Season 4, Episode 2: ‘Curiouser and Curiouser!’
Before we get into the details of this week’s episode, I wanted to tug for a moment at a thought I didn’t squeeze into last week’s installment.
A number of readers have pointed out that Keeley’s outfit in the season premiere was very deliberately intended to evoke Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz”: pigtails, gingham dress, sparkly red shoes.
This is an analogy the show has cultivated from the start. The premise, after all, was that an innocent from Kansas flies to a strange and distant land to have adventures before returning home restored. The show’s (original) finale set its closing moments to Brandi Carlile’s cover of “Home” from “The Wiz.” Likewise, this season’s premiere was titled “Home.”
But our homecoming, as viewers, isn’t to Kansas City. It’s the opposite: back to Richmond. Kansas City is just some place with good barbecue where that jerk Dr. Jacob lives.
So Episode 2 opens with Ted waking up back in England where he belongs. Some things have changed since he was last here, such as the size of his shredded-wheat cereal. And some things have not, such as the “wanker guy,” who has mixed in a little casual sexism but is otherwise unadulterated. As I’ve done in previous seasons, I’ll break the episode down into story lines for pace and clarity.
Rebecca, Higgins and the Richmond women’s team
Last week, Higgins did some early research into the worrisome financial prospects of a Richmond women’s team; this week, he has commissioned a tome on the subject. (No, I am not going to try to reproduce the acronym.) Its conclusion is stark: A women’s team would have a “low chance of long-term viability” and “could potentially deliver a significant blow to our men’s program as well.”
Meanwhile, Rebecca is taking heat from the opposite direction too, as her feminist bona fides are questioned by Coach Alice Chilton (Tanya Reynolds). Alice is the assistant coach who’d done months of preliminary work for the Richmond women’s team and had quite reasonably expected to be made head coach. When Ted was hired instead, a miffed Alice asked Rebecca if she had even considered hiring a female coach. She hadn’t.
Alice’s question sends Rebecca into a defensive tailspin. “I am not a woman-hating monster!” she tells Higgins. But her distress seems only to compound, scene after scene: fielding questions at the news conference, ordering a book — any book! — by bell hooks. Rebecca finally emerges from her self-doubt thanks to an aphorism Higgins relates from his mother: “Strong women stand up for themselves. Stronger women stand up for others.”
So there will be a Richmond women’s team, in the unlikely event anyone was in doubt. And my guess is that we’ll follow the Dubai Air trajectory from Season 2, in which disastrous financial consequences are predicted and then largely forgotten.
I do want to note the existence of a small ideological eddy that might flow in a different direction from the show’s overall current of gentle feminism (but probably doesn’t). When Rebecca has lunch with her mother — as always, the great Harriet Walter — the latter contradicts Rebecca’s earlier statement.
“Women are monsters,” she tells her daughter. “Men showed us the way, and we perfected the model.” I doubt this line is setting up a sharper narrative edge to come. But, boy, it could be interesting if it did.
Roy
He’s here, he’s there, he’s every — actually, let’s just leave it at “he’s here.” Roy did not make the trip to Kansas City, so our first sight of him is at a news conference this week, doing the one thing he’s better at than football: swearing. Moments later, he reintroduces himself to Ted in a similar vein: “What the [expletive] are you doing?” (Roy is very difficult to quote accurately in a family newspaper.)
So far, Roy occupies a slightly odd place in the new season, as he’s the only main cast member who has no direct connection to the women’s team. (Roy is still the coach of the men’s squad, a role he took over at the end of Season 3.) Coach Beard was in a similar situation at the start of the episode but … don’t worry, we’ll get there.
Apart from cussing with customary fervor, Roy’s principle role this episode is to turn the existing visitor’s locker room at Nelson Road Stadium into a locker room for the disappointingly named Lady Greyhounds. (Does this make any sense? Where are the visiting teams, women’s and men’s both, supposed to change and shower?)
Roy’s slanted benches, flickering lights and sputtering showers were all nice touches. But the massive false pillar was the pièce de résistance.
Keeley is with Roy for most of this deconstruction. As noted last week, they are not currently together as a couple, and I am very unhappy about that. But wait, maybe a breakthrough? Just before leaving, Roy tells Keeley, “I’m afraid that I’m losing someone.”
Then she replies, “Beard?” Boo! Stop toying with my emotions, “Ted Lasso.”
Coach Beard
Yes, Keeley is of course referring to the love-triangle gag between Ted, Roy and Beard. It was an OK joke, I suppose, though it extended a bit long for my taste. I was a big fan of Beard in the early seasons, but gradually he’s been somewhat Kramer-ized into a character with a broader, less-dry brand of humor. Here’s hoping for a shift back in the other direction.
Alice and the players
Alice, Ted’s cranky new assistant coach, is the primary addition to this season’s cast, and she already fits a very familiar model: the skeptical naysayer whom Ted needs to win over with his bottomless decency and goofy wisdom. Alice is Rebecca. And Roy. And Jamie. And Trent Crimm. And Dr. Fieldstone. And on and on. It’s too early to say much more, but I like Reynolds as an actress, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the character develops. (It is presumably Alice who gives the episode its Lewis Carroll-y title, “Curiouser and Curiouser!”)
If the introduction to Alice was relatively brief, we got scarcely any introduction at all to the players on the women’s team. There’s the mildly unbalanced keeper, Boots (Jude Mack); the mutually aggressive Irish twins, Niamh (Aisling Sharkey) and Siobhan (Rex Hayes); the striker who immediately tears her A.C.L. and is out for the season; and possibly one or two others mentioned even more briefly.
I’ll have more to say about these characters as they come into clearer focus, but it doesn’t seem like any of them will be central to the show in the way that players like Roy, Jamie and Sam were in earlier seasons.
Odds and ends
I didn’t write much about Ted this week, so I wanted to take particular note of his scene in the Richmond men’s locker room, with the “Believe” sign and the familiar player names in a row: Rojas, Maas, McAdoo. It’s a memorable moment partly because, unless there are cameos ahead, this may be the closest we come to seeing these characters onscreen again. Godspeed, all. I did, however, notice at least one unfamiliar name above a locker-room cubby: Williamson? I’m pretty sure this is a reference not to a fictional men’s player but to a real-life women’s one: Leah Williamson, the captain of Arsenal and the England women’s national team, who worked as a women’s soccer consultant for Season 4.
Last week, I spent a moment imagining the machinations behind “Ted Lasso” and the various Kansas City barbecue joints it has featured. This week, we have two more data points. First, for the amusing “brisket with the boss,” Ted gives Rebecca barbecue from Gates, the place where they all ate last week. I think this means Gates has officially usurped Arthur Bryant’s old role as the top BBQ spot on “Ted Lasso.” Later, we see Coach Beard sporting a KC Sines Original baseball cap, but this is a trick: It’s a fictional restaurant that’s a nod to one of Jason Sudeikis’s close friends. (It was also shown in earlier seasons.)
“Mr. Gladstone,” the alias under which Coach Beard surreptitiously meets Ted at the pub is, of course, the alias under which Benjamin Braddock surreptitiously met Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate.”
Rebecca is still wearing green, her new, if possibly accidental, favorite color.
There were several great comments last week about both Kansas City and its barbecue options. A few people also pointed out that the excellent “How many cities are in this city?” joke was a reference to the excellent “How many countries are in this country?” joke from the show’s first episode. And a few noted that, in addition to the two references I cited, there was a third nod toward “Casablanca” that I missed: a movie poster in Ted’s house.