Every Year After Episode 2 Review: "Young Blood" - Percy and Sam Slip Back Into Old Rhythms While Sue's Memorial Opens the Basement Door

By Mira Vance · Editor & Lead Reviewer

"Young Blood" turns one week back in Barry's Bay into a trapdoor. Percy wants to be useful, Sam wants to stay upright, Charlie wants the family business fixed enough to sell, and everyone keeps walking into rooms that remember more than they do. The episode's best move is how plainly it lets the present-day grief sit beside the younger summer: the friendship bracelets, the old truck, the basement couch, the short story, the first period, the almost-kiss that never becomes funny. It is warm without sanding off the ache.

Percy raids The Tavern after hours, and Sam finds her reaching for a drink

The episode opens by making grief literal before it makes it romantic. Percy narrates the many forms of death - a loved one, a relationship, a secret dream - over images of people coping badly, quietly, or not at all. By the time Sam finds her in The Tavern after hours, she has not so much returned to her old haunt as broken back into the version of herself that used to belong there.

Their first real private conversation has the awkwardness of people who know every old shortcut and none of the current roads. Percy jokes that she was desperate because the motel had no mini-bar. Sam points out that an unlocked window still counts as breaking and entering. Then they fall into the old game: Three Updates, the kind of friendship ritual that only sounds silly if you did not grow up needing it.

That is where the episode starts tightening the knot. Young Percy once told young Sam about a short story competition; adult Percy now writes obituaries. Sam offers the softest professional courtesy he can, help with Sue’s obituary, only for Percy to learn that Taylor is already handling it. The triangle is not played as cheap jealousy. It is worse than that. It is Percy realizing that a job she could have done with love has already been assigned to someone who stayed.

Chantal fights the motel Wi-Fi while Percy admits she wants to matter to Sam again

Chantal’s morning meltdown over the motel soap and Wi-Fi gives the hour some snap, but it also positions her as Percy’s bluntest mirror. She can complain about spotty internet, pillows, and local charm all she wants; when Percy starts unpacking what happened with Sam and Taylor, Chantal hears the problem immediately. Percy did the scary thing, saw Sam again, survived it, and now she wants more.

Not “more” in the obvious way, or at least not only that. Percy says she and Sam used to be each other’s touchstones, and what she wants is to feel that again - to feel like she matters to him. That is a dangerous wish in an episode built around memorial planning, because need and grief are everywhere. Percy wants to help because Sue was like a second mother to her. Delilah hears the offer and turns it into a boundary check.

Delilah’s warning is polite enough to pass in public and sharp enough to draw blood. Percy has been gone a long time. She has missed a lot. Sam and Charlie have been through things she did not witness. It is not unfair, exactly, which is why it stings. Percy came back carrying history, but Barry’s Bay kept living without her.

Charlie pushes to sell The Tavern, and the broken cooler exposes the brothers’ grief

The Tavern is not just sentimental real estate this week. It is leaking, rotting, termite-damaged, full of old paperwork, and stocked with food that is about to spoil because the cooler has failed before Sue’s memorial. Charlie sees the practical nightmare and keeps pushing the obvious solution: fix the place enough to get a decent price. Sam refuses to talk about selling. It is too soon.

Their argument is one of the episode’s cleanest family-grief scenes because nobody is wholly wrong. Charlie is abrasive, impatient, and already operating as if the sale is inevitable. Sam is avoidant, stretched thin, and furious at being blamed for a building he was trying to hold together during Sue’s chemo and hospice. When he says he did not have time to renovate The Tavern between those two things, the room goes quiet in the way only family rooms can.

Then the show lets the practical plot turn sneakier. Charlie and Delilah talk about an offer, Whit’s finances, and the fact that Sam will lose it if he knows the deal is moving. The food needs ice. Chantal refuses to fetch it because it is below her pay grade, then finds the perfect “entry-level” errand runner: Percy, who is so desperate to be useful that she takes the errand anyway.

Sam helps with the ice run, and an old story called “Young Blood” comes back to life

Percy lugging ice down the road is exactly the kind of small-town humiliation this show knows how to make tender. Sam spots her, laughs, and turns the errand into a drive. What follows is the episode’s best present-day flirtation because neither of them is flirting cleanly. They are updating resumes, stepping around losses, and remembering how easy the other person used to be.

Sam tells Percy about Stanford, med school at UC San Diego, and residency at UCSF. Percy hears success, but she also hears the boy she once knew. When she says she knows how hard he works, then corrects herself with “or I knew,” the whole scene briefly stops pretending this is casual. They both know a lot about each other. They also know the tense of that sentence has changed.

The flashback beside it is even sweeter. Young Sam reads Percy’s story and calls “Young Blood” a kick-ass title. He tells her she has the coolest brain, weird and alive in ways that make him want to see inside it. The episode does not need to underline the ache. Adult Percy writes death notices. Young Percy had a statewide competition and a best friend who believed she would win.

The old truck supplies the physical memory: ancient Hubba Bubba, a double-dare, a cassette made for Sue’s 40th birthday, and music that cuts out because the truck is still the truck. By the time Percy and Sam return with only two melting bags of ice, Delilah sees exactly enough to be worried.

