The latest in EA’s FIFA soccer franchise won’t just star your favorite current players, but will also feature the fictional squad from the hit AppleTV show Ted Lasso. And the character himself will be a playable coach in the upcoming game, with a fully mocapped Jason Sudeikis to bounce about alongside your team, waving his arms, and doing whatever it is a soccer coach even does.
Today, within minutes of each other, both the official Ted Lasso and FIFA Twitter accounts revealed a one-minute trailer that sets up Lasso’s playable appearance in the game. Characterized as an unlikely soccer genius whose knowledge of the game might be sparse, but who is quite a successful coach regardless, a CGI Jason Sudeikis walks out onto a virtual field before clapping, pointing, and cheering in victory. In the trailer, we also catch glimpses of (fictional) soccer reporter Trent Crimm, Coach Beard, and several AFC Richmond stars, including Roy Kent and Jaime Tartt.
You can find the full details of the Ted Lasso / FIFA 23 crossover in EA’s official announcement.
This reveal was teased a bit yesterday when the Ted Lasso Twitter account tweeted a picture of Sudeikis standing in front of an array of cameras and lights. “Look out, Mario!” the tweet reads, “You’re not the only pixelated man with a mustache who never knows where the tube is taking him.” Before that, as PC Gamer notes, leaked database rankings for the game hinted at the crossover.
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While it’s a suitably themed crossover, fleshed out by the inclusion of the full AFC Richmond squad—whom you’ll be able to play as in any mode—looking at the footage, it’s hard to avoid that creepy uncanny valley feeling. Especially as the camera moves around Lasso’s face at the end of the trailer, revealing him in full 3D polygonal form, something just isn’t right. That poor (and kind, and astonishingly emotionally intelligent) man.
The black flame candle has been lit once more, and that can only mean one thing: our first look at the long-awaited sequel to Hocus Pocus is here.
This morning Disney dropped the first footage from Hocus Pocus 2, set to debut on Disney+ in a few months. The short and sharp teaser doesn’t give us much, but it does give us a fleeting look at the cackling return of the legendary Sanderson sisters Winifred, Sarah, and Mary, played by Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy, respectively.
Teaser Trailer | Hocus Pocus 2 | Disney+
Directed by The Proposal’s Anne Fletcher, Hocus Pocus 2 is set 29 years after the events of the 1993 fantasy classic, and sees some young high schoolers light the fabled Black Flame Candle once more, resurrecting the trio of 17th-century witches to cause havoc on modern day Salem. Now, it’s up to them to stop the Sanderson sister’s quest for revenge before dawn rises on Halloween.
As well as the returning Midler, Parker, and Najimy, Hocus Pocus 2 stars Star Trek: Discovery’s Doug Jones, Tomorrow War’s Sam Richardson, Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham, Veep’s Tony Hale, and more. Check out a frightful new poster for the film below!
Image: Disney
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Hocus Pocus 2 hits Disney+ on September 30.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel and Star Wars releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about House of the Dragon and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
Ted Lasso’s second season began with a penalty kick, as Dani Rojas looked to give AFC Richmond its first win of the season and ended up ending Earl the greyhound’s life. And so it’s fitting that Richmond’s season comes down to another penalty kick in “Inverting The Pyramid Of Success,” and that Jamie—even though he hasn’t missed a penalty all season— decides that Dani should be the one to seal the draw that would earn the team promotion back to the Premier League on their first attempt following their relegation.
But while these moments are clear narrative bookends for this season of television, I was deeply perplexed by the suggestion of this moment as a climax for this finale. Dani’s story functionally disappeared after he was cured of the yips, and outside of some quips and a battle with dress shoes we never got any clear sense of how his onfield performance or off-field life were unfolding. And while Jamie being willing to give up the ball during a key moment is certainly related to his maturing as a player since his return to Richmond, it does nothing to connect with his relationship with his father, or his more recent self-insertion into Roy and Keeley’s relationship that causes some tension throughout the episode. The scenes may be bookends, but there’s no meaningful connection to the stories being told in between them.
This is, unfortunately, a common theme across “Inverting The Pyramid Of Success,” which is a logical transition point in the series’ larger narrative but makes a collection of very strange choices in how it resolves or escalates the season’s storylines in order to reach that transition. If you were to go back to the beginning of the season and say that Rupert would purchase West Ham United and poach Nate from the coaching staff to become the Cobra Kai to Richmond’s Miyagi-Do, that would feel like a logical evolution of the series’ storytelling. But what confused me most about this finale is that so much of the work the season did to place Ted’s philosophy under a microscope and consider the limitations of a culture of positivity was effectively unwritten by how the show chose to resolve those stories, creating almost no accountability for the lapses in personal and professional conduct that we saw unfold. The core truth of the season of television I’ve been writing about is that AFC Richmond was promoted in spite of—and not because of—Ted Lasso’s leadership, and yet this finale undercuts even the parts of the season that worked the best by refusing to explore this reality.
This is most prominent in the circumstances of Nate’s departure, which was foregrounded by last week’s cliffhanger when Ted learned that it was his own assistant coach who told Trent Crimm (The Independent) about his panic attack. It’s perfectly in character that Ted has no desire to lash out at Nate, and that he plans to go about his day ignoring that everyone is staring at him, there’s paparazzi outside his door, and he mixed up the salt and sugar in the previous night’s batch of biscuits. Ted is hoping that Nate will apologize, but it’s quickly clear he’s too cowardly to do that, and that isn’t helped by how quickly the team rallies around the idea of hunting the culprit down. Beard pushes him to confront Nate to help get closure over what happened, but avoidance is Ted’s instinct, and so it’s no surprise that it takes Nate losing his cool in the midst of the match with Brentford before they’re able to have an honest conversation about it.
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However, there’s not a whole lot of honesty in that conversation from Nate’s perspective, and it took a storyline that I thought was working pretty well and muddled it considerably. Up until that point, the episode does a great job of poking the bear when it comes to Nate’s situation, and Beard’s growing anger at Nate’s cowardice. During the Diamond Dogs scene where Roy asks for advice, the moment where Nate says he has to admit something is a terrific swerve, and Beard’s reaction to discovering he kissed Keeley has such a joyous contempt to it. The episode was building to the moment when Nate’s anger would boil over, and where Ted would be able to see the ways he failed to recognize his loss of perspective, and a deeper reckoning seemed to be on the horizon.
