Also: Should we panic about Ted? Can Keeley and Roy make it work? Will Sam stay or go?
Season 2, Episode 12: ‘Inverting the Pyramid of Success’
And … it’s a wrap.
After a dozen episodes, Season 2 of “Ted Lasso” is officially in the books. And viewers of the finale might be forgiven for, in the words of Yogi Berra, feeling déjà vu all over again.
It’s the final game of the season, which will determine whether AFC Richmond winds up in the Premier League or an inferior one. And partway through the match, it turns out they only need a draw! They score to tie the game and …
Well, unlike last season’s finale against Man City, they hold on to their draw, instead of giving up a last-minute goal. They’re back in the Premier League for Season 3! And in the Premier League they will have the opportunity to play Rupert’s new team, West Ham United, coached by Rupert’s new coach, the suddenly supervillainous Nate Shelley.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s review how things closed out this week.
Ted and the tabloids
For all the ominous setup last episode, the uproar over Ted leaving the Tottenham game because of a panic attack — and not, as initially claimed, food poisoning — didn’t really involve much, you know, uproar.
Of course, it’d be awful to be splashed all over the tabs. (Just ask Rebecca.) But everyone on the team supports Ted unequivocally. Mae and the pub denizen-fans, too. Even the curmudgeon who wanders by with his “if my father had a panic attack at Normandy” nonsense basically acquits Ted seconds later. The only person who seems genuinely upset is George Cartrick, the ex-Richmond coach whom Rebecca fired in Season 1. And who cares about the opinion of a guy who famously lets his testicles hang out of his shorts?
The whole thing appears to have been a tempest in not even a teapot but a teaspoon. Indeed, by the end, the only real victim of Trent Crimm’s exposé in The Independent turns out to be Trent Crimm himself. In an exceptionally bizarre chain of logic, Trent reveals to Ted that:
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He felt a journalistic obligation to write the piece.
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He felt a personal obligation to go against all journalistic ethics and reveal that Nate was his anonymous source.
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He doesn’t really want to be a journalist anyway, so he told his bosses what he did and they sacked him.
In what universe does this make a lick of sense? He could have just declined to write the panic-attack piece and quit. Instead, he injured a man he admires and his own career for literally no reason.
Oh well, at least now he’ll have time to learn to ride a bike. I strongly suspect this joke is an inside one: Sarah Miles, the actress who plays Brompton-bike-riding Sharon Fieldstone, didn’t know how to ride one when she was first cast.
Speaking of whom, I was wrong last week. Sharon really did just up and leave with no fanfare. She gives Ted a brief call this week, but that’s it. As I said before: disappointing. I hope she’s back next season.
Sam
It’s time for Sam’s big choice. Stay with AFC Richmond? Or accept Edwin Akufo’s offer to be an early centerpiece in Casablanca? It seems odd that Sam promises his decision immediately after the Brentford game that will determine AFC Richmond’s fate. Richmond will either win, in which case he’ll be elated; or they’ll lose, in which case he’ll be dejected. Either way, it seems like a bad emotional environment in which to make so crucial a life choice.
Of course, it appears that he had already made the choice earlier. Right after his father told him to listen to the universe, Sam saw a young fellow playing pickup soccer wearing his jersey. It’s not much as signs go, but it may have been enough.
Or perhaps he’d made the choice even before that. Toward the end of the episode, he tells Ted and Rebecca that he’s staying with Richmond because it’s best for his “journey.” As a non-fan of the Sam-Rebecca story line, I confess that I’m not happy that the current will-they-or-won’t-they narrative is clearly going to continue into next season.
Indeed, the whole idea that staying or going is Sam’s choice to make is a perfect distillation of why their relationship is such a bad idea. Sam is under contract. Rebecca is essentially telling him he can unilaterally void that contract. She can’t intend to extend that privilege to every player on the team, right? She certainly didn’t tell Jamie last season that it was his choice whether to stay in Richmond or go to Man City.
This whole story line is a mess. It’s actually worse now, because we don’t even get to see Rebecca and Sam enjoying one another’s company, just mooning around like miserable teenagers.
As for Akufo, his tantrum when Sam turned him down was absurd and unfunny. Like the “Led Tasso” scene back in Episode 3, it was trying to mine a vein of broad comedy that is outside the show’s comfort zone. And like that scene, it flopped. Stick to what you do best, “Ted Lasso.”
By contrast, the response by Francis, Akufo’s attendant, was simple and perfect: the classic fake-handshake-into-smoothing-his-hair routine. That must really smart coming from a professional handshaker.
