Your Friends and Neighbors – Season 1 Episode 7 Recap & Review

The Review Geek

16-05-2025

The First Honest Thing
Episode 7 of Your Friends & Neighbors starts with Coop back stealing more gear, this time in the form of diamonds. However, he soon starts to see a series of surreal images, including a naked Nick cooking, Christian eating pancakes and Lu is even here too. When he awakens however, he finds himself in hospital.
Coop is mess after being beaten outside, and he's been unconscious for 12 hours. Detective Lin shows up to talk to Coop – alone. With the whole family shepherded out the room, Lin immediately gets down to brass tacks. With nothing taken from him, Lin believes he was targeted.
Lin gets the feeling that he's a man on a downward spiral and offers a helping hand to get out of this mess. She can see the pieces of what's happening but obviously doesn't have the evidence to put it together. Her pleas fall on deaf ears though as Coop is too far into this now and he's not about to stop any time soon.
At the station, Lin learns that the report from Paul's death doesn't match the same gun inside Samantha's house. Her weapon hasn't been fired, as she said, and the gunshot residue shows that Paul pulled the trigger and shot too. Lin believes that Paul may have been shooting at someone trying to flee but she doesn't think Coop fits the MO. She does think he's hiding something though, and she's determined to figure out what.
More reports confirm that there's trace amounts of blood, and coupled with the ammonia Lin noticed at the house, seems to reinforce the idea of someone covering this up. Interestingly, inside the kids' room, Lin finds a nanny-cam in one of the teddy bears, which shows Coop over at Sam's place, tucking Henry in to bed which we saw several episodes back.
Naturally, Lin speaks to Sam and encourages her to change her initial statement at the police station. When she leaves, Sam picks up her phone and makes a call but it doesn't seem to be to Coop. Either way, there's a big bullseye on Coop now.
Elena is also in a tricky spot this episode. Her brother owes money to a guy called Felix and after dropping drugs during a run, he owes 175k in total. It's a shocking amount of debt that her dead-end brother has got himself into, and Elena is stuck with the bill, given a week to pay this back.
Bruce picks up Ali from work and brings her home, admitting that he admired her in the past and seeing her up on stage again has made him happy. As they begin kissing after stopping at the driveway, Hernandez finds himself stuck behind the trash cans. He's actually fishing for evidence illegally, and he soon finds out that Coop's blood matches the trace in the ammonia at the crime scene.
Coop shows to see Barney at the hospital, who's thankfully alive but not in a great way. He's pissed about what's gone down, and knows something is being kept from him given the brown envelope of money. Barney is not happy and eventually kicks his friend out the room.
With a bombshell about to drop for Coop, Sam is stuck playing host to Paul's wake. Coop shows up, unaware that back home Lin has shown up with a warrant to search his place. Inside the garage they find the car, and with time very much of the essence, Coop hurriedly speaks to Kat, the best lawyer in the area, and blackmails her into taking on his case, despite the conflict of interest.
Coop has a quick swig of whiskey before leaving with Lin and the other officers, publicly arrested for Paul's murder. Unfortunately, they've also found the gun in the trunk of his car too.
The Episode Review
So it looks like this is the end of the road for Coop, who's caught in a very difficult position here given what's taken place with Sam. It's ironic that he could take the fall for a murder he didn't commit, and it appears that the real suspect could well be someone closer to home.
The random scenes with Ali and Bruce would put the latter squarely in the right place to plant a gun in the trunk of the car, but his motive is still unclear. The fact that he's now blanking Ali after the incident and hurried away from the police claiming he's 'just a friend' doesn't do him any favours.
Bruce is certainly a shady individual and seemingly using Ali as a way of getting to Coop. The gun being planted in the trunk of the car is indicative of this, given he's the only one who's had direct access to the house.
There's also Coop's boss, Mel, Nick or even Sam that could be responsible though. And in this episode we did see Sam message someone outside the station – and it wasn't Coop. However, everything is starting to heat up now and the ending hints that we've got plenty more drama coming out way.
Roll on the next episode!
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Expect A Full Season Write-Up When This Season Concludes!