Season 4, Episode 9: ‘Mae Rides the Bus’
I’ve mentioned on a few occasions that the pacing of this season of “Ted Lasso” has been a little haphazard: one-off story lines relatively deep in the season (Derrick Tarp); entire episodes in which we scarcely see the Richmond women players; some episodes in which nothing of consequence happens and others that are jam packed with developments.
Last week’s episode was one of the latter: Keeley and Roy got back together, Gemma and Alice had a breakthrough, the team moved fitfully toward promotion, and a mysterious plot to take control of Richmond was uncovered.
Of the last development, I wrote, “Well, this seems like a major story line to be introducing so late in the season.”
This episode, the show replied, “Hold my beer.”
But before we get to the huge news, there were important developments elsewhere …
The team and promotion
After ignoring the Richmond players for long stretches of the season, in these last two episodes the show has finally gotten us situated: The Lady Greyhounds are good.
Good enough, in fact, that if they win their next-to-last game, against Bristol City, they will be promoted into the Super League, the top women’s league in England. (The show has been rather negligent about laying out the stakes, but they’ve gradually come into focus.)
So even more than last episode, this one takes us to the pitch with the players. An early 2-0 lead by Bristol City is gradually chipped away: a goal by Gemma, one by Siobhan assisted by Niamh, and another by Lizzie, giving them the lead.
The cake is iced when Shannon, in for Gemma, scores a final goal for a 4-2 margin. Richmond is going to the Women’s Super League!
I can’t help but feel that this victory would have had more narrative weight if the show had focused a little more on the ebb and flow of the team’s season on the pitch. But it’s welcome regardless.
One brief aside: Does Richmond have a third striker who’s never been introduced? Because Gemma has obviously been out with her injury and Bristol City was the declared “season debut” for Shannon.
And one more (I said a lot happened this episode!): Roy using Keeley’s makeup accessories to model the game action for her was inspired and delightful. “Scented candle lines up to take the penalty kick”; “rouge and contour: great teamwork despite your differences.” It was one of the best bits with Keeley and Roy all season. (As for what it led up to, we’re getting there.)
The plot
Yes, as I and many others suspected, the villain secretly trying to take control of Richmond is Zelda, assisted by her unpleasant flunky Hugo Riddles.
It’s hard to judge the story line at this point, because it appeared so abruptly last week and remains so vague.
For starters, it’s unclear why Zelda is trying to steal Richmond away. Some have suggested that she intends it as payback for Rebecca not attending her boat party on New Year’s Eve, which would be an explanation poised somewhere between amusing and just ridiculous.
Mae
Back in 1981, the musical parodist Weird Al Yankovic cast his eye on Queen’s hit “Another One Bites the Dust” and reinvented it as “Another One Rides the Bus.”
But where Weird Al converted an anthem about mortality into one about transportation, this episode of “Ted Lasso” flips the transformation. The title is “Mae Rides the Bus”; the story, alas, is that just as Richmond wins its extraordinary victory, Mae bites the dust.
I hope I don’t sound heartless in confessing that I found Mae’s passing less sad than I think I was intended to. She was a likable character but a minor one, and as with much of the supporting cast of the first three seasons, the show leaned on her a little more heavily this season than was perhaps ideal.
Nonetheless, godspeed Mae Green!
Keeley and Roy and …
Dig into sitcom history and you may come across the “Cousin Oliver Effect,” a trope dating back to “The Brady Bunch” in 1974. It is defined as a TV show, facing declining ratings in its later seasons, adding an adorable child or baby to goose viewership.
Over the years it became a sitcom staple, with even thriving series using the tactic to reinvigorate their cuteness quotient, including “The Partridge Family,” “All in the Family,” “The Cosby Show” and many more up to the present day.
Which is all a way of saying that having Keeley be unexpectedly pregnant in the penultimate episode of a season that has never quite found its footing is such a perfect example of the Cousin Oliver Effect, it almost seems like an inside joke, a meta-commentary on the invariability of sitcom arcs over time.
Like much of what’s happened between and around Keeley and Roy this season, the awkward timing of this huge revelation is due partly to the show’s failure to really engage with its star-crossed lovers’ story line until midway through the season.
So we’ve had Roy speed-dating, and then dating the doctor, and then breaking up, and then telling Keeley he loves her and then her discovering she’s pregnant — all ruthlessly compressed together. As Keeley notes to Rebecca, in one of the truest lines ever spoken on “Ted Lasso”: “We just got back together like two seconds ago.”
But setting aside the hurried nature of these developments, the moment when Keeley tells Roy she’s pregnant, inaudible to us, and his inevitable response, are perfect: “That’s the best [expletive] thing I’ve ever heard.” Why the episode chose to end with Mae’s death, rather than this moment with Roy and Keeley, is beyond me. It feels like television malpractice.
The question for next week’s season finale, I suppose, is how fast the show chooses to speed through the subsequent stages of Keeley and Roy’s relationship. Will they get married? Will the baby be born? Will the baby, with a big forward time jump, be graduating from college?
I guess we’ll find out.
Odds and ends
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As someone who has frequently been perplexed by the office culture at A.F.C. Richmond, I was pleased to see Rebecca drawing the line with Zelda on the value of schedules, which she forthrightly declares as “necessary” for “human beings.” Well done, Rebecca. Way to set modest professional standards.
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Unfortunately, those modest professional standards barely make it to midday, when Rebecca states that, because of her annoyance at dealing with “that shareholder stuff,” her lunch with Keeley will be a “let-the-wine-flow zone.”
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And as long as I’m critiquing the A.F.C. Richmond C-Suite: Higgins’s telling Rebecca on the plane that “Even without the Milk sisters selling, someone could still get 49 percent of the shares,” rather implies that neither Higgins nor Rebecca is entirely clear about what fraction of the club she actually owns. In any case, Rebecca doesn’t want to hear any work talk. (“Is this how we’re saying hello now?”) So Higgins says he’ll let her “settle in, have a glass of wine.”
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An odd little detail that I’m not sure what to make of. When Beard gives Boots the keeper gloves, he tells her, “What brings no benefit to the bee, brings even less to the hive.” This is a quote from the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius in “Meditations” — but unless I’m severely misinformed, it’s backward. The proper quote is “What brings no benefit to the hive brings no benefit to the bee.” The shift in emphasis is substantial. Was this a slip-up by the show? Was it deliberate (and if so, to what possible end)?
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“The only person hoping for a green light more than me and Gemma is the Great Gatsby himself.” Ted’s comment at the news conference is of course a lovely reference to the light gleaming on Daisy Buchanan’s dock. And I don’t know how — it was in my notes! — but last episode I forgot to mention the delightful way Higgins’s investigation of the share-buying scheme echoed “All the President’s Men.” Thanks to all the commenters who reminded me.
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