Keeley and Roy
Keeley has felt a bit lost in the shuffle this season. (Both she and Rebecca have taken notable steps backward as strong female characters.) As Roy has ascended to center stage on the show, she has often been rendered as a kind of sidekick.
It does not, however, look like that will be the case when Season 3 rolls around. The VC folks behind Bantr are going to fund her to start her own PR firm! This is clearly great news for Keeley.
It is less clear whether it’s great news for Keeley and Roy. After last week’s game of confessional one-uppance at the photo shoot, things were looking grim, with the two giving their best end-of-“The Graduate” stares into the camera.
For most of this episode, however, the couple seems back on track. Not only does Roy not murder Jamie for telling Keeley he still loved her, he actually forgives him. He does it with an obscenity, of course. He is, after all, still Roy Kent.
He is appropriately happy at Keeley’s good news. And he takes being left out of the Vanity Fair article in stride, even if it does send him in for a consultation with the Diamond Dogs.
The joke about Roy having a hard time talking about his emotions (“It. Hurt. My. Feeling.”) is an old one, but well executed. And did anyone else notice that Roy’s overall take on the session — “So, sometimes the [expletive] Diamond Dogs is just chatting about [expletive] and no one has to [expletive] solve anything and nothing [expletive] changes” — is a near-verbatim quote of Ted’s assessment of “girl talk” with Rebecca way back in Episode 1? (The expletives, obviously, are additions.) It’s a clever echo, and a sly suggestion that men and women often talk in the same way, even if they call it different things.
It’s not until the end that doubt creeps back in. Roy, sweetly but foolishly, has planned a six-week vacation in Marbella for the two of them. But Keeley can’t go — she has to spend every waking moment preparing for her new gig — and she tells Roy to take the trip by himself. Once again, he does that slight head tilt that he does when he’s making sure he understands.
“Are we breaking up?” he asks.
They’re not, thank goodness. And there’s no real reason to think this is a bad sign at all. Keeley needs to be a workaholic, Roy needs a vacation, and six weeks isn’t really that long. But as with Sam and Rebecca, the show wants to keep us wondering over the long months between now and Season 3.
Curse you, “Ted Lasso.”
The Game against Brentford
There’s not a lot more to say here. (We’ll cover Nate in the final section.) But I will note that the end of the match, when Jamie is fouled directly in front of the goal, takes the Jamie-is-now-a-great-teammate narrative to ridiculous lengths. Though Jamie was the one fouled, and though the announcers note he hasn’t missed a penalty kick all season, he gives the ball to Dani Rojas to take the shot.
Yes, the same Dani Rojas who accidentally killed Richmond’s old mascot, Earl, with a penalty kick in Episode 1, and who — from the sound of it — hasn’t taken a penalty kick since. This is, of course, deliberate on the show’s part: Before Dani takes the shot, we see Earl’s name etched on his cleat and Earl’s replacement, Macy Greyhound, on the sideline. (I confess that I might have chosen Tina Feyhound, though it was close.)
But, seriously? Of course Jamie should take the shot! And having him do something as ridiculous as giving the ball to someone with a recent history of “the yips” — simply in order to close out a one-episode story line that most of us forgot about weeks ago — is just, well, ridiculous.
Nate
This is obviously the Big One, the one that we’ve seen coming down the track almost all season long. But it has proceeded in fits and starts, and suddenly — I think far too suddenly — the gradual evolution seems complete.
Even before the game begins, Nate is unconscionably rude to the other coaches. When Ted asks if they want to stick with Nate’s false 9 formation, he replies, “You’d be fools not to.” As I noted last week, for virtually the whole season Nate has punched down, specifically at Colin and at Will. Even earlier in this episode he seemed customarily afraid of Beard.
So why the sudden transformation? I know the forces tugging at him emotionally, but why did they accelerate so rapidly? Perhaps after betraying Ted to “The Independent” he felt there was no turning back?
Or maybe it’s the suit? Keeley essentially remade Nate as Roy, clothes-wise, and maybe he got the bad parts with none of the good? (I jest, of course. Roy has no bad parts.) We’ve been told that the clothes make the man. But perhaps — and here I feel obligated to channel my inner Roy — this time the clothes made the man an [expletive].