But then, mid-match, Nate’s breakdown—while well-rendered by Nick Mohammed—was delusional in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. There are kernels of truth about how Nate has far more knowledge about football than Ted, who still doesn’t understand the basics of the game despite having had a lot of time to do so, but most of what he complains about is juvenile and self-centered. He effectively lays into Ted for not getting enough attention, explaining that he had made him feel special and then didn’t offer him enough positive affirmation afterwards. It’s his Daddy Issues jumping to the forefront, but it turns into the whole emotional core of his frustration, and frankly if I were Ted I would feel as though there was nothing I could have done to keep this from happening. If Nate needed that level of babysitting, he was always going to lose touch with reality such that he perceived Ted agreeing to go along with the “False Nine” strategy as a plot to blame him for a loss as opposed to a vote of confidence.
Essentially, the only way Nate’s story really works for me is if it forces self-reflection from Ted, Beard, and the rest of the coaching staff about their responsibility for Nate’s heel turn. However, that never materializes here. Beard knew that he was inappropriate with Colin, but no one has clued into the way he was treating Will, and Beard doesn’t never accepts responsibility for failing to realize his initial intervention didn’t pan out. Ted, meanwhile, completely missed how his inability to take Nate seriously—like when he thinks he’s a “big dog” and Ted laughs at him—was accumulating in his psyche, or how the hiring of Roy would have added to this. But for these realities to sink in, Nate’s exit would have to be seen as a preventable occurrence, and as something that they would have wanted to avoid. However, the way Nate salts the earth by literally tearing the “Believe” sign in half after storming off during the team’s celebration makes it hard to imagine anyone being sad to see him leave, and the sight of him in full Cobra Kai mode with Rupert at West Ham turns him into such a villain that you can’t come back to that. We never see a scene equivalent to when Ted found out that Rebecca let Jamie return to Man City in season one, and he laments his missed opportunity to get through to him. There’s never a moment where Nate’s absence is read as anything other than “good riddance,” robbing the show of a chance to assess how his story punctured the idea that Ted’s positive culture carried only positive consequences.
Photo: Apple TV+
It’s clear that we haven’t seen the last of Nate, and it’s likely the show will explore his path to redemption once Rupert’s whispers turn into the type of judgment and ridicule that Ted never actually directed toward him. But it’s a bizarre way to move into that story because it cuts off the actual implications of his descent into darkness, as Ted simply sips champagne with Rebecca and toasts to their future in the Premier League as though this chapter of the show is over. It’s a bizarre tone for the episode to set at its conclusion, and takes what should have been a moment of reckoning and turns it into an awkward encounter that Ted just sets aside for next season. And while it’s true Ted didn’t yet know at that time that Nate would be joining Rupert at West Ham, it’s bizarre that we don’t get an epilogue scene for Ted reacting to that development: his last scene is his farewell to Trent Crimm (Independent), which doesn’t accomplish much of anything. The choice to instead end on the “stinger” of Nate’s Villain Hair as a teaser for the third season certainly clarifies the narrative arc moving forward, but it misses an opportunity to solidify how the events of this season will carry forward in Ted’s coaching philosophy.
I know Game Of Thrones has become something of a joke after the response to the final season, but one thing it modeled very effectively was using the penultimate episode of each season as a climax, allowing for a finale that would simultaneously reflect on the season that came before it and gesture toward the future. And that’s what Ted Lasso really needed, because across the board the actual resolution that comes after Richmond’s promotion is rushed and frankly confounding.
This is perhaps most true with Roy and Keeley, whose story in this episode is a bit chaotic throughout this episode but reaches a new level of confusion in the epilogue. Last week, many argued that the show wasn’t actually setting up a love triangle for the characters, and that it was just testing their connection. And sure enough, despite leaving them in a very tense moment on the sofa during the photo shoot, they’re basically operating as normal when the episode starts, which really underlined how much the pileup of complications was a narrative ploy more than an organic character development. The seeming lack of continuity is jarring, but once Jamie comes clean to Roy about his mistake and Roy forgives him, the story settles into a moment of uncertainty about their future, and whether Roy believes that he is the right person for Keeley as she takes the next step in her career and starts a P.R. firm. It’s not the worst place for the story to land, even if it does raise the question of why any of the bullshit with Jamie or Phoebe’s teacher was necessary to get there (the Nate kiss is honestly most justified as a way to escalate his anger that no one takes him seriously during the Diamond Dogs meeting, which is very effective).
But then the epilogue scene makes no sense. Why is Keeley suddenly convinced that she has to focus so much on her career that she can’t work remotely? Wouldn’t they have communicated about this previously? The season was already set to place their relationship in a murky place given the changes ahead, but why did they need to create this forced separation as Roy goes on vacation with his paper tickets (although he does leave them behind)? We either needed an additional scene of Keeley facing pressure related to her firm or the scene itself needed to be longer and have them actually discuss where her anxiety was coming from. And all of this could have been facilitated if they had used one of their extra episodes to take the cascading epilogues they felt were necessary and let them breathe, exploring the aftermath of their promotion to consider the consequences that might not have been as clear when the dust hadn’t settled.
Photo: Apple TV+
It would have also allowed the show more space to consider the power dynamics of Sam and Rebecca’s relationship, which resolves in an agreeable fashion but reinforces the mess leading up to that point. Where Sam ends up—choosing to stay in Richmond to continue making a difference for young people and committing to engaging with his diasporic identity by turning the empty storefront from the previous episode into an actual Nigerian restaurant—is totally fine. While I’d have preferred an emphasis on the messed up power dynamics of their relationship, his choice to sever his decision from it was at least a positive development. But it is again frustrating that Rebecca’s arc in the season more or less boiled down to waiting for Sam to make a decision: we get the nice emotional moment with Keeley, but their relationship never really changed much as the season went on, once again putting Rebecca into a contingent place in the narrative without much to show for an entire season of storytelling.
