Every Year After Episode 7 Review: "The Boathouse" - Percy and Charlie Get Locked In With the Truth as 2015 Takes Sam Out of the Summer

By Mira Vance · Editor & Lead Reviewer

"The Boathouse" stacks one closed door on top of another. In the present, Percy tells Sam the truth and loses Charlie's last bit of patience; in 2015, Sam's Stanford future quietly removes him from the summer Percy thought they still had. The hour keeps returning to the lake as a place that remembers everything: broken boats, stalled goodbyes, family grief, bad choices, and the friend who was there when the boyfriend was not.

Charlie tells Percy to leave after she tells Sam, and 2015 opens on the Florek boat stalling in the lake

The present-day cold open is all consequence. Percy has told Sam what happened with Charlie, and Charlie is furious that the secret they both agreed to bury has finally reached his brother. Percy tries to explain the timing: Sam came to her after breaking up with Taylor, talking about second chances, and she could not let him make that choice without knowing the truth.

Charlie hears something else. He hears his own relationship with Sam collapsing in real time. Percy asks if Sam is okay; Charlie answers by telling her that if she cares about Sam’s well-being, she should go back to Seattle that day. The line that lands is not subtle, but it does not need to be: You’re selfish, Percy. The episode begins with a door already closing.

Then 2015 cuts in like a sunburn. Percy, Sam, and Charlie are on the old boat, thrilled for a summer that still looks wide open. Charlie has tried to repair their dad’s boat. It immediately stalls. That failure is funny for about ten seconds, until the episode starts using the boat as its main memory object: something inherited, something half-fixed, something everyone keeps trying to push back into motion.

Sam’s summer intensive turns Percy and Sam’s whole summer into two weeks

The flashback’s first real wound is not the boat. It is Sam’s delayed confession. While Percy teases him as Captain Valedictorian, the master of maritime knots with Stanford waiting for him, he finally tells her he got into the summer intensive he wanted. It starts in two weeks. It runs the whole summer.

Percy has been building their last pre-college summer in her head: horror marathons, old rituals, all the greatest hits before everything changes. Sam has known since the end of April that most of that list was not going to happen. His reason is gentle enough to make the hurt worse. He did not want to ruin what little time they had left.

That is Sam all over this episode. He means well, and he still withholds the one fact Percy needs in order to stand on solid ground. By the time Charlie comes back with dry spark plugs and reads the room, the summer has already changed shape. They are still by the lake, but Percy is suddenly counting down.

Chantal pushes Percy toward Charlie while Delilah tries to become the perfect ex-wife

In the present, Percy plans to say goodbye in her own way and skip the funeral, partly because Charlie told her her presence would complicate things. Chantal refuses to let the story stay that clean. She reminds Percy that what happened between Percy and Charlie was not only Percy’s burden, then immediately has to absorb Percy’s admission that the almost-kiss with Jordie might have become less almost if Charlie had not interrupted.

Chantal gives two kinds of advice at once: do not blow up Drew on impulse, and do not leave Barry’s Bay without telling Charlie what he needs to hear. That combination is exactly why the scene works. She is not pushing chaos for sport. She is trying to keep Percy from making one more life-altering choice in a fog of shame.

Delilah, meanwhile, is doing her own highly organized version of collapse. Chantal finds her with Whit’s Milan espresso machine, a performance of composure, and a whole taxonomy of her father’s ex-wives. Delilah has decided she will be the one who keeps her makeup on, stays tasteful, and wins by seeming fine. Even her uncertainty over whether the model is named Shannon, Sharon, or Shonda tells on her. She is copying a survival strategy she does not actually understand.

Charlie offers Sam their dad’s ties, and Sam admits he used caregiving as a way to ghost his life

The Sam and Charlie scene is quiet, which makes it harder to shake. Charlie has pulled out their dad’s old ties and suggests they both wear one to their mother’s memorial. It is a small brotherly peace offering, but Sam will not pick it up. Charlie says he spent his whole life trying to protect Sam and blew it all up in one night. Sam answers with silence, then says he can stay at Jordie’s motel until after the funeral.

The episode gives Sam more room with Delilah later, and that scene helps keep him from becoming only the betrayed brother. While Delilah panics over teal tablecloths that have arrived aqua, Sam sits with her and talks about his father dying, about wanting to become a cardiologist so he could fix hearts, and about learning that heartbreak does not work that way.

Then he finally says the thing he has been circling: he worked hard to forget Percy and leave Barry’s Bay, but the big adult life he sacrificed so much for was not working. Taking care of his mother mattered, and he does not regret that time with her. He also recognizes that it became a noble excuse to ghost the rest of his life. Delilah, who had a front-row seat to Percy and Sam’s breakups, tells him Percy took it hard. Sam is not absolved, but he is not cardboard either.

Young Percy fixes the boat with Charlie while Sam keeps getting harder to reach

Back in 2015, Charlie refuses to let Percy spend the summer moping over Sam. His solution is gloriously un-Sam-like: manual labor, eight in the morning, the broken boat, and enough teasing to make grief feel briefly manageable. Percy brings him black, extra-hot coffee and knows what a socket wrench is. He calls her a cool girl. She tells him she knows.