Whatever accounts for Nate’s arrival at his heart of darkness, things only get worse from here. Everywhere Nate looks, he sees a new slight. At the Diamond Dogs meeting, he’s furious that Roy wanted to kill Jamie for saying he still loves Keeley, but thinks it’s no big deal that Nate kissed Keeley. He wants to be head-butted because he surmises — correctly — that Roy dismisses him as a complete non-threat.
This is the engine of Nate’s downfall, I fear: a complete incapacity to comprehend context. Jamie is a threat because he’s an overtly sexual guy — he was on a sex-reality show, for goodness’ sake — who is also Keeley’s ex-boyfriend. Nate is neither of these things.
But Nate has tunnel vision. He can’t comprehend why Roy disregards him as a romantic competitor. Two episodes ago, he couldn’t understand the extreme contrast between Higgins’s vision of an afterlife as a contented kitty in front of a fire and his own vision of becoming a violent, vengeful tiger. He gets the narrow idea — Jamie spoke, I kissed; Higgins and I both want to be cats — but he completely misses the broader picture.
Apologies for the amateur psychoanalysis. But, as noted, Sharon is no longer around to supply the professional version.
Again, to Nate everything now seems like a rebuke. The team trusted him with the false 9 strategy. But at halftime he wants to scrap it for fear of being blamed, and he is clearly angry that Ted asks the players their thoughts and — thank you, teller-of-truths Jan Maas — they decide to stick with the original plan. (And no, I don’t think Nate’s false 9 formation was a Rupert-influenced attempt to undermine the team. As Nate notes, he himself would have borne the blame.)
Nate’s subsequent scene with Ted is the opportunity for Nick Mohammed (who plays Nate) to do what Jason Sudeikis and Hannah Waddingham did in the funeral episode: stretch himself as an actor and bare his character’s pain.
He does a superb job, although the scene is less powerful in part because it is quite short, and in part because it needs to do two things at once: clarify why Nate is so wounded, yet simultaneously confirm him to be an [expletive] perhaps beyond rescue. “You made me feel like I was the most important person in the whole world,” he tells Ted. “And then you abandoned me.”
Nate even brings up the signed photo he gave Ted for Christmas, which he feels should be somewhere in his office, instead of a picture of “dumb Americans.” (You may recall that in Episode 10, we briefly saw the photo in question prominently placed on Ted’s bureau at home.)
Given this season’s emphasis on fathers and sons, much of Nate’s rage toward Ted is doubtless diverted rage toward his own father, who — unlike Ted — actually does ignore and belittle him. You can see this when Nate launches his ugliest barb, saying that Ted should be back in Kansas with Henry. Nate, a son who feels abandoned, is accusing another father of abandonment.
A couple of times, I’ve suggested Nate might be turning into Travis Bickle from “Taxi Driver.” After the Brentford match, when Ted discovers the torn “Believe” sign, I thought maybe he was closer to Alex Forrest, the heartbreak-stalker played by Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction.” I was just relieved there was no stove in the locker room on which he could have boiled Macy Greyhound.
But no, the final scene clarifies that he is now a full-on Bond villain. All he needs is a scar and a catchphrase: “Do I expect you to lose? No, Coach Lasso. I expect you to die.”
Odds and Ends
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The title of this episode comes from two sources: “Inverting the Pyramid,” a book of soccer tactics that Coach Beard is reading, and “The Pyramid of Success,” developed by the legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden (a.k.a., as Ted describes him earlier in the episode, “John Obi-Wan Gandalf”). A signed copy of the latter hangs on Ted’s office wall, and Nate is staring at it before the match. At the top is what Nate wants: competitive greatness. But at the bottom, holding the whole edifice up, are the qualities that Nate is quickly abandoning: friendship, loyalty, cooperation, enthusiasm. He’s inverting the pyramid.
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We’ve all seen men’s hair go gray quickly (see: the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama), but I don’t think we’ve ever seen it happen quite as quickly as it happened to Nate Shelley. Just a few episodes ago, his hair was still basically black. It even gets grayer over the course of the episode! In the final shot it’s almost Warholian.
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In addition to those already noted, this week’s pop-cultural references included Pauly Shore, “A Few Good Men,” Heather Locklear (“Melrose Place” era) and “The Hangover.” Let me know of any I missed in comments. And thanks to the readers who pointed out a few good ones from last week: “Good Will Hunting,” “Coming to America” and “Six Degrees of Separation.”
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Lastly, I want to thank all the readers of these recaps, and especially those who have made the comments section so lively. I’ve had a ball doing this, as is probably obvious, and I hope to come back again for Season 3. In the meantime, you can keep track of me on Twitter at @OrrChris.
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