And while I know I’ve harped on the Dubai Air storyline being dropped to the point I’m getting subtweeted about it, it does strike me as strange that Sam’s decision-making is so narrowly drawn given what he’s gone through this season. The choice to introduce Edwin Akufo last week and then turn him into a joke so swiftly after Sam rejects his offer makes the whole thing seem trivial, despite the fact that there are elements in his speech—like the threat Sam will never play for the Nigerian national team—that feel like they should have been part of Sam’s consideration to begin with. It’s an example where Sam’s story would have been far better if the fallout from Dubai Air had been more prominent, and if the show had been able to introduce his agent—which he surely has—to work through the negotiations, but the show has too many stories to serve for it to commit the time necessary to do so. The result is a story that has a basic kernel of truth but struggles to feel like a culmination of a narrative arc, which is a problem across the board here.
It’s particularly a problem because this was the single biggest strength of the first season. In general, the show’s sense of humor and its strong performances have been as strong in the second season, and there are moments here—Ted’s speech to the team about honesty, Roy warming up to the Diamond Dogs—that capture the energy that served the show so well. For this reason, I completely understand how there are some people who are mostly unconcerned about the storytelling issues I’m detailing here. But by choice, the writers chose to muddle the story being told, which on paper I’m more or less in support of. There’s something very dramatically effective, for example, in placing an increasingly begrudging Nate in the midst of those types of scenes where he was once a willing participant to underline his character arc. But in every story but Ted’s, the show’s plotting became far more imprecise than it had been in season one, regularly struggling to articulate character motivations and ground the stories being told in the trajectory of the team, their season, and the world they operate in.
“Inverting The Pyramid Of Success”—and the second season as a whole—was going for complicated and landed on confused. For every story being told, there were a collection of open questions as to why characters behaved in a certain way, but the show generally ignored these questions, or answered them offscreen in unsatisfying ways. With so many stories to address, the on-field play was sidelined, and the writers struggled to keep player stories like Isaac and Jamie afloat when their priorities were elsewhere. Moments like the lack of consequences from the Dubai Air protest were emblematic of a larger dramaturgical struggle, as the writers were unable to place stories in relation to one another and to the world those characters occupy. And while no one of these stories was a dealbreaker—yes, even for me, the person who keeps harping on one of them—the accumulation of odd decisions was too significant for this finale to address while also setting up where the story is headed moving forward.
The optimistic view for Ted Lasso’s future is that these growing pains were inevitable given the specificity of the first season’s fish-out-of-water narrative, and that a combination of reflection from the writers and the natural progression of the story will help the show get back on track next year. The cynical view is that the show’s first season energy was fundamentally unsustainable, and that no amount of adjustment can ever fully balance this collection of tones and stories. And while these last couple of episodes made the case for the latter stronger than I would have anticipated even while frustrated with the show earlier in the season, in the end there’s too much potential in these characters and this world for me to embrace cynicism at this time. However, I remain curious to better understand how and why this season lost its focus, and what might change in the future to try to gain it back.
Stray observations
I realize that British tabloids are trash, but in this day and age there would be a strong counter-narrative about mental health—particularly for men—that would emerge immediately after hogwash like the Soccer Saturday rant from Ted’s predecessor, and so it was weird for the show to pretend as though there was no discourse on that level until Ted’s press conference after the match the next day.
As much as I thought letting Sam Richardson turn Edwin into a slapstick routine undercut the seriousness of that story in ways that do a disservice to Sam’s arc, I did laugh at the handshake surrogate leaving Sam hanging.
One thing the season never really had a clear grasp on is the state of Ted and Rebecca’s friendship: they rarely interacted alone, and despite the fact she was one of the only people who knows about Ted’s anxiety she still only texts him when the story breaks even after their big emotional moment last week? It just doesn’t add up.
I expect many folks will be using the Masculine Melancholy Renaissance painting as their cover photos. Fun shot.
I enjoyed Beard’s reaction when Ted uses the name “John Obi-Wan Gandalf” while making up an inspirational quote during his speech to the team.
So not only are the venture capitalists behind bantr able to step in to replace Dubai Air, but they’re also handing out money for P.R. firms, apparently. (I can’t nitpick money storylines because money is not actually real, but did anyone else find it weird that Keeley would get that news in an email?)
It makes absolutely no sense that we never saw the team speculating about Edwin’s arrival—especially given his helicopter is somehow still on the field—and/or quizzing Sam about what was going on. You would think that would trigger a lot of anxiety, and yet there’s Sam casually opening the gift of another team’s jersey in the locker room in clear view of everyone else? Just a few episodes ago they were all gathered around tracking his love life, and now no one even seems to know he might be leaving? It just doesn’t add up.
“I’d be happy to headbutt you, Nate”—using Beard as the audience surrogate in these scenes was an important dimension, albeit one that really does seal the deal on Nate being irredeemable.
So after that long journey into Beard’s personal life, we get one final “we broke up, wait it’s back on” with Jane and that’s pretty much it? In retrospect, it remains confounding that the writers would look at the season they broke and think that episode was a good use of narrative oxygen. Even if I had liked the episode more than I did, the choice not to see an extra episode as a solution to the problem of an overstuffed narrative strikes me as weirder now even than it did while watching “Beard After Hours.”
Not enough Higgins here, necessarily, but I liked how it took him a few tries to get in sync with Keeley as he works to give her advice. It’s actually really hard to put yourself into someone else’s shoes, and there was a nice rhythm to her efforts to articulate her anxiety and his adjustments therein.
As with Jamie and Dani, I don’t know if Isaac had enough characterization for his moment with the Believe sign to register as anything close to a character beat, but it was still a nice moment albeit one that—like most in the episode—has Nate’s non-participation hanging over it.
Colin Corner: More than a concern about not following up on a throwaway line about Grindr (which, again, might have never been meant to mean anything), I think in general it’s disappointing that despite two episodes where the team gathered outside of work, we really didn’t get much of a deeper understanding of individual players and it’s Jan’s one-joke personality that gets the big moment at halftime. I hope we get more focus on the team next year, regardless of whether we wishfully thought Colin’s queerness into existence.
So if you are unaware, commenters pointed out early in the season that the Championship’s promotion scheme puts the top two teams through automatically but then includes a playoff for the final spot. And so technically, per the claims made by the commentators, Richmond earned the second-place position and thus promotion, but this was technically not a do-or-die game despite it being presented as one, provided that the rules around the Championship are the same in this universe (which next season will have Premier League licensing, per a recent deal).
Always happy for puppy content, but can anyone explain a reason for the lesbian dog breeder coming on to Keeley being a thing that took up time in this episode of television?
