‘Ted Lasso’ Season 4, Episode 5 Recap: Romantic Reversals

Season 4, Episode 5: ‘Riches of Embarrassment’

If you’ve ever wondered precisely how inspirational Coach Ted Lasso could be, now you have your answer: He can reunite two romantic partners by the mere act of eating alone.

Two of AFC Richmond’s players, Margy El Sharif (Mercedes Assad) and Mady Song (Annelise Heywood), are wandering Richmond at night when they come upon a solo Ted digging into a hot dog outside a restaurant.

“Hot dogs are strictly a social food,” Margy remarks, offering an anthropological observation I had not encountered before. In any case, this vision of solitude is itself enough to persuade the two recently split-up women to get back together on the spot. Well done, Ted. Well done, hot dog.

Alas, Margy and Mady are pretty much the only couple with a happy arc this episode. Onward …

Rebecca and Matthijs

A smartly uniformed Matthijs and his daughter, Jelka (Susanna Redhead), show up on the doorstep of a delighted Rebecca. But they have barely completed their first smooch before Matthijs shares news: He’s taken a new job with Virgin Atlantic and will be moving to London to be with Rebecca. How fantastic!

Or is it? Rebecca’s face tells a more conflicted story. Later, explaining her ambivalence to Ted, she indulges in a bout of nauseated choking that puts to shame Higgins’s many prior efforts in that department.

In bed the next morning, Rebecca gently suggests that perhaps she and Matthijs should have discussed this move together. She is also a little miffed because Matthijs told Rebecca he was moving for her, but Jelka told Rebecca that Matthijs was following his ex-wife and co-parent, who’d also gotten a London job.

In my book, that is a relatively minor conflict or misunderstanding. But my book is evidently not Matthijs’s book. Angered beyond all reason by this 90-second exchange, he abruptly declares, “I think we should take a break.”

It’s all rather sudden, and I’m sorry to see Matthijs behave so irrationally. But the show hasn’t really known what to do with him ever since his first, marvelous episode in Amsterdam. Will he recede further? Or will his and Rebecca’s ups and downs be a central thread? I guess we’ll find out.

Roy and Keeley

Rebecca and Matthijs aren’t the only couple alternating hot and cold roles this episode. Through the first four episodes of the season, the status of Roy and Keeley was straightforward: He desperately wanted to date her again, and she felt he wasn’t yet ready.

So we had the whole serial dating story line last week in which Roy was speeding toward the designated 10th date after which, in theory, Keeley would consider going out with him.

So much for theory.

This episode tickles us with easily the best Roy-Keeley scene of the season so far, as she notes that he responds to “Roy” and “Oy” with equal attention. But the real purpose of the scene is to show that Keeley is now willing, even eager, to give it another try with him. “Just out of curiosity,” she lies, “What date you at?”

“Nine,” Roy tells her. But as we learn all too soon, Roy has abandoned his marathon of one-drink encounters. “The last couple of dates,” he tells Keeley, “have been with the same woman.” He quickly upgrades “couple” to “few” and then “dates 6 to 10.”

A stunned Keeley, who moments earlier looked ready gobble Roy up, flees as quickly as she can, and later cries her eyes out to Rebecca.

So, yes, that makes two relationships this episode in which the pursuer and pursued abruptly swap places and everyone winds up unhappy. What have you got against love “Ted Lasso”?

As far as the identity of Roy’s dates-6-to-10 woman, I see three possibilities: the bartender from the last episode, the doctor from the last episode, or someone we haven’t yet met. Last week, I predicted Roy and the doctor would get together, and I see no reason to alter that forecast. But again, I would like anyone who’s getting in the way of Roy and Keeley to be immediately sent to some distant post in the Arctic.

Alice

A quick word to say that I think Tanya Reynolds, who plays Alice, has been terrific all season, easily the best addition to the show. I had felt though, that her character occasionally seemed a bit like a variation on the later, angrier incarnations of Nick Mohammed’s Nate from Seasons 1-3.

To its credit, this episode makes the comparison explicit. Alice is abusive to Shannon at practice, and then to Gemma, and then to the whole team. And even Ted’s best Lasso-isms aren’t up to the task of guiding her back toward the light. I confess, I wasn’t terribly impressed with Ted’s barbecue metaphor, which seemed a little too on the nose. (By contrast, I loved the one he offered Rebecca moments later: “There’s a reason the rearview mirror is smaller than the windshield.”)