The repair montage is warm because it is so practical. Percy and Charlie are not talking the summer into being better. They are sanding, tightening, testing, and showing up. At the same time, Sam becomes a voice on a screen who keeps getting interrupted by coursework and other people. When Percy calls later and reaches voicemail, Charlie knows exactly who she is really trying to reach.

His read on Sam is blunt: Sam shuts down when things get hard. The episode lets that sentence sit beside the boat work. Sam promised nightly FaceTimes and lecture recordings; Charlie is the one standing next to Percy with grease, tools, and time.

Percy and Charlie get locked in the boathouse, and the fight turns into a panic attack

The present-day boathouse scene begins as a confrontation and becomes a trap almost by accident. Percy finds Charlie there because his phone went straight to voicemail and she knew where he would be. She has come to say what she needs to say. He wants her gone. The door shuts, the old outdoor lock holds, and suddenly the place that once stored summer becomes a room with no service and no easy exit.

They start exactly where they always start: blame. Charlie says no one is looking for Percy because she made herself alone. Percy refuses to let him put ten years of wreckage entirely on her. She may have shut the door today, but how they got here is on both of them.

Then her body gives out before the argument can. Percy panics, gasping and unable to finish the sentence. Charlie’s anger drops away. He pounds on the door, calls for help, then stays with her and tells her to breathe. The show does not make that care clean or romantic. It makes it immediate. For a few minutes, the person she hurt is also the person who gets her through it.

Delilah jumps into the lake, Sam breaks up by email, and Percy and Charlie finally name the night they chose

Jordie’s “Lake Life Seminar” starts as flirtation with Chantal and becomes something kinder once Delilah joins them. Chantal hates murky water because she cannot see the bottom. Delilah admits she mostly waded in for years because wet hair would have ruined the cool, fun girl image she maintained for Charlie. Jordie goes first. Chantal follows. Delilah finally goes under.

The release does not stay cute. After the swim, Delilah breaks down and corrects her own earlier story: stepmother number three was named Siobhan, and she ended up in rehab. Delilah’s polished anecdote collapses into grief for a woman she had reduced to a lesson. It is a sharp little scene, and it gives her more than the role of wronged wife at a memorial weekend.

The hour’s hardest flashback lands after the boat finally starts. Sam emails Percy to say the summer is harder than he expected, he needs to focus, and he thinks they should stop talking. She calls his phone, a woman named Jo answers, and Percy leaves the message Sam deserves: she is his ex-girlfriend, and he cannot break up with someone over email.

That hurt sends Percy back to Charlie. He calls Sam’s email a cowardly move, says Sam robbed her of their last summer, and tells her she deserves better. Percy thanks Charlie for saving her summer. The kiss that follows does not arrive out of nowhere; that is what makes it so painful. It comes from weeks of being seen, from anger at Sam, from loneliness, from the old fun returning in the wrong place. In the present, Charlie and Percy finally say the missing part aloud. She lashed out when Sam hurt her. Charlie was jealous of what Sam and Percy had. Neither of them was the only person in that room.

Tiny details worth clocking

• The boat first fails in front of all three of them, then later starts with only Percy and Charlie there.
• Sam’s “Captain Valedictorian” glow curdles fast once Percy realizes he has been sitting on the summer intensive news for six weeks.
• Delilah’s teal-versus-aqua panic says more about her memorial-weekend control than any confession could.
• Chantal invites Delilah to the lake even though she clearly wants time with Jordie, which is one of her gentlest moves here.
• Charlie’s old line that Sam shuts down when things get hard comes back in the cleanest possible form: Sam breaking up by email.

Final verdict

“The Boathouse” is the kind of episode this show is built to do: one summer object, one present-day pressure cooker, and a memory that keeps getting warmer until it burns. The strongest material is Percy and Charlie’s double timeline. In 2015, their closeness grows from fixing something tangible together. In the present, they are trapped with something they never fixed at all.

The episode is a little crowded around the edges. Jordie and Chantal’s flirtation, Delilah’s divorce spiral, Sam’s memorial setup, and the boathouse fight are all doing useful work, but the hour occasionally has to jump away right when a scene starts to breathe. Delilah’s lake breakdown still lands, mostly because the Siobhan correction is so specific and sad.

What the episode gets right is the ache of second chances that are not clean enough to feel good yet. Percy wants Sam’s forgiveness, Charlie wants to stop carrying his brother’s dreams like penance, Sam wants to believe caregiving was only love and not also avoidance, and Delilah wants composure to count as healing. Nobody gets the easy version. By the end, Percy and Charlie have not solved the past. They have only stopped lying about who was in it.

Rating: 8.7/10 - A bruised, beautifully anchored boathouse episode that makes the 2015 boat repair and the present-day panic attack speak to each other, even when the supporting threads crowd the room.

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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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