“Advice for being a boss: hire your best friend”—I mean, I would argue that hiring a P.R. person who might have warned you about the potential risks associated with dating one of your players instead of celebrating it might have actually been preferable given how that could have blown up in your face, but hey, you do you. (This really was a lovely scene, though).
Like, are they giving Trent Crimm his own spinoff? I feel like there wasn’t nearly enough information to understand why he would purposefully burn Nate, resign from his job, and go off in search of himself.
They never quite circled back to whether Roy kept up his reality TV habit with his yoga ladies, but we do learn that he shares in the national schadenfreude when the U.K. earns zero points at Eurovision, so he’s still got his appetite for it.
I want to take a brief moment to thank everyone—and I do mean everyone—who’s been reading and commenting on these reviews. I realize that invariably my critical approach to a show that had such a distinct connection with audiences generated some disconnect, but from that disconnect came some really productive conversation, and a dialogue that I feel helped us all collectively better understand the somewhat surprising divergence of views on the season as a whole. As I said on Twitter, writing criticism on a weekly basis like this is not an effort to persuade people who love something that it’s flawed, or bad; it’s about expressing your point of view such that people who care about a show can better understand their own reaction to it, either by helping to clarify concerns or galvanizing one’s appreciation. For all of our ups and downs and the comments claiming I hated a show I ranked as my top show of 2020, y’all’s contributions to these reviews really did become a critical part of my experience of the season, and I’m hopeful we’ll be back together next year for the next phase of Ted Lasso’s journey.
In the opening moments of “Midnight Train to Royston,” we see the results of the penultimate game of AFC Richmond’s season, as Sam basks in the glory of his first career hat trick and another win for the surging Richmond. Through the voiceover, commentators Arlo White and Chris Powell reveal through exposition that Richmond has been playing spectacular football, and are a win away from securing promotion back to the Premier League.
I have to admit that I found this a bit surprising (and not just because y’all in the comments explained that the promotion structure of the Championship is more complicated than this episode implies). After starting the season with a long string of draws, Ted Lasso has mostly had Richmond’s regular season play out off-screen, and the few games we did see were part of the FA Cup and that ended with an embarrassing loss to Man City that one could have imagined as a real momentum killer. Instead, the team appears to have gone on an impressive winning streak, and are now on the verge of achieving the goal that Rebecca and Ted set out for this year at the end of the first season.
Some of you in the comments have tried to do the math on what type of unprecedented performance would have allowed the team to be in such an advantageous position given their weak start, but it’s clear that Ted Lasso isn’t interested in the math. Instead, “Midnight Train to Royston” presents such a rosy picture of Richmond’s performance on the pitch to draw as stark a contrast as possible with the tension bubbling to the surface amongst the team’s employees. At the same time as Richmond is on the brink of promotion, Ted’s panic attacks are a day away from becoming tabloid fodder at the hands of a disgruntled Nate, Sam’s on the verge of a career-changing decision on his playing career and his relationship with Rebecca, and Roy and Keeley are facing down the biggest challenge to their relationship to date.
However, to say these tensions fail to register equally would be an understatement. Built as it is around a pivotal turning point and an uncertain future for the team, this is meant to be the climax for the season’s story arcs, and yet half of them remain illegible and struggle to hold up against much scrutiny. The result is an episode that mostly reaffirms my frustrations with the season thus far, clarifying once and for all which stories have worked as slow-burn developments to fuel character dynamics, and which ones just feel like the show was either missing the mark from the beginning or is missing the pieces necessary to make it work in context of the story being told.
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It’s no coincidence that the two stories in this episode that work the best are also the ones that have been more consistently developed over the course of the season. Ted and Nate’s respective journeys have always been linked, even when they have never interacted this year outside of group scenes. That separation is used productively here, as Nate starts to be more comfortable voicing his frustration with Ted failing to give him proper credit around his fellow coaches, and he continues to be mostly shrugged off and lightly corrected by Roy and Beard. Unlike Nate, Roy and Beard are comfortable in their role as assistant coaches: they know what their job is, they know how to fulfill their roles, and they have no ambition to achieve something more if it means being forced to take on more authority or step out of their comfort zones. Nate wants more recognition of the work he’s doing, and is tired of Ted’s patronage—symbolized by the suit—effectively relegating him to a lackey in his own mind and the mind of everyone else (or so he believes). And that would seem to be why, at some point offscreen, Nate told Trent Crimm (The Independent) that Ted lied about his bout with food poisoning, and actually had a panic attack.
It’s a smart convergence of two stories that have been operating independent of one another, but have nonetheless always been in conversation. Nate’s storyline has been frustrating in productive ways for the show, as our issues with Nate’s behavior and the absence of any consequences for Nate’s behavior has emphasized Ted’s failure to recognize and take responsibility for what was happening while he was (understandably) distracted dealing with his own problems. Nate’s betrayal of Ted is going to cut deep, yes, but if there’s anything we’ve learned about Ted this season it’s that he sees the well-being of everyone on his team as his own problem to solve. Just look at how his confrontation with Sharon after she tries to ghost on him plays out: at the core of his anger is the idea that they shared a breakthrough, and thus created a bond that links their journeys together. The fact he didn’t realize how his similar bond with Nate had fallen apart will be as central to the pain he’s about to go through as the news cycle Trent Crimm has set in motion. Whatever hit Ted faces to his professional reputation or his coaching future seems like it will pale in comparison to the personal betrayal by someone he considered his friend, and also his personal failure to see the signs that this was on the horizon.
For Nate, meanwhile, this really is his villain arc, but I appreciate the show’s willingness to let his heel turn play out the way it has. While I thought roping him into the Roy and Keeley nonsense—more on that in a bit—was unnecessary, his story remains one of someone who spent so long getting spit on that a brief taste of notoriety has him spitting indiscriminately hoping it will give him the recognition he feels he deserves. It’s a depressing insight into how the culture of toxic masculinity is so pervasive that someone like Nate is destined to replicate the same behavior that tormented him, and unable to imagine success or authority through a lens other than the one he was under for the rest of his life. It echoes a conversation I once had with a TV writer about the culture of writers’ rooms, and how the abusive behavior of showrunners is so easily passed down to other writers as they gain authority over the course of their careers. It’s not a pleasant story to watch, but that’s what makes it work: we want to believe the culture Ted created within the team would be enough to overcome the scars of Nate’s past, but it wasn’t, and now everyone has to reckon with that.
