Summary
Your Friends & Neighbors finally catches up with its initial mystery in Episode 5, giving us a little more context but still no real answers.
It has taken Your Friends & Neighbors five weeks to circle back to the brutal crime scene it began with, but Episode 5 finally gets us there with a little more context. We now know why Coop was in the house, for instance – he was hoping to rob Sam, his now ex-lover, while she was away in Boston. And we know who the dead guy is – Sam’s ex-husband, Paul. But as for who killed him and why, we still have no idea.
This is the culmination of a very bad evening for Coop. Teaming up with Elena yielded some short-term success, but that arrangement gets pretty complicated in “This Tourist Has Balls”, for multiple reasons, including burgeoning sexual chemistry that is sure to blur the lines to a dangerous extent in coming episodes.
But let’s start at the end. With the dead body.
There’s a lot bundled up in Coop breaking into Sam’s house. It immediately follows a “you up?” text, so there’s a petty feeling to it. It’s a crime of opportunity. It’s a chance to get back in Elena’s good graces after sabotaging the painting sale by being unnecessarily chivalrous, which, in itself, led to Coop being pepper-sprayed. But it’s mostly just something to do while drunk and high. The corpse is quite a surprise.
We have no idea who killed Paul, only that it wasn’t Cooper (unless the show is being very clever with its structuring, which seems unlikely). To be fair, every time we have met Paul, he has been pretty awful, so it could be anyone. It likely isn’t a coincidence that Sam happened to not be in town at the time of the crime, either. But it’s unlikely to matter since Coop is such a blundering idiot that the prime suspect, as far as the authorities are concerned, is almost certain to be him.
Drink and drugs aren’t conducive to good decision-making, to be fair, which is probably why Coop trailed bloody footprints all over the place and ended up in the pool instead of properly covering his tracks. Your Friends & Neighbors Episode 5 is deliberately mysterious about how much of the crime scene he cleaned up beyond washing his own clothes, but even if he was thorough, it won’t take long for someone to notice that Paul has mysteriously vanished.
Donovan Colan in Your Friends & Neighbors | Image via Apple TV+
And following a string of unsolved robberies, the police are going to be paying extra-close attention to a sudden murder. The net is tightening around Coop rather rapidly, and I wouldn’t trust any of his so-called allies as far as I could throw them. Though there is something about Elena, isn’t there?
Elena is interesting because, as she rightly points out in “This Tourist Has Balls”, she understands what it’s like to have nothing on a much more profound level than Coop does, so by extension, she also understands much more intuitively the need to make something of herself. That’ll undoubtedly lead her back into cahoots with Coop despite their falling-out, since she needs someone who can not only get her access to the kind of people and properties she can make her fortune on, but is stupid enough to take the fall in her place if it all goes wrong. This is perhaps an overly cynical view of Elena, who seems to be getting closer to Coop than either of them expected, despite their falling out, but sometimes needs must.
It likely says a lot about just how badly things are going for Barney that he seems considerably worse off than either Coop or Elena. On some level he’s like an amalgamation of them both; he’s trying to sustain a swanky lifestyle but can no longer afford to pay for it, but he’s also something of an outsider in the community at the best of times, never quite feeling comfortable around his stern in-laws or his almost exclusively white neighbours.
But there’s a more tragic note to Barney, I think. He doesn’t have a solution, even a crazy, self-defeating one like Coop’s, so he’s left to wallow in complete isolation. And that isolation leads him to drink, and drinking almost causes him to burn down the ongoing renovations to his home. It’s a sequence of events that looks like a deliberate decision that he immediately panicked about and regretted, more than a drunken accident. And if that’s where Barney’s head is at, I don’t see things getting much better for him any time soon.
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