Summary
Everyone seems to have arrived at a crucial turning point at exactly the same time in “I Feel Lost Without Me”, making it one of the better character-driven chapters, even if it lacks some of the tension and jeopardy of prior installments.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say that Your Friends & Neighbors is taking on an oddly contemplative tone in the latter stages of Season 2. Sure, there’s still some overt slapstick, and a last-minute cliffhanger is a nice reminder that Coop isn’t out of the woods yet, even if he’d like to be, but for the most part, Episode 8, “I Feel Lost Without Me”, is a slower-paced, character-driven hour that doesn’t feel like it’s building to a grand finale so much as allowing the cast to come to terms with whatever may happen in it.
In other words, mileage may vary. At least when this season has taken some time away from the main plot, it filled that space with some genuinely impressive formal tricks. This is a much more conventional hour that just lacks some of the major tension and payoffs that we’ve come to expect, though it arguably makes up for that with better-than-average emotional drama. She never gets any credit, even from me, but Lena Hall’s Ali is a really lovely character who deserves more of the limelight and an actual plot to call her own. But maybe next season.
In the meantime, we’re largely picking up from where we left off. After crashing her car, Tori is staring down the barrel of a DUI, and it’s a serious enough infraction that her best case is to get the whole thing pled down to a misdemeanour and then cross her fingers and hope that the record gets sealed once the slap on the wrist has been delivered. Naturally, that’d be easier to do if she were enrolled in college, but her decisions on that front have left her high and dry. Since she knows it, she’s using the whole situation to be even more mad at Mel, who’s facing her own legal predicament thanks to the petty neighbor dispute. Kat is representing them both.
This leaves Coop playing middleman and shouldering most of the emotional burden, since word has already gotten around. Mel’s own woes mean she isn’t the greatest option to represent Tori, meaning that Coop has to pick up the slack while Mel reluctantly apologises to her neighbors so that the whole thing doesn’t become a felony.
Coop is still feeling pretty bad about his current circumstances. After Ashe tried to strong-arm him into a partnership last week, he has decided that the best course of action is to blow the whistle on the legality of the fund by getting Liv to tip off the compliance department. She won’t, though, since that’d implicate her. So, since the investment flew under the radar in the first place, that’s where it’s going to have to stay. Coop’s only option is to manage Ashe, while Liv “manages” him. It’s pretty clear what she means by this, but we don’t stick around in the scene long enough to see whether Coop gets managed or not.
Either way, he tells Barney about the predicament that they’re in and, inspired by the telling off Grace gave him at the Hamptons, attempts to fire Barney to keep him insulated from any potential blowback. He’d rather Barney just went to work for Grace’s father, and so would Grace, but it’s the last thing he wants to do, given that his sovereignty as a man is at stake. To be fair, though, per Barney’s own digging, Ashe has been investigated in relation to three — count ’em! — of his business partners suddenly disappearing without a trace. Maybe Grace has a point.
Everything involving Mel in Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2, Episode 8 is pretty ridiculous. She does indeed apologise to the neighbors, and it even seems like she means it, but they also immediately file for a restraining order on the inexplicable grounds of Mel having punched Sam earlier in the season. What that’s got to do with anything is anyone’s guess, but Kat’s advice is for her to stay as far away from the house as possible and not antagonise the situation. In her fury, Mel drives a little too fast along her driveway and ends up knocking down and killing the neighbors’ dog.
If the dog’s timing isn’t exactly ideal, Sam’s is fortuitous. She arrives to find Mel sobbing and cradling the dead canine, and since she agrees with her that there’s simply no way her neighbors won’t assume it was a deliberate act of murder, Sam helps Mel bury the dog. This whole thing is ridiculous slapstick nonsense, but it is very funny, and it’s nice to see a bit of candour between Mel and Sam. It’s one of a couple of relationships that end up being repaired this week. The other is Mel and Tori. When the latter manages to get out of court with an extremely light sentence, she runs and hugs her mother in relief. Later, she even agrees to move back home, though that might be because it was Hunter who was asking.
Things are going slightly less well for everyone else. Elena is still in deep with Felix and is running out of time to pay him back, so she and Coop pull off a short-notice score by stealing a rare baseball card worth $300,000 from Gordy. This is ridiculous, too, since Gordy and Lisa come back in the middle of the heist in the midst of an extremely venomous argument, so Coop has to hide. Coached by the ghost of his dead father, he decides to leave his fate to chance and just walk out. Luckily, Gordy and Lisa are too preoccupied to notice.
The loss of Ron is affecting Ali, too. She’s dealing with it in a different way, though. With the modest inheritance that she has received from her father’s death, Ali decides to lease her own place and move out to prove she can stand on her own two feet. She also blithely walks out of her job, too, which kind of makes the opposite point, but Lena Hall’s so good at selling Ali’s internal anxieties that it’s difficult to mind. Coop has no choice but to wave her off as the leaves in an Uber. It’s at exactly this point that a van full of goons in balaclavas pulls up. Coop is tased and dragged inside the van. Was Ashe getting sick of him dragging his feet over the proposed deal? It seems the most likely justification, but in this show, you can never quite tell.