The success of these two stories is built on the fact we’ve seen those scars develop over the course of both the first and second seasons, and as the story takes this turn we have enough information to understand Nate’s decision even if we don’t agree with it. The rest of this episode, though, struggles to accomplish the same, rushing to deliver comparable climaxes for stories that are just plain not working. This has been particularly true for Roy and Keeley’s relationship, which the show has decided to turn into two love triangles at the last minute. After last week’s declaration of love from Jamie, this week sees Keeley end up a victim of Nate’s shotgun masculinity while a miscommunication about Phoebe’s pick-up from school finds Roy hanging classroom decorations with her teacher and notably not mentioning Keeley when she asks if he’s married. As they sit down for a photoshoot for Keeley’s first magazine spread attached to her career and not her looks, these details spill out, and they’re left hanging in the uncertainty of the moment while the camera flashes.
Photo: Apple TV+
And look, I won’t pretend that I didn’t enjoy the chemistry that Roy has had with Phoebe’s teacher in their couple of scenes from throughout the season, but I truly do not have a grasp on what this accelerated conflict is trying to accomplish. I understand the broad purpose of the story: the season as a whole has been about testing the limits of Ted’s idealistic philosophy, and Roy and Keeley’s relationship is the show’s closest romantic equivalent of that. But the show already did an episode where they took off the rose-colored glasses on their relationship, and there we saw them learn lessons about clear communication that seemingly brought them closer together. At this point, nothing that’s happening to the characters is emerging from the characters themselves: it is the show’s contrivance pulling Jamie’s declaration out of thin air, exaggerating their funeral argument in ways that lacked motivation, and now tossing in Phoebe’s teacher and Nate’s kiss—which Roy is admittedly rightfully unconcerned about—to pile up so many potential vulnerabilities that even the show’s most ideal relationship is on the verge of collapsing.
But rather than being legitimately concerned about their relationship, I’m distracted by the overloading of story by the writers, whose machinations have disconnected the plot from any clear character motivations, and pulled me out of a story at a time when the show wants to be pulling me in. The scene that precedes the revelations, as Roy sits down with Keeley as she worries about the pressure of finally being seen as herself and not just as a body, is such a clear depiction of the core of their supportive relationship, so why couldn’t that have just been the story? I still do not understand what the show is gaining from layering these contrivances on top of this relationship that couldn’t have been achieved by the two characters on their own terms, especially given that Jamie’s point of view is entirely absent here, further reinforcing how arbitrary that revelation was.
It’s probably less surprising, if you’re been reading these reviews consistently, that I feel much the same about Sam and Rebecca’s storyline. In an episode searching for conflicts to complicate relationships, the most bizarre choice is to introduce an entirely new one for Sam and Rebecca instead of using the ones that already existed in their story thus far. I know I’ve complained a lot about the lack of consequences from Sam’s Dubai Air protest, but there was always the possibility it might come back to complicate their lives later on, especially once he and Rebecca became romantically involved. And the messy power dynamics of their relationship seemed like they would be a natural source of later conflict, should more people become aware of their connection. So it’s strange to see the show drop in Sam Richardson playing Edwin Akufoz—an African billionaire who wants to buy Sam to play for a team in Africa he doesn’t even own yet—out of its hat to generate the threat of Sam leaving the team, completely bypassing existing conflicts to tell a far less interesting story about Sam and Rebecca facing rote dilemmas of deciding whether a relationship is important enough to disrupt other parts of their life.
And yes, my core problem with this story is that I do not buy their relationship: they flirted anonymously for at most a couple of months, spent a few weeks in a secret relationship, and now it’s true love? We needed to see more of those bantr messages if they wanted us to understand that depth of connection, and we also needed more time spent in Sam’s point-of-view: it’s weird to show the start of his conversation with his father here, for example, but not show us how the conversation played out before his final moment with Rebecca. It’s just a fundamentally unbalanced storyline, and to rob us of the chance to see Sam debriefing his experience with Edwin is a missed opportunity to start the process of rectifying that.
But even if I imagine a scenario where I was all in on the relationship itself, nothing about how this story plays out makes sense to me. Why do we never see a conversation where the team’s coaches/management have a meeting to discuss the on-field ramifications of losing a star player, and what it might do to team morale? The show chooses to boil the story down to “Rebecca has to decide if she loves Sam enough to tell him not to follow his dream home to Africa,” but there are clear financial and professional obligations central to this story that the show just sweeps under the rug in the process, and it’s a disservice to the world the writers spent two seasons creating. This is especially true when the show goes so far as to draw a parallel between Rebecca’s admission to Ted that she had been trying to sabotage him from season one with her admission that she and Sam were having an affair, as though those were two equally significant moments in the show’s story arcs.
As soon as I realized what the show was suggesting, it galvanized my frustration with how this story has played out, and the disconnect it’s created between me and the show as a whole. Ted’s message in that scene is that nothing he says matters, and that Rebecca just needs to listen to her heart and her gut, but that is profoundly not true. The choice to have all of these characters collectively ignore the power dynamics of this relationship and the potential workplace implications is incredibly confusing, as is Ted’s complete lack of concern for how Sam’s potential exit would impact his team and their future. Charitably, one could argue we’re meant to judge Ted for this, and see it as another sign of his inability to focus his energy in the right place when it comes to balancing the team and his relationship with his coworkers. But the show has failed to present anyone—Higgins, for example—making a more pragmatic case for handling this situation, and the sweeping romanticism of Sam and Rebecca’s relationship has never wavered or really even been questioned to date. And while there is one remaining episode for all of these consequences to come to the surface, I have reached the point where I frankly do not trust the show when it comes to handling the fallout from this and other story elements that have popped up this season.
I realize with one episode remaining in the season it is possible that whatever Rupert was seeding at the funeral will reshape our understanding of this season, and clarify the writers’ intentions for how we’re meant to see its place in the three-season arc that Sudeikis has talked about having planned for the show and its characters. And as is always the case, as the writers are reconvening to break that third season, they’re going to be exploring the stories from a fresh perspective, meaning that criticisms of a given season may be naturally addressed by self-reflection or the injection of new voices. As such, I want to emphasize—because it apparently needs to be said—that my evaluation of this episode or even the season as a whole is not a wholesale dismissal of Ted Lasso, its philosophy, or those who are enjoying the show more than I am right now.
