‘Ted Lasso’ Season 4, Episode 10 Recap: Wrapping Up

Season 4, Episode 10: ‘Being Alive’

The “Ted Lasso” finale captured much of both what went right and what needed work over the course of this fourth season. So the following is a bit of a mélange of thoughts about the episode and about the season overall. We don’t yet know whether there will be a fifth season, although reports are that the show’s creators are optimistic.

There’s a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get to it.

The players

Talk about the good and the bad.

Niamh and Siobhan’s rendition of the traditional song “The Parting Glass” was a lovely moment. I think it might have shined even more in an episode that wasn’t already overflowing with sentimentality, but that’s a quibble.

The scene a little later with Lizzie and her unreliable ex was just terrific. It was genuine, and intimate, and gave a sense of the particular conflicts faced by women athletes. Sometimes you don’t know what you’re missing until you see it, and for me this scene conveyed the best version of this season, but one we’ve seen only intermittently.

And after these promising early scenes with the players, we don’t see much more of them, beyond a brief follow-up with Lizzie and her boys. (There’s a reason so many of the best scenes with the players feature Lizzie.)

The episode repeatedly reminds us that the Lady Greyhounds are playing their final game of the season, and it reintroduces the idea of selling out Nelson Road Stadium with Keeley’s zippy new promotional video.

But when the game arrives, the show loses interest and we see virtually none of the action on the pitch. Unless I missed it, we don’t even see who won the game. Talk about putting the women players in the background.

It almost feels cruel that when Zelda later reveals her diabolical plan, it turns out it has nothing to do with the women’s team at all!

Sure, it makes sense that the men’s team is the more valuable asset. But honestly? In a season that’s based on the premise of Ted coaching a women’s team, possibly the closest thing to a season arc turns out to be about the men’s team?

Zelda’s plot

Even setting aside the fact that Zelda doesn’t evidently care about the women’s team, her scheme is utterly nonsensical.

Zelda is presented as a billionaire vastly richer than Rebecca. So if she wants A.F.C. Richmond there’s no need for all the cloak-and-dagger business. She can just buy Rebecca’s shares at a premium.

And if Rebecca won’t sell at any price, there are 19 other teams in the premier league whose owners Zelda can ply with her claw-clip lucre. There’s no need to buy in secret what she can just buy in public. That’s kind of the point of being a billionaire.

Alice

As I’ve noted repeatedly, Coach Alice is my favorite addition to the “Ted Lasso” team this season. So I’m certainly intrigued by the idea that she and Ted will be changing positions in the coaching hierarchy.

But did this idea come out of nowhere? It’s presumably connected to Ted telling Henry he was sorry to have missed so many of his games. But what led up to the decision, and who made it? I’m perplexed.

Cameos (and Nate!)

It’s the season finale, so we have cameos. Isaac (with trimmers!), Dani Rojas, Colin, Zoreaux, Jan Maas and Will all show their faces. Sam even gets a brief scene with Roy.

But it’s our old friend Nate Shelley (Nick Mohammed) who’s the star reappearance. He has easily the best cameo — and one of the best scenes period — of the season. The micro-speech he offers in the Diamond Dogs meeting is a lovely example of “Ted Lasso” at its very best: “End of the day, love wins. If you can surrender to the emotion of it, that informs the decisions you make. Head catches up with the heart.”

If there’s a Season 5, can we bring Nate back?

Keeley and Rebecca

I’ve been disappointed with how the show has treated its principle female stars this season.

The balance between Keeley’s likable goofiness and her development as a businesswoman has been totally lost, with the former overwhelming the latter. There are episodes when it feels as though more effort has been put into her outré wardrobes and fingernails than into her dialogue.

Rebecca has been on an even weirder journey over the last few episodes. Is it just me, or are we supposed to be a little concerned about her drinking?

At Mae’s wake, Rebecca tells Higgins with unsavory relish, “I hate funerals but I love the drinks after.” After Roy shares his Chelsea news, he seems concerned when she hits the decanter. (“Is there booze in that?”) And it’s probably a bad sign when your employees refer to a version of you as “drunk Rebecca,” even affectionately.

Maybe it’s all just meant to be boozily delightful. But if there is a fifth season, this might be something to keep an eye on.

Rebecca and Matthijs

If you thought that this episode would take it easy on major developments after last episode’s death-and-new-life doubleheader, well you were wrong. Rebecca is spontaneously proposing to Matthijs! She seems even more surprised than he does.

Does this mean he will move to London? That could be a major change after a season in which he’d fly in for a scene or two and then vanish for episodes.

Or maybe not. Matthijs’s profession presumably means that even if he and Rebecca are blissfully married, he can still come and go episode by episode, according to the show’s needs.

Ted and Michelle and Henry

Coming and going actually feels like a pretty good description of the role Michelle and Henry have played this season. For stretches, Ted has felt no different than when he was living alone in London, even though he is now actively co-parenting.

As with the women players and a variety of other elements, the show seemed to make progress later in the season in integrating Henry and Michelle. It felt as though the stretches where we didn’t see them were briefer, and they were blended into other subplots rather than always marooned in their own.

But the story line of Ted lying to Henry about his grandfather’s death felt like a major missed opportunity. How do you set up that scenario and then take the conclusion, where Ted tells Henry the awful truth, offscreen?

Talking people through difficult situations is what Ted Lasso does. Let us see him do it with his own son.

Roy

Roy taking the job at Chelsea is another big development — like Alice’s promotion, Keeley’s pregnancy, and Rebecca’s nuptials — that’s been planted in order to bear fruit in the theoretical fifth season.

Will Roy still be a member of the main cast if he’s coaching a competing men’s team across London? It’s been awkward enough this season having him connected to a different Richmond team from everyone else. And what, if anything, will his move mean for Keeley?

After the Season 3 finale, “Ted Lasso” felt complete. Three seasons had been the explicit plan from the start, after all. One consequence of extending the show for the fourth season is that it now feels incomplete again. A drawback? An opportunity? Time will tell.

Odds and ends

I haven’t really discussed Beard’s age-related cosmetic misadventures, but there is a nice payoff this episode when he explains that he got rid of the fake tan because Mae “thought it came off as anti-British.”
Beard has a strong episode in general. When his problematic paramour, Jane, shows up at the wake, it feels like a bad omen. But the scene with Beard is sharp and tight, and he has a zinger with “hooker’s bridesmaid.” Later he gets in a nice line about knowing something was wrong when Jane had been pregnant for 11 months. He also sneaks in an excellent Ollie North reference. But the Richard Schiff allusion is the chef’s kiss. (And yes, I too immediately asked myself “How old is Richard Schiff?”)
I already mentioned Nate’s bravura performance at the summit of the Diamond Dogs. But I was tickled by the way the meeting is bookended by explanations of the gathering from Roy (“for some reason it has to start with [expletive] barking”) and Alice (“Oh, I see. It’s just a conversation”).
If you were wondering who is responsible for this episode’s lovely version of the show’s title theme, it is Brandi Carlile. A fan of the show, she was also responsible for the beautiful rendition of “Home” from “The Wiz” in the penultimate episode of last season.
Roy’s attempt to explain the details of “The Exorcist” to Keeley is hilarious. Elaine Pinter (Helen Schlesinger) shows up to offer a patented “Pinter pause.” And the moving poem that supplies Mae’s concluding voice-over is “When Death Comes” by Mary Oliver.