Jon Hamm and Amanda Peet in the Season 2 finale of Your Friends and Neighbors —Courtesy of AppleWarning: This post contains spoilers for Season 2 Episode 10 of Your Friends and Neighbors.“The minute you decide to go criminal, you are in so far over your head,” says Jonathan Tropper, creator of Apple TV’s Your Friends and Neighbors. The show, about Coop (Jon Hamm), a hedge fund manager turned criminal, has had its protagonist going through some serious turmoil in its second season. “One of the core beliefs of building Coop’s character for us in the writers' room is this notion that he comes from a world where he was the expert, and he thinks he can transfer that expertise to this world. But he can’t.”Never is that clearer than in the finale of Season 2, which dropped on June 5. We spoke to Tropper (who also wrote the finale), and director Stephanie Laing about the episode, what it means for these friends and neighbors, and what we can expect from Season 3. A messy clean-up jobJames Marsden in Episode 9 —Courtesy of AppleThe Season 2 finale of Your Friends and Neighbors finds Coop, Nick (Mark Tallman), and Barney (Hoon Lee) dealing with the fallout of the penultimate episode, which ended with Owen Ashe’s (James Marsden) shocking death. Ashe lost control under the influence of drugs and started shooting at his friends. He slipped on his marble floor while chasing them down, cracking his head open and seemingly dying from his injury. Suddenly, the trio is left to clean up the aftermath. The first instinct is to call 9-1-1, but Coop urges them to reconsider: He almost went to jail in Season 1 after being set up for murder, and that time he hadn't even been in the room. But the evidence appears stacked against him, even though none of them killed Ashe. They decide to dispose of the body in the lake, and clean up the house and wipe it of any evidence. As they’re carrying Ashe out, Sam (Olivia Munn) walks through the door—she’d been planning to break up with Ashe. Coop just about manages to talk her out of calling the police, and she leaves Ashe’s house. As Coop, Nick, and Barney drive Ashe’s body to the lake, they’re in for a surprise: Ashe isn’t dead. He wakes up and freaks out, picking a violent fight with everyone in the car. “One of my favorite scenes was the car fight,” says Laing. “I watched a lot of YouTube Car-Jitsu fights that really helped influence the way we shot.” (For the uninitiated, Car-Jiutsu is a combat sport where people fight using jiu-jitsu in the limited confines of a vehicle). In the chaos of the fight, the car swerves into the lake, sending the four men into the water. While Cooper, Barney, and Nick escape the car, Ashe doesn’t, and he drowns, truly dead this time. On land, the trio realizes Ashe is in the back seat, so they go back underwater to put him in the front seat so that if he’s found, it’ll look like he’d been on his own. Now, they are legitimately responsible for Ashe’s death.“One of the things Coop has been dealing with since his father’s death [in Episode 5] is the understanding of how he’s lost the plot as a father and a family man. His father was a simpler man who never lost track of what his priorities were,” says Tropper. “Everything after Coop’s father’s death, for him, is about trying to right his own ship to be the father he needs to be for his kids, and the person he needs to be for his family. He’s been lying to himself, saying everything he’s doing is to provide for them, but everything he’s doing is egocentric and selfishly motivated—it may have started as a knee-jerk survival instinct, but that’s not what it is now.”In the finale, while dealing with the secret of Ashe’s death, Coop tries to start making amends. He wires the $600 million he was holding as part of their investment scheme back to Ashe’s account, and returns the painting he stole in the Season 1 finale back to Jack (Corbin Bernsen), his former boss (we see this in a montage at the end of the episode). But the weight of the secret is tearing his relationship with his friends Nick and Barney apart.Hope for reconciliationHamm and Peet in Episode 9 —Courtesy of AppleAs speculation over Ashe’s disappearance becomes the talk of Westchester, Coop and his family attend the country club’s Father’s Day party, where all anyone can talk about is Ashe, who is still missing. Fed up with being at a Father's Day event so soon after the death of his own father, Coop and his family leave early and go to the bowling alley, a place his father loved dearly. Amidst a manic, destructive finale, this scene of Coop bowling with his family provides an opportunity for genuine peace and joy. “We wanted it to feel really warm and inviting,” says Laing. “I want to add, for the record, that Jon Hamm is an incredible bowler. The script said he bowls an eight, and he bowled an eight.” Laing’s technique in directing that scene allowed a striking calm and humanity to shine through the chaos. “I let the cameras roll and let them really fall into their characters. We kept the cameras at a distance, and eventually they forget the cameras are moving.”This leads Coop and his ex, Mel (Amanda Peet), to have an honest conversation about their needs. Coop suggests that they could scale back and leave the rat race behind, which Mel instantly reads as a sort of cry for help. Nobody can see Coop quite like Mel can, and she urges him to tell her what’s really going on. She knows he’s hiding something from her.