But given how much trust I held in the show at the end of the first season, it’s deeply disappointing to leave “Midnight Train to Royston” feeling so at odds with the show’s priorities, and its understanding of the stories being told. For me, it’s not as simple as a lack of focus on the football elements of the series, or the tonal swings as we dig deeper into the characters’ pain, or the fiction that a Nigerian player who loses a game protesting a sponsor would only benefit from doing so (okay, you got me, that last one is still a sticking point). It’s the intangible feeling that there are dimensions to these stories that are being left behind or elided for reasons that I don’t understand, which is all the more distressing for a show that I was so in tune with last year.
I’ll be more than thrilled if I feel differently after next week’s finale, but I can’t pretend that I’m currently optimistic about that given what transpired here.
Stray observations
So, it’s incredibly dumb that a week before that a game that would determine the team’s promotion to the Premier League Ted would have the team learning the dance to “Bye Bye Bye.” I know it’s a fun bit, and we love the show having fun bits, but there is a time and a place for them. But then I realized that part of the point of the scene is that Nate spends the whole time seething at how dumb it is, which is both good subtle storytelling but also deeply conflicting since it means I’m relating most to Nate’s perspective, and Nate is being a right git. We could read this as the show being consciously ambiguous, but instead it just reads as wanting to have its cake and eat it too based on the aforementioned lack of trust.
Note the clear contrast between Nate and Will, who’s swaying his hips to the music as he holds the speaker.
Sam Richardson doesn’t get a lot of “comedy” to play with Akufo, but I really enjoyed the physicality of his run from the helicopter.
“Congratulations, you both just met a cool person”—the “middle-aged man is Banksy” joke was a dud, but I thought it was interesting to see Akufo use one of Ted’s own lines (albeit one he used with Trent during his interview) as a way of making Sam feel more comfortable with the idea of leaving Richmond.
It would appear that Sam has picked up “Full name sung to the tune of ‘Seven Nation Army’” as his chant.
We spent all that time speculating in the comments that they would end the season with the team in the Championship play-offs to determine the third promotion spot, but the show has entirely erased any of those distinctions, now just saying they’re one win away. Does this mean they’re in the final playoff game? Because if not, the implication that the next game is “do or die” would be misleading, although they’re also not treating it as very “do or die” given Nate’s the only one discussing strategy. Just very strange all around.
“Your eyebrows aren’t crazy. They’re psychotic”—this Beard line is fine and all, but I preferred the little moment when he checks his own eyebrows as Roy’s ranting about the photo shoot being picky about his.
“Unnervingly accurate charcoal sketches of breasts”—It’s Roy’s “nice” when he gets to one he likes that really sells his reaction to these.
I suppose it makes sense to have Ted be too giddy to resist bringing up the Cheers connection with another “Sam and Rebecca,” but seemed a bit on-the-nose after it’s been discussed online for weeks, y’know?
Speaking of subtle moments with Nate, on rewatching it you can see the moment where he starts to cross wires between his desire to be in charge and whatever energy he was channeling toward Keeley as she talks about how Roy never wants to go shopping with her. We’ve seen him cross these wires before when he asked out the host at the restaurant after securing the window table, too, so it’s a natural extension.
“Don’t let-ter get away with it, Ted”—as the dust on the season settles, I’m pretty convinced that the “standalone” episode would have been better spent on Higgins, both because he’s delightful and we could have gained some insight into how the business operations of the club and the team’s performance were weighing on him.
As a general rule, if I don’t know a character’s name going into the penultimate episode of a season, you can’t successfully insert them into a love triangle. (It’s Ms. Bowen, we learn here.)
I’m looking forward to flipping through the episode once it goes live to see what the Nigerian painting Sam and Edwin are looking at looks like, since it was just a green screen in the screener.
So, Edwin’s plan—he claims—is to buy Raja Casablanca and turn the Moroccan team into a powerhouse alongside the major European clubs. I was curious, though, if there is any precedent to an individual buying rights to a player before they’ve actually bought the team in question? I was confused by the reasons he would be doing things in that order, and it made me suspicious that he’s lying. Surely Sam shouldn’t make any kind of decision until the ink is dry on the sale of the team, right?
I enjoyed Roy’s callback to the “Independent Woman” scene from the first season, which might be part of why I reacted so violently to the “Is this the end of Roy and Keeley?!” nonsense right after it.
Colin Corner: Feels like the chances of them circling back to that random Grindr line are getting pretty thin, but they did close the loop on his Lambo being way too much car for him, so I’m not giving up hope yet.
“Karma Police” was much too on the nose, but I’ll never be mad at OK Computer needle drops.
The episode’s title appears to be a play on Sam’s potential departure and the idea that Royston is both an actual location in Georgia and in the U.K.? I think?
Picking up a few weeks after Richmond’s loss to Man City, “No Weddings and a Funeral” wastes no time clarifying its emotional purpose. After opening on Sam and Rebecca musing about whether to take their relationship public, Rebecca’s mother arrives with the news that her husband has died, and all of the show’s narrative energy converges on his funeral.
After Beard’s divisive detour into the streets of London, the choice to once again largely ignore the on-field dimensions of Richmond’s season is a bit of a surprising one, with only two episodes left to go in the season. But what becomes clear is that for the show’s writers, whatever ending the season is building to cannot happen until Ted and Rebecca achieve a sense of clarity about how they intend to approach those circumstances, based on what they’ve experienced in the season thus far. For Ted, that means confronting the core emotions about his father’s death which were inevitably brought to the surface by someone else losing their own father. For Rebecca, this means confronting her mother about how she could be romanticizing the cheating, gaslighting man she kept letting back into her life, and what her understanding of this means for her own relationships.
