. But when the suicide note is found, the whole truth comes out. Coop is let go, and she is arrested, but there is nothing that the cops can charge her with. The note proves that Paul killed himself, and because Sam hadn’t yet claimed the insurance money, she couldn’t be charged with fraud. Her only crime was hiding the evidence and hampering the police investigation, which her lawyer shrugs off in exchange for community service. This means that she does not have to go to prison, though her actions are bound to turn her into an outcast, which means that she will most likely move out of Westmont Village and try to start her life anew somewhere else.
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