Ted Lasso :: Do The Right-est Thing

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The latest episode of Ted Lasso is called ‘Do The Right-est Thing’, which is naturally a reference to both the classic Spike Lee movie Do the Right Thing and the concept of doing the right itself. Similarly the episode lightly touches on race and institutional corruption, even if the specifics are broad enough to avoid direct comparisons to reality.

One of the underlying conflicts of the episode is Jamie and his reintegration into the team, which mainly involves multiple failures until he gains a sort of epiphany — self-sacrifice for the greater good. At first he has notions of rising up like a classic underdog, but he doesn’t understand the depths of the team’s animus toward him — he gets tackled on the field by Sam, who is becoming far more of a leadership character this season.

After that, Jamie considers simply bribing the team to get their affection, but the true nonsense comes when Ted becomes his evil twin ‘Led Tasso’, which is immediately correctly identified by Dr. Sharon as a shared enemy so that the team doesn’t keep Jamie as an enemy. Despite the ridiculous idea, Jamie is the first to point out Ted’s ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ thing — it’s a connection of self-sacrifice, putting himself at odds with the coach, that maybe leads the way toward the end switch.

There’s a lot of thematic ideas of father/son relationships in Ted Lasso that permeate everything, from the toxic to the flippant to the supportive. Even Sam’s loving and mostly proud father is disappointed about the Dubai Air promotion and calls his son a ‘shill’. Pretty unfair, as Sam is just a kid, really, and had no idea about it. In the real world, there’s no direct correlation of recent oil drilling — although both Chevron and Shell have had environmental problems there, there’s no direct connection from them to any Dubai airline.

Still, when Sam covers his Dubai Air logo and tells the team that the other teammates of Nigerian descent must do the same (which feels a bit … reductive because why should all of the black players have the same ancestry?), Jamie is the first other player to offer to do the same thing. The actual implications of this action and Rebecca’s ‘doing the right thing’ by ignoring the CEO of the oil company are a bit unclear, but there’s no way it doesn’t seriously hurt the team.

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Whether or not it becomes a serious plot point later is hard to say but one would hope it’s not ignored. The more reasonable ‘right thing’ is pretty understandable with Rebecca reconnecting with her god-niece Nora (Kiki May), and naturally the young girl is pretty gung-ho about a lot of progressive ideas, despite Rebecca’s initial conflict about them. Eventually Rebecca is convinced enough to want to make Nora proud that she alienates a major sponsor — although the argument could be made that having such an unethical company as a sponsor might be problematic in its way.

Rewatching this episode I did notice a few Apple product references, although the only one used for a joke was Coach Beard discussing sharing an iCloud account with his girlfriend Jane. The episode still had a lot of funny moments, like Sassy describing Ted as so ‘eager to please’ while Rebecca spits out biscuits, or Roy’s niece delightfully agreeing to go to his podiatrist appointment. There were also a lot of little hints of things to come, as things are still complicated with Nate and his self-confidence issues, and a new dating app called “Bantr” promises to be a critical plot point in the future.

Overall, it’s an episode that might feel different depending on how many times you’ve seen it — it felt a bit more impactful the first time I saw it, but the second time I felt like I had a lot of unanswered questions about the reality of the situation. Still, it’s an episode with a lot of critical character development, one overly silly subplot, and fascinating implications for the road ahead. Next week is the Christmas episode, and I have to say I’ve never anticipated one of those more.

What did you think of this episode? Give us your thoughts in the comments section below.