The climax of “No Weddings and a Funeral” is a cross-cut between Ted’s house call therapy session with Sharon—who he called after he had a panic attack putting on his tie to head to the funeral—and Rebecca confronting her mother with the truth about her father’s behavior. For Ted, this is the culmination of the season’s strongest storytelling, gradually allowing us to understand how Ted’s philosophy is founded on his grief and anger over his father’s suicide. It isn’t as simple as the idea that Ted is compensating for his sense of loss. It’s that his entire personality has become about simultaneously working to help everyone in the way he wishes he could have helped his father, and also doing everything in his power to not show his pain and become a burden on them. It’s Rebecca’s mother who says that “once I love something, I love it forever” when defending her choice to stay with her husband, but in many ways Ted’s stubbornness about his coping mechanisms was equally absolute, up until his divorce shattered the equilibrium he had managed to attain. And so not only is Ted feeling that he’s quitting on his family like his father quit on him, but he’s also trained himself never to let anyone else share his pain, trapping him in a toxic cycle.
Based on what Sharon says to Ted over the phone about breathing exercises, this is not their first session since the phone call after the Man City game, but it’s their breakthrough moment. Jason Sudeikis has always been at his best when the show asks him to strip down to Ted’s deep well of sadness, and he’s excellent here as Sharon flips a switch in his brain about how he thinks about his father. It’s important for his therapy that he details the day he found his father’s body, and the hatred he felt for what his father did to his wife and son, but it’s more important that he understands the love he feels for his father in relation to that. The Johnny Tremain story is a core memory for Ted, but one that he had pushed aside, even as it informs the responsibility he feels for his players and his family. And his wish that his father could have known how good he was at being a father is hopefully the permission he needs to let himself accept that he is a good father, friend, and coach, even if he isn’t able to solve all their problems (and even if things like the Nate situation might reveal ways in which he’s failed in those roles at times).
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It’s a powerful and important scene, and one that has clear reverberations through all of Ted’s relationships both personal and professional as we head into the rest of the season. The choice to cross-cut it with Rebecca’s conversation with her mother, though, is where things start to get more muddled. To start, Emmy winner Hannah Waddingham is tremendous throughout the scene, matching Sudeikis’ energy and reminding us how well she taps into Rebecca’s vulnerabilities. It’s a tall order to match up something as dark as Ted discovering his father’s body to her finding her father cheating when she was a teenager, but Waddingham sells it, and fully anchors us in Rebecca’s struggle to understand her mother’s choice to act as though this funeral isn’t celebrating a man who did them wrong. And ostensibly, the choice to run the scenes in parallel makes the case that even if it may not have been traumatic to the same degree, Rebecca’s life philosophy has been similarly shaped by her father’s cheating: it informs her approach to romantic relationships, whether it’s her divorce from Rupert or her anxiety over her relationship with Sam.
Except, try as Waddingham might, I struggled to find a coherent narrative in Rebecca’s storyline here, mainly because her arc in the season has been so opaque. As I’ve explored previously, the show entirely lost the character’s work-life balance this season, pivoting exclusively to the bantr storyline outside of the Cerithium Oil situation in “Do The Right-est Thing” that ended up being part of the bantr storyline anyway (which Nora cements by reprising the “Boss Ass Bitch” line to describe Rebecca shagging Sam). What “No Weddings And A Funeral” does is make the argument that her narrow focus on finding love this season is a symptom of her own pathology: whereas the first season saw her come to terms with how her unhealthy desire to hurt Rupert was blinding her to the relationships she was building with her co-workers and her investment in the team she vowed to destroy, that realization didn’t suddenly mean that she knew how to be in a healthy relationship, or that she necessarily knew how to run a football club.
In writing that out, I’m starting to better understand the writers’ goal for Rebecca’s story, but placing it in such close proximity to the subtle yet purposeful setup for Ted’s breakthrough underlines how there wasn’t enough work done early in the season for this to fully register. If you have Hannah Waddingham, giving her a lengthy monologue at her father’s funeral is going to solve some of that problem, but there needed to be more evidence in the season that Rebecca was neglecting parts of her work, and that she was doing more than scrolling through dating apps. The season started with the goal of being promoted, but Rebecca didn’t seem to have internalized that goal, and seemingly didn’t have a professional priority heading into the year. I’m glad that Rebecca still has things to figure out about herself, as the whole message of the show is that personal growth is a process that never ends and can often feel tremendously isolating, but her story just has too many mixed signals for this not to register as an overreach.
While this retcon isn’t entirely successful at justifying her storylines this season, it does at least create a clearer path forward in terms of where the consequences of her and Ted’s actions will complicate Richmond’s future. Although Rebecca weirdly never brings up the power dynamics of her relationship with Sam as a point of anxiety when she decides to break things off, the choice to reintroduce Rupert is indeed conspicuous, and lines up with some discussion in the comments about how the Sam relationship could be used to undermine her leadership given the —fittingly clunky, given the joke earlier in the episode—exposition reminding us about Becks’ shares in the team. And it’s no mistake that Rupert whispers sweet nothings into Nate’s ear on his way out the door, making it increasingly likely that he stages a coup of both Ted and Rebecca in one fell swoop. While my concerns about some of the lack of immediate consequences for past storylines remain, I will be more than happy if the show takes the accumulating neglect from all these storylines into a finale cliffhanger.
However, I am less happy with the clunkiest part of this episode, which was the reintroduction of Jamie into Keeley’s romantic life. I was going to write that it was the return of the Keeley/Roy/Jamie love triangle, but to be honest the show never actually told that story: Keeley had dumped Jamie on her own accord before she really started connecting with Roy, and by the time Jamie returned to the picture Roy and Keeley were already settling into their relationship. Jamie’s return has featured a few moments between him and Keeley, like when he went to her looking for advice on connecting with the team and she took him to Sharon, but those were all fairly minor. Concurrently, the show has never really given us much reason to doubt Roy and Keeley’s relationship, especially given how—as Alan Sepinwall said when I was discussing this episode with him—every fight they have seems to only bring them closer together. And so it was deeply perplexing to watch an episode where Roy picks a dumb fight without a lot of reason, Keeley seems overly impressed that Jamie was willing to wear a normal suit, and they kept stealing glances until Jamie reveals that one of the reasons he came back to Richmond was because he loves her and wants her back.
I just don’t understand the logic of this eleventh hour story. It seems unfathomable to me that anyone in the show’s audience is rooting against Roy and Kelley based on the stories that have been told, and nothing about his minor teasing about her desire to fertilize a tree after she died would have impacted that. And while Jamie has indeed done a lot to fuel his redemption arc, we haven’t been given enough of his point-of-view for him to be an equal rooting interest to Roy, even if Roy had been taken down a peg here. If the show wants this to feel consequential or suspenseful, they needed to have approached the resolution to Roy and Kelley’s past conflicts differently, leaving meaningful wiggle room for it to seem like a legitimate competition. As it stands, it reads as writerly intervention to fuel late-season conflict, without the textual evidence necessary to make it an organic part of the story being told.