“Sitting there with Mel,” Tropper says, “we have this moment where it seems like they could reconnect. He could confess to her, and they could recalibrate their value system together, which would ultimately probably bring them together. But without that, we wouldn't have a show,” he jokes.Who kidnapped Coop?Oded Fehr and James Marsden in Episode 7 —Courtesy of AppleBefore a breakthrough can happen, Coop’s phone buzzes. Ashe’s lawyer, DeMille (Oded Fehr), is waiting for him outside. He returns the video of Coop stealing from Ashe (the inciting incident in their forced partnership) and tells Coop that he’s going to wire the $600 million back to him. He tells him that it’s not all Ashe’s money, and Coop should hold onto it for now—which he doesn’t want to do. DeMille is surprised to hear that Coop was kidnapped, implying that Ashe was not, in fact, responsible for kidnapping Coop to threaten him about the money. Instead, DeMill suggests that Coop should “consider the other possibility,” which Coop takes to mean Cricket Birch (Bojana Novakovic), a big-time investor deeply involved in Coop and Ashe’s complicated financial dealings. Coop is shocked by this, given his sexual relationship with Cricket.Tropper, however, suggests the real answer to who kidnapped Coop might be more complicated. “It would make the most sense to him that Ashe grabbed him, but we wanted to create the idea that once you start playing in these huge amounts of money with people like Ashe, you have no idea what you’re actually dealing with. It could be Cricket or Ashe, but as we get into Season 3, we may discover it was neither of them.”An Easter egg hidden in a classic movie referenceThere’s been a hint to how Season 2 would end hiding in plain sight. Early in the season, Coop goes to the cinema to watch the 1955 masterpiece The Night of the Hunter. In the scene he watches, a woman is found by a fisherman, drowned in a car at the bottom of the lake. Eagle-eyed cinephiles would have immediately recognized the film he was watching, and when they saw that the finale episode was titled “The Night of the Hunter,” they’d likely put two and two together to guess exactly how the season would end. Just like in the scene Coop watched all those episodes ago, Season 2 ends with a fisherman discovering the car at the bottom of the lake. Tropper says the season was always going to end this way, even before The Night of the Hunter came into play. “We had already plotted out the season, and then we got into lists of movies Coop would be watching,” he explains. Tropper credits executive producer and writer Jamie Rosengard with the idea to integrate The Night of the Hunter into Season 2, prompted by the idea of the fisherman finding Ashe in the lake.Tropper says the next season’s timeline starts “very shortly” after the events of Season 2. “Coop is dealing with the Ashe money, the fallout on his family, and the fact that Mel is now suspicious of him. He’s also got a much bigger secret than any of that, so there’s some serious tension between him and Nick and Barney,” says Tropper. We get a strong sense of that tension in the finale, when at the country club Father’s Day party, Barney and Nick get into an explosive fight that sends Barney through a table full of food. His wife, Grace (Eunice Bae), has become exhausted with his accumulating lies and strange behavior, and tells him he needs to find somewhere else to stay. What to expect in Season 3Eunice Bae and Hoon Lee and Grace and Barney —Courtesy of AppleIn teasing the third season, Tropper says he’s most excited to see Barney and Grace’s story unfold. “Up until the end of Season 2, Barney and Grace had what I felt was the best marriage in the show. And as a consequence of Coop’s actions and Barney’s bad judgment, Barney’s marriage is now in peril. We’re gonna explore their marital problems in Season 3, and how it’s tied to Coop is going to become a really interesting thing to get into.” Laing also hints at “a very big action sequence.” While she won’t divulge details, she says, “it’s going to be what audiences love about the show.”Beyond that, there’s plenty of chaos coming Coop’s way. As he says in the final narration of the season, “No matter how comfortable we get with them, there will eventually be a reckoning with all the lies we tell.” And there are an awful lot of lies that Coop is dealing with now. “The issue is that there’s a cumulative effect. The lie’s getting bigger, and it's being compounded by other lies,” says Tropper. By the end of Season 2, Coop has sucked Nick, Barney, and Sam into his web of deceit. “The stakes are piling up, the lies are piling up—this is a Jenga tower of bullsh-t, basically.”Says Tropper: “There’s no way that someone’s not going to pull the wrong block, and things are going to start tumbling down.”