There was a lot to take away from this week’s episode, but the main thing is something I don’t even feel good about pointing out: Keeley would REALLY benefit from bangs. I’ve always wanted bangs. I wonder if Juno Temple has ever considered it.
Anyways, back to the real content this week. As always, we’ve got a couple of storylines going on at once, but the focus this week is on Nate, Reeley (Roy and Keeley? Does this stick?), and Ted learning how to participate in therapy (we’ve all been there, Ted).
Unfortunately, there was little follow-up on last week’s cliffhanger, where we found out that Becca and Sam had been hitting it off on Bantr. It’s one of the complaints I’ve had with the writers this season - that they don’t seem to have any commitment to following up on things that are important from one episode to the next.
Ted is going through it - really - and it’s like, we get it. He is very clearly resistant to therapy and to Dr. Feildstone, but she’s become quite a likable character now that we’ve been able to eliminate her as a threat. I’m okay with her pushing him a little bit. Ted tells her that he’s not a quitter, and he's willing to keep trying at therapy, and he does. He comes back a couple of times over the course of the week, and despite a couple of setbacks and storm-outs, it seems like he and the doctor had reached a happy medium by the end of this week.
We turn next to Keeley and Roy, with the former struggling with her inability to articulate her need for personal time from the latter, who is impressively clingy for someone who prides himself on being so aloof. Keeley ends up venting her frustrations to the coaching staff (and others) instead, ultimately resulting in a blowout between the two of them when Roy realizes that she’s been essentially shit-talking him at work for an entire week at work. Is this the end of Reeley? This is Ted Lasso, so of course not. Jaime ends up metaphorically explaining to Roy that sometimes, it’s okay to give your teammate some space. So Roy apologizes with a delightfully romantic gesture and all is well. I have to say, if Roy Kent OR Brett Goldstein followed ME around like that, I don’t know how much complaining I’d have to do. Truly. This is the Roy Kent show, and we’re all just lucky passersby.
It seems - after all my complaining - we may actually have a villain origin story this season. A true antagonist. And it turns out this character is Nate Shelley - who would have thought? Nate, like a couple of other characters, has daddy issues - his father refuses to show him any approval, and after his heroic “wunderkind” coaching change in last week’s episode, Nate seems to think he is deserving of immense praise. It’s what he’s getting on Twitter, after all. His inflated ego does not translate well on the pitch, where he is still objectively the low man on the totem pole. Part of me does feel bad for him - he’s spent most of his life as a punching bag, but I didn’t have enough sympathy left over from last season to cover for his behavior this week.
We’ve seen it brewing with his treatment of the team manager, but we reached a boiling point this week with Nate’s treatment of Collin on the pitch. Nate absolutely berates Collin for being an essentially average footballer, which was hard to watch. Coach Beard overhears and brings Nate back down, and Nate apologizes, which is nice. But after the team manager and some of the players pitch in to buy Nate a “wonder kid” jersey as a riff on Nate’s mispronunciation of “wunderkind," Nate sees a negative tweet about himself, presumably the first, and winds up in a state. The episode ends with him threatening the team manager. Again, tough to watch. The collective consensus this week was that Nate sucks, and there really aren’t any other characters this season who suck, so that makes him look significantly worse. As we head into next week’s episode, I’m hoping for a reality check. But maybe the writers will completely blow this storyline off! Who can say?
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