Apple TV Plus
The latest episode of Ted Lasso is called ‘The Strings That Bind Us’ which is a multifaceted cheeky reference to Roy’s tactic of comedically tying the players together by their most sensitive parts. There’s also a feeling about escaping the bindings that kept the team from succeeding, something that has been holding them back for as long as the show has been on.
But the episode starts with an epic music drop of ‘Dreams’ by The Cranberries, which is immediately a portent of the hopes and dreams of everyone we might care about on this show. A recurring motif in this episode are the various stores and shops starting their mornings cleaning up and preparing for the day, mostly people we don’t see more than once, but it’s connected to a feeling of something — home, perhaps, as Sam’s dad later asks about his restaurant?
Or maybe it’s home that becomes something more, like Taste of Athens for Nate and then Keeley, of all people? Or Mae’s pub, which is suffering due to the poor performance of the Richmond team? It’s a different sort of home, but it’s a community nonetheless, and helps us pull the entire metaphor of the entire show in one short series of scenes.
Baz, Paul and Jeremy, our local fan archetypes, confront Ted about the losing streak, bemoaning having humanized him in the past and thus not pushing him hard enough about problems. Ted’s response to invite them to watch the training is another odd choice in some ways — but we can’t forget, Beard himself let them on the pitch to thank them for a fun night out last season.
After they are back in the pub watching the game at the end of the episode, they are all thinking positively about Richmond’s chances, much to Mae’s surprise. This ties back and forward to Trent Crimm’s revelation about ‘The Lasso Method’, which he describes as slowly but surely creating a culture of trust and teamwork that cannot be broken, and then allowing the players the freedom to make choices that help the whole team. Maybe it’s not as simple as Sacrifice, as Dani proposes, but it’s multifaceted enough that it feels like the culmination of a long story coming to this point.
In the background of these notes are two fairly critical but relevant pieces for the team — Sam’s father coming to visit (played of course by the great actor Nonso Anozie) and Jamie getting frustrated about his static role on the team.
Sam maintains a positive attitude even about tweeting a response to the racist Home Secretary Brinda Barot (the name is interesting, because ‘Brinda’ is most often thought of as one of Indian descent yet this lady is hardcore British Caucasian) despite his chef Simi wanting him to be angrier. The overt racism is understood to be close enough to reality that you buy it — she says, ‘Go home, Britain is closed’, which is about as obvious a political point as the show has ever made.
His father’s appearance is teased for a while, as is his name — he’s exactly as supportive and positive as you’d expect for Sam’s father to be, and is also quite funny in the awkward scene with Rebecca. The reveal that his name is Ola, like the restaurant, is a lovely note, because it comes a split second before the neon sign (fixed by the team) comes back to light. It’s explicitly symbolic on its face, but you forgive it because it’s executed so damn well.
I also really liked the meeting between Ola and Ted, because it was so sweet that they directly talked about eating candy — and American candy no less. That’s a pretty funny little insertion. We rarely see Sam in a negative headspace — here was his worst, furious at the destruction of his home away from home, but the last time we saw an angry outburst was (ironically enough) when he was angry at Ted for bringing Jamie back to the team.
Now that’s turned around as Jamie is shown getting frustrated because he knows at some level, that he’s not just another Zava, there to barrel through the team and score goals. No, he finally notes, the team needs to go through him and work with him to turn their Total Football idea into reality.
Apple TV Plus
In the side storylines that parallel it, Nate manages to evolve in a new way — when he is paralyzed by fear, this time he doesn’t spit in anger, coalescing the Dark Side like before. Instead he’s trying to channel the Light Side of the Force, but this is the only thing that’s worked — his admission that Jade overheard about how much the restaurant meant to him, not a feint, not a tactic, nor a trick, but just emotional vulnerability. Thankfully Jade is still great with her deadpan expressions, and they both know she’s too good for him.
It’s an interesting parallel to the ‘love bombing’ Jack has been doing to Keeley; Rebecca notes that Rupert did something similar, and it can make it easy to ignore red flags. So Keeley insists on doing things for Jack for once, even if it’s a much smaller scale — they actually address the complicated nature of the work relationship, even if it’s not entirely resolved.
Some of the funnier moments of the episode were Ted’s harsh training, and Nate’s Siri calling him ‘wunderkind’ (not wonder kid) which was pretty pathetically funny. There’s also the funny moment where Danny and Isaac switch voices, which made me want to see other people on the team try that too.
At the end of the episode Richmond has managed to score a goal in a truly excellently choreographed scene — no wonder the commentator notes it ‘was bloody gorgeous, a majestic sweeping symphony of a goal, with Tartt in the role of conductor’. A certainly well considered turn of phrase. The team has had not a victory, but a turn around in feeling.
So a deliriously happy Trent might be ‘their dork’ as Ted notes, but hasn’t Ted also been their dork too all along? In the final scene, Sam decides to keep the cracked mirrors while keeping everything back to normal — a reminder of the past. But it’s also a reminder of how this team, now so in sync and helping each other heal, was once cracked too — but the mirror was never shattered, so perhaps the reflection is something more than that.
The episode ends with the song ‘Enjoy’ by Tekno which critically includes the chorus line ‘Allow me to enjoy myself’ which itself mirrors Roy’s earlier speech about himself and not letting himself enjoy the best part of his career. It’s a wrap up to a really delightful episode, one that pushes upward in an expected but cheery way — a note of hope in the darkness, perhaps the thing the show really needed to show us.
What did you think of this episode? Give us your thoughts in the comments section below.
Share this post