With the entirety of the team ditching their trainers—poor Dani might never recover—for the occasion, and Sassy and Nora returning to the fold, “No Weddings And A Funeral” uses its longer running time to deliver lots of small moments of joy, in addition to Rebecca’s Rickroll eulogy serving as an emotional anchor for the funeral itself. And while I do think that this much time spent away from the pitch reinforces the risks associated with Beard’s detour last week, there’s enough fuel in those small moments here to generate momentum, and hopefully bring us a step or two closer to pulling the season’s various threads together. What’s clear here, though, is that the writers may have overreached on how some of these arcs are meant to converge, which is going to create some hurdles to bringing everything full circle by the time Richmond’s do-or-die moment comes at season’s end.
Stray observations
To our back-and-forth discussion last week about how narratively significant “Beard After Hours” would be, he Facetimes Jane into the funeral like it’s a concert, without any delving into the unhealthy dimensions of that relationship. For me, it’s still a misstep, although I was happy to continue the dialogue we started about it here in the comments last week with the good folks at Lasso Cast.
In addition to his little moment with Rupert, Nate’s super villain arc was also fueled once more by Jan, who notes the infantilizing detail that Nate’s only suit came via Ted. At this point, I don’t see how he turns away from the dark side, given how much someone like Rupert validating him and giving him authority would fuel his ego.
After this week’s Emmys—where, if you missed it, the show won Outstanding Comedy Series, Actor, and Supporting Actor (Brett Goldstein) and Actress (Waddingham)—and the number of times they played the beginning of the show’s theme song, it stood out how when the episode awkwardly transitioned from “He died” to “Yeahhhhhh.” Definitely intentional, I thought, given the way they didn’t try to fit in any dialogue in between.
Rebecca’s mother made a joke about how Sam’s boxer briefs left little to the imagination but if the writers really wanted that joke to land they would have chosen a lighter color (although it’s possible the black was a standards and practices note).
I appreciate the show’s follow through on throwaway jokes, like Ted getting ready for the funeral to “Easy Lover” as he explained earlier in the season. It’s the kind of attention to detail that makes it harder for me when the show contorts itself to make things like the love triangle materialize.
As his panic attack comes on, Ted sees the army man his son sent to protect him, his son’s visit last season, and then finally a dart hitting a board.
After I watched this episode, I had a conversation with a friend about “Never Gonna Give You Up” where he also brought up the fact that everyone initially presumed Rick Astley was black, so I appreciated that Rebecca’s mother still believed this was true decades later. (Also, while I know that the song has become infamous due to Rickrolling, for me as an older millennial it is instead a definitive “Song I Learned About Due To Pop-Up Video”).
I thought Jane Facetiming into a funeral was creepy, but I did appreciate that you could see her on the screen singing along to “Amazing Grace.”
I’ve never fully understood shipping Ted and Rebecca, to be honest, and a big part of that is because I find Ted and Sassy’s whole dynamic far more compelling. I’ll ship that.
Although he started the season as its first case study, Dani has largely faded into the background, so his little runner about the shoes was fun here.
Did anyone get really distracted by how small the doors in Rebecca’s house were, given that she towered over them? How many times did she hit her forehead as a teenager?!
Not that I’m entirely hung up on that Grindr joke from Colin earlier in the season, but it’s Bi Visibility Day as I’m writing this, so I’m just going to note we’re still waiting for any other piece of evidence to go along with it. His weirdness that Becks was breastfeeding her baby during the funeral and his ignorance to the fact that not all shoes require you to stand in line and wait for them were both unhelpful in this regard.
I’ve been told I am not appreciating Higgins enough, so while it probably wasn’t an expressly necessary scene narratively to see the coaches all debriefing after learning Rebecca’s father died, I appreciated it for Higgins’ belief that in heaven animals are in charge and humans are the pets. I look forward to fan art of him curled up in front of Cindy Clawford.
I spy… an iPhone with no notch. Screenshot: Apple TV+
Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso is about a folksy American football coach hired to help a stumbling British soccer club, but gadget nerds were buzzing about something else spotted in last Friday’s episode: a potentially notch-free iPhone 13.
The cast of Ted Lasso is frequently seen using Apple products within the show, but eagle-eyed viewers noticed something unusual in a scene where a character whips out her iPhone to check a message. As you can see in the photo above, there was no notch in sight. The back of the phone appears to be an iPhone 12, but the front doesn’t have the distinctive notch we’ve all come to love and respect with no animosity whatsoever. The phone also appears to have the same default wallpaper used in iOS 14.
That appears to be an iPhone 12 from the back. Rebecca’s face is Apple right now. Image: Apple TV+
Apple is notorious for its secrecy, so it seems unlikely that this is a deliberate signal that the notch is disappearing from the iPhone 13. That said, it’s been rumored for months now that the iPhone 13 would have a much smaller notch or a hole-punch selfie camera. However, a completely notchless display isn’t believed to be in the cards for this year’s iPhone. It’s also possible that this was an unintentional goof during the post-editing process. After all, there are several close-up shots of iPhones within the same episode where the notch is visibly present. Though users on Twitter did seem to spot more than one instance of the notchless phone, so who can say?
CGI is actually used quite heavily in Ted Lasso, mostly during scenes where the fictional football club AFC Richmond plays their matches in crowded stadiums. (You can check out a neat video over at The Mary Sue to see how extensive those visual effects shots can be.) Viewers are also convinced in various corners of the internet that Brett Goldstein, the actor who plays the cantankerous Roy Kent, is also somehow a completelyCGI character as part of a broader Apple conspiracy. The latter is obviously a bit out there, but given that CGI is a part of the show’s DNA, it’s not entirely implausible that perhaps an editor got a bit too heavy-handed by accident.
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Whether it’s a cheeky nod or a complete gaffe, it’s not as if we’ll have to wait too long to see what the iPhone 13 will look like. The phones are rumored to go on sale on Sept. 17, meaning we should be getting word about an iPhone launch event in the coming weeks.