Chantal lets Jordie show her Barry’s Bay, and Delilah admits Whit is a disaster

The Chantal and Jordie thread could have been pure comic relief, and some of it is: her outrage over napping, his zen defense of napping, the ice cream bribe that gets her to ditch a wedding-planning Zoom. But the conversation by the water gives Jordie more shape than “friendly inn owner.” Chantal defines herself by work, benchmarks, and ambition. Jordie answers with the story of a basketball plan that ruptured along with his pec.

It is a neat contrast without being too tidy. Chantal’s life is full of targets she hits. Jordie’s life is what happened after the target vanished. He ended up back in the town he swore he would never live in, running the family business he swore he would never run. The line sits quietly beside Sam and The Tavern, because Barry’s Bay keeps turning old exits into front doors.

Delilah, meanwhile, gets her own small confession with Jordie. He notices she has been at The Tavern constantly and gently pushes at what is going on with Charlie and Whit. Delilah snaps, then gives him the answer anyway: things with Whit are a total disaster. For a character who spends so much of the hour managing other people’s optics, that little crack matters.

Taylor takes Percy into the basement, where an old truth-or-dare humiliation still lives

Percy’s errand for memorial photos sends her into the Florek basement with Taylor, and the scene is exquisitely uncomfortable because Taylor is not cruel. She is capable, kind, busy, and genuinely easy to like. She met Sam in medical school, works as a pediatrician, and is training in pediatric surgery. Percy calls her amazing because Taylor is amazing, which makes the ache worse.

The basement itself does the real ambushing. Taylor is sorting Sue’s old things and joking about Pokémon cards, paddle games, horror DVDs, and Sam’s strange insistence on saving movies he supposedly would never watch. Percy knows why those movies matter. The flashback shows young Percy arriving with Sour Patch Kids and horror options, only to find Sam in a mood and eventually flee after getting her first period on the couch.

Before that memory, another one lands harder. Young Delilah turns truth or dare into a little social grenade by daring Sam to kiss Percy. Charlie heckles. Sam hesitates. Percy sits inside the dare long enough for hope to become visible. Then Delilah bails with a laugh, “JK,” and leaves Percy with the kind of humiliation that grows up before the person does.

Sue helps young Percy through her first period, and Sam arrives at Percy’s motel door

The episode’s most generous scene belongs to Sue. Young Percy is mortified by her first period, and Sue handles it with exactly the right mix of practical help and emotional permission. Pads, shorts, no panic, no shame. When Percy starts crying, Sue does not tell her to stop. She tells her to cry as much as she wants and calls the bathroom her favorite place to cry.

That scene explains more about Percy’s return than any speech could. Sue was not an abstract mother figure. She was the adult who could make a humiliating body-change feel survivable. She was the person Percy could cry with when everything was changing and she hated it. So when young Percy later leaves early and asks Sam if they are good, the “swear” between them carries more than childhood melodrama. It is a promise made in a house where Percy felt held.

In the present, Percy finally calls her mother and says she should never have come. Her mother tells her that Barry’s Bay and “those boys” are toxic and orders her to leave that night. The episode does not argue with that warning. It simply lets Sam knock on Percy’s motel door before she can obey it.

Tiny details worth clocking

• Percy taking off her friendship bracelet in the car because she was afraid Sam would not be wearing his is a whole history in one nervous gesture.
• The title “Young Blood” belongs to Percy’s old story before it belongs to the episode, which makes her stalled writing life hurt more.
• Taylor trying to donate Sam’s horror DVDs while Sam keeps switching the Post-it to “save” is funny until the flashback shows why those movies are not random.
• Chantal calling the soap a microchip tells you everything about how badly this town is calibrated to her city life.
• Delilah’s “no judgment” to Jordie comes seconds before she admits the thing she is pretending not to need judgment for.

Final verdict

“Young Blood” is a strong second episode because it understands that second-chance romance only works if the first chance had texture. Percy and Sam were not just childhood best friends in some vague flashback shorthand. They had rituals, dares, private jokes, old movies, a bracelet oath, a story contest, and a shared house where Sue made Percy feel safe. The episode earns the present-day pull by making the past specific.

It is also honest about the mess around that pull. Taylor is not an obstacle the story can flatten. Chantal and Jordie’s subplot is charming, though it runs a little lighter than the Percy/Sam/Sue material around it. The Charlie-Delilah-Whit sale thread is still mostly plumbing, but it gives the hour a useful pressure point: grief does not pause the bills, the rot, the cooler, or the buyers waiting outside the door.

What lingers is Sue’s bathroom scene. Percy cries because everything is changing, and years later she is back in the same town facing proof that it changed without her. Sam knocking at the motel door is romantic, yes, but it is also the worst possible timing in the best possible way. Percy came to pay respects. Barry’s Bay keeps handing her unfinished business.

Rating: 8.6/10 - A tender, well-shaped memory episode that deepens Percy and Sam’s bond while letting Sue’s absence do real present-tense damage.

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Reviewed by Mira Vance · QuizFandom Editor & Lead Reviewer. Every rating is an honest per-watch assessment from the desk that also writes the quizzes — not a press release rehash.

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