[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Couple Next Door, Season 1 Episode 6, “Crimes of Passion.”]
The tangled web of secrets in Starz‘s thrilling drama, The Couple Next Door, finally reached a breaking point as Danny (Sam Heughan) faced the metaphorical music with his wife, Becka (Jessica De Gouw).
After she learned about his secret son, Becka was further clued into the fact that Danny’s been involved with shifty side jobs at work and engaged in a secret tryst with their neighbor Evie (Eleanor Tomlinson) that led to an unplanned pregnancy. When Evie leaves her husband, Pete (Alfred Enoch), behind following the pregnancy revelation, she takes up in a cabin on her parents’ property and calls Danny, claiming she’s being held captive by her father.
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Together, Danny and Becka drive to check on Evie, only to discover she’s completely fine. But Evie believes that she and Danny are in love and will be together, which is something Becka and Danny both know isn’t true.
When Pete arrives at the secluded cabin with a gun, things turn from tense to dangerous, especially when Evie makes a run for it. As both couples stand in the woods, Pete pleads with Evie to terminate her pregnancy and stay with him, but when Danny goes to grab the gun, he gets shot in the leg as Pete is knocked over onto the ground.
Once Pete is back on his feet, Evie gets close to him and manages to get a hold of the gun, only to turn it on Pete, shooting him in the torso. Pete is carted off to the hospital, while Evie seems headed towards a darker fate, but what about Danny and Becka? Where will they stand after all of this?
“I think maybe because of the life that they were leading, that might be the thing that’s their salvation, the fact that they have a basis of communication and trust and honesty and that they’re striving for something bigger,” Heughan tells TV Insider. “And I think another couple in a more traditional relationship might not have survived because they don’t have that communication,” he adds, noting the benefit of Danny and Becka’s open marriage dynamic.
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While their arrangement may have backfired a bit in this instance with Evie and Pete, the duo does manage to sort through a lot of their woes before the closing moments of the season. In Heughan and costar De Gouw’s eyes, Danny and Becka are “going to work through this.”
“Yeah, this was the breaking of and the making of them as a couple,” De Gouw notes. But the same can’t be said for Evie and Pete. “They’re going to need a lot of support. Not from Becka and Danny.”
“Yeah, I don’t know if they can,” Heughan says of Evie and Pete making a comeback in their own marriage. “She’s pretty far gone, but he is too. So maybe they deserve each other.”
In Tomlinson’s eyes, there’s no going back. “I don’t think that they stand together. I think that they probably decided to split,” she says. “I think it’s hard to know where [to] go with those characters now. I think Evie needs some serious help mentally and probably a bit of jail time,” Tomlinson weighs in.
As for Pete, Enoch acknowledges, “There’s a massive breakdown, but it possibly presents an opportunity. I think that’s the nice thing that he’s not dead at the end. Who knows what his state is and what continues when he presumably goes to the hospital, but I suppose it leaves that door open.”
Wherever these characters may end up next, we’d advise avoiding the suburbs at all costs. But what did you think of the ending? Let us know in the comments section below, and relive the drama anytime on Starz.
The Couple Next Door, Streaming Now, Starz