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The latest episode of Ted Lasso is called ‘Beard After Hours’ and indeed, it is one where we only follow the man-with-no-name as he putters around Richmond after dark. The episode immediately starts with the flipped view of last episode Ted getting flipped off by Beard, and it is clear that Beard is in a state. He even glares at a child in Man City getup until the mom gives him a disapproving look.
We hear a different cover of the show’s theme song, with nary a Ted in sight, as the episode sets up the pins to fall. Beard watches real life commentators Thierry Henry and Gary Lineker comment negatively on Richmond’s performance, until it shifts into direct anti-Beard hallucinatory feedback. This gag will get repeated a few times, always in pretty heavy if funny ways, even eventually touching on self-harm.
Another setup is ‘Jane Payne’ (which is I suppose her rhyming name) on Beard’s Apple iPhone (prominently featured, of course) who has yet to say she loves Beard after he said it first to her. Beard tells bar owner Mae about their latest breakup and jealousy issues, but this is not everything. We see Jane texting about coming to find him at some club, that it’s what ‘he needs’ — later we even see her in front of a neon purple cross, texting about atoning for her sins.
This will come to play once more at the very end of the episode, when it seems that nearly all is lost. In the meantime, Beard hooks up with the three barflies we’ve seen the whole show — caustic Baz (Adam Colborne), laconic Jeremy (Bronson Web), and unusually cheerful Paul (Kevin Garry). After an ‘as per usual’ Paul asks Beard about the fragility of life, we cut to Beard finishing up a rant about being in a simulation (because of course he would).
Then the next adventure begins, as the quartet heists their way into a private club where Beard throws on an Irish accent and calls himself ‘Professor Declan Patrick Aloysius McManus’ (which is singer Elvis Costello’s real name). Beard completely wins over a bunch of Oxford rich boys, and catches the eye of a young woman in red (Charlotte Spencer, credited as ‘Red’). He finds himself in a mysterious room, lit in purple and soft neon colors, with TV screens that switch to the sports commentators attacking Beard again — one says the horrible insult that Beard would need a ‘pep talk to kill himself’.
Thankfully Beard immediately is angry about it, but it’s also clearly something reflective of his own head in some way. So the stage is set for something to go terribly wrong. Which it does, but in different ways. He gets mixed up with Red’s boyfriend, a muscular, angry dude, and then gets saved by the dude when he’s being accosted by Jamie’s father and his lowlife pals.
There’s a lot of abstract, mysterious, almost ‘wrong’ levels of unreality, like Beard jumping in a dumpster or a hotel clerk blathering about insane conspiracy theories. And of course, after hinting at something wrong with his keys multiple times (Beard keeps dropping them), they literally break off in his door — and then the rain starts to come down.
All after Beard’s precious iPhone’s battery died and he’s missed over 50 of Jane’s messages. He delivers a sort of confession to nobody in a strangely empty church, the same one with the neon cross, about how Jane makes the world more interesting. At the same time, we see that Beard has given a really lovely gift to the barflies, the ability to run around and goof off in the Richmond pitch.
So Beard has gone through Hell and given his own sort of grace, so when he descends in the lower levels of the church, he discovers the club that’s been hinted at since the start of the show. After letting himself go and dancing, he spots Jane — who I suppose has probably been there the whole time.
Sure, the episode ends with a joke — Ted showing the loss to Man City with 10x speed set to the ‘Benny Hill theme’ — but it’s also ending with Beard sleeping under his hat, in a better, healthier place than it started. It’s kind of a bottle episode of sorts, except that the bottle is the character — we see Beard triumph through adversity and it feels so satisfying to get there. It’s the sort of impressive catharsis that only works when we are desperate for things to work out — and when it does, it’s oh so satisfying.
Hard to say where things go from here, but if anything was going to make me feel better about the trauma of last week’s episode, this was a good start to getting there.
What did you think of this episode? Give us your thoughts in the comments section below.
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