Alice is furious even after the team’s comeback and narrow loss to a vastly superior Chelsea club. (Aren’t the Lady Greyhounds in the second division? Why are they playing Chelsea? This season is even worse than previous ones in its indifference to the team’s outcomes. Is there relegation in this league?)

“That’s one of the great things about sports,” Ted tells Alice after the loss. “There’s always another chance.” Alice’s response is heartbreaking, considering her own injury-shattered career: “Yeah, not in my experience.”

But citing his experience with Nate, Ted suspends Alice for the final game before Christmas break and tells her, “Hopefully, we’ll see you in the new year.” Yes, like Rebecca and Matthijs and Keeley and Roy, Alice and AFC Richmond are now having a time out.

Keeley

Last week, I complained that so far this season Keeley has largely been presented as “Rebecca’s disconcertingly childish senior employee.” This week, as with the Alice-Nate similarities, the show makes the critique more or less explicit.

At the Richmond match, Zelda Southport declares Keeley a “dreamer,” as opposed to a “doer” like Zelda and Rebecca. The latter adds, “Well, I’d get a lot more done if my little dreamer would listen to me occasionally.”

Then Zelda escalates a notch and declares that it’s a good thing that Keeley has “had her wings melted” by the team’s loss and the half-empty stadium. “She’ll be more inclined to listen to you,” she tells Rebecca.

It’s perhaps ironic that even as Zelda and Rebecca chide Keeley as if she were a wayward intern, she has perhaps her most effective episode of the season for Richmond.

The promotional video for the team looks top notch, and even though Keeley is disappointed by her illusory “sold out” stadium, it is still the biggest crowd most of the players have ever played in front of.

So let’s build on that, “Ted Lasso.” Show us the Keeley who gets things done.

Beard

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Beard is best in small, ironic doses, and when he takes center stage, “Ted Lasso” becomes a different show. (The “Beard After Hours” bottle episode in Season 2 is the best example.)

Part of the problem is that almost every time Beard is assigned a subplot, it’s one that has nothing to do with Ted or any other member of the team. And as plenty of people have pointed out, his relationship with Jane (Phoebe Walsh who, like Beard’s Brendan Hunt, is a writer on the show) is tedious and depressing.

Jane’s unpleasant and mildly slanderous play about her faked pregnancy points up the awkward way in which Beard’s story lines are shoehorned into the show. I’d love for this latest subplot to be a brief one.

Odds and Ends

As we head toward what I expect to be confirmation of my “Roy and the doctor will be dating” prediction, I’m feeling my oats. So here’s another: Ted and the so far nameless stage manager (played by Charlotte Riley) he met at Jane’s play will be dating soon, too.
I will note briefly here that, while the stage manager seems perfectly nice, I’d have much preferred it if things had reignited between Ted and Rebecca’s magnificent friend Sassy (Ellie Taylor), with whom he shared that night of passion in Liverpool in Season 1. But we have yet to see Sassy this season, and I don’t particularly expect we will.
A couple of weeks ago, we had that awful “whore” joke about Matthijs and Rebecca’s long-delayed dinner. This week, we have a small child yelling, “Where the [expletive] are you?” at midfield during halftime. Amusing? Maybe. But it feels way off-key for “Ted Lasso.”
I liked Ted’s wicked reference to “The Town” before he and Beard go to Jane’s play: “Whose car we gonna take?” “The Scottish play” the stage manager mentions is of course “Macbeth.” The “risk to remain tight in a bud” quote that Ted and Alice share with the team is often attributed to Anaïs Nin but in fact comes from the novelist and playwright Elizabeth Appell. And I was delighted to learn that Zelda was the only audience member for the Eurythmics’ first show. And I’m pretty sure the tune Ted was whistling on his way into Rebecca’s office was “Sentimental Journey,” another song Doris Day recorded, like “A Wonderful Guy” two weeks ago.
Last week, I missed references to Bob Seger’s “We’ve Got Tonight” and, to my shame, to the Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor comedy “Stir Crazy.” Remind me what I missed this week, and let me know any other whistling theories.