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The latest episode of Ted Lasso is called ‘The Signal’ and thankfully I do get it this week too — it refers to the middle finger signal the coaches give to Jaime to have him initiate being awful — for the right seasons this time. The episode starts by showing that the team has been doing pretty well, all thanks to the ‘Roy Kent effect’ and are about to play in a quarterfinal game and are potentially that much closer to promotion.
But underlying everything are a few key things pushing everything else — the people who can change and the people who cannot. The ones who can change are a mixed bag; Roy seems already fully formed now, with no real conflicts to speak of, even being able to deal with Jamie’s incessant requests to be coached by him. Naturally Jamie himself has made a clear change, being able to call himself ugly with bad hair just to get help.
On the complicated side, we’ve seen Ted push back at Dr. Sharon’s mild requests for further communication, to the point where it has literally taken an actual panic attack to change his mind. He asks for an appointment, seemingly in a worse place than we’ve ever seen him before — it’s quite the juxtaposition with the team winning. At the same time they’re on the rise, he’s on the fall.
The trickier ones are Nate and Beard, in different ways and in different capacities. Beard and Jane have been going through a bunch of on again, off again moments, and this disturbs the empathetic Higgins. Whether or not Beard and Jane reconciling in such a pleasant way at the end of the episode is a good or bad thing is unclear, but at least it is left quite positively with Higgins. And it was also amusing for Jane to tell Beard that the ‘Oliver Twist aesthetic’ was her kink.
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Nate is in an interesting place, because he’s trying to maintain his new assertive energy from last week’s episode while still feeling like he doesn’t have value next to the great Roy Kent. When he ineffectually yells at the team followed by Roy giving salient advice, it’s not a great sign. But then after Ted flees and nobody seems to be grasping what to do, Nate comes up with a strategy that wins them the game. And he loves the attention as someone with such low self-esteem, continually scrolling through Twitter to find his ‘wonder kid’ nickname — not that the actor is so young, really, but he looks more so.
So the lot of them might be changing, but this is contrasted with Rebecca and her mother Deborah (Harriet Walter), the latter of whom explicitly calls out this whole theme by quoting Esther Perel that it takes two people to create a pattern, but one to change it. And yet she is unable to do so, leaving Rebecca unable to break her pattern of meaningless hooking up with her non-Bantr side piece Luca.
I did notice that the other app was called ‘2MSCNT’ which is pretty funny as a linguistic joke, but the episode utilized to drop the surprise that it’s been Sam and Rebecca texting all along. It’s an interesting pairing, that’s for sure, and one rife with complications, so it remains to be seen where it goes. Certainly the tease of last week implying it might be Ted and Rebecca texting was a feint, as expected.
In terms of just the comedy parts, I did enjoy the barflies shouting at Bake Off in a way that I would hope is true, Beard clarifying that he’s not allergic to horseradish but horses and radishes, and the whole ‘trying to build bridges’ and ‘you couldn’t build Jeff Bridges’ because its simple absurdity made me laugh.
Overall, the episode felt significant, a real turning point in the season, which I suppose is reasonable given it’s essentially the halfway mark now. Perhaps some jokes were cheesy and some didn’t entirely work, but I fully bought into the dramatic aspects of the episode. There’s a lot of tension now, and it’s all about to snap.
What did you think of this episode? Give us your thoughts in the comments section below.
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