Ted prepares for a new reality, Nate plunges in and Keeley (maybe) steps away.
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By Christopher Orr
Season 3, Episode 8: ‘We’ll Never Have Paris’
This is yet another episode that feels somewhat disjointed, following multiple story lines that don’t overlap much or offer a strong through-line. One could make the case — as I did in the headline — that this is an episode about the ends and beginnings of relationships. But the subplots nonetheless felt more like separate pieces than parts of a whole.
Ted and Henry
We open with the news that AFC Richmond has beaten Aston Villa 3-0 for their second decisive victory in a row, an outcome that was easy to anticipate following last episode’s discovery that Total Football with Jamie as facilitator rather than scorer is a winning recipe. (To underline the point we hear the play-by-play of Jamie passing to Dani for a goal.) Moments later, we learn the win streak is up to four.
“You have to think,” one of the commentators declares, “that no one is happier than Coach Ted Lasso.”
Well, if you did think that, it surely became unthunk as soon as we cut to a close-up of Ted looking not at all happy. He’s in the pub with his ex-wife, Michelle, and her new beau — and their former marriage counselor — Dr. Jacob. “Please, I insist, call me Jake,” he tells Ted, proving that he is just as bad at reading a room as he is at meeting a minimal standard of professional ethics.
Michelle and Jake are dropping off Henry with Ted as they take a surprise trip to Paris. (“Jake told me on the plane,” Michelle explains.) Ted may not know much about Europe, but he is confident of this arithmetic: Paris + newish couple = marriage proposal. This assumption is confirmed when, asked where they would propose if they could do so “anywhere in the world,” Trent and Roy in unison cite the City of Lights.
This entails a meeting of the Diamond Dogs — plus the rookie member Trent but minus a cranky Roy — though a brief one. Once the others learn that an engagement is merely Ted’s assumption, they agree to follow Higgins’s advice to “find out before you flip out.” It’s OK, though, because this meeting is largely a setup for … But no, that would be getting ahead of ourselves.
Ted — again, not happy — decides not to wait for Michelle’s return but instead to ask Rebecca to procure a private investigator to shadow the couple in Paris. Even when he reads to Henry (a children’s book by the Premier League footballer Marcus Rashford), he is consumed: Does “Mommy’s friend” Jake read to Henry? Watch TV with him?
Granted the wish to do whatever he wants on a day that Ted and Beard are taking off, Henry opts for a Premier League game and, wouldn’t you know, the only team playing is Rupert and Nate’s West Ham United. So the fellas go to the game, deck out Henry in a West Ham jersey, and shout and wave to get Nate’s attention on the sideline. Again, more on this soon.
We next see Ted, Henry and Beard sitting outdoors at the pub as a busker plays “Hey Jude” nearby. My mind immediately went to the song’s Paul-John-Julian back story, which Beard then helpfully unpacked for Henry before advising him, “I know right now it feels like you’re in a sad song. But you, young man, you have the power to take a sad song and make it better.”
Ted has by now absented himself to call Rebecca, who had texted to say she had “info.” Its precise nature, however, was apparently revealed to Ted while we were Beatling with Beard and Henry. The most we hear from Rebecca is, “But seriously, who gives a flying [expletive] if Michelle gets engaged,” which is suggestive but not dispositive.
Is the omission deliberate and, if so, what is it intended to accomplish? Time will tell. But the tug that Henry exerts on his father’s heart, while scarcely new, is ever more evident — in particular during the goodbyes that close the episode, when Ted can scarcely let go of Henry’s backpack.
Nate
When we first run across Nate this episode, he is in bed in the morning. Moreover, he is not alone but with Jade, our favorite hostess at Nate’s favorite Greek restaurant. Upon waking, she quickly determines that, charmingly, Nate had already gotten up, showered, shaved, brushed his teeth and gotten back into bed. Alas, love-struck boy that he is, he quickly falls into the trap of trying to “label” the “relationship” while claiming he’s trying to do no such thing. Slow down, tiger.
I confess I feel somewhat disappointed that we went directly from Jade not standing Nate up at dinner to the two comfortably ensconced in bed for what is evidently not the first time. (Indeed, in a later scene, she accedes to the label “boyfriend.”) We have not yet seen a single real conversation between the two, a glimpse of why it is they enjoy each other’s company. We’ve gone straight from romantic tension to romantic fulfillment without witnessing the romantic journey at all, at least so far.
Which is perhaps part of the reason Nate’s most moving relationship is still his complicated one with Ted. I noted last episode that even as we watched Good Nate’s re-emergence from Bad Nate, it had been some time since we’d seen him at work at West Ham. Could Good Nate survive in the malignant shadow of Rupert?
Smitten, he evidently can, even if only briefly and only with Rupert absent. Nate gathers a couple of subordinates together for a meeting of the “Love Hounds,” a shameless rip-off of …well, I hardly need to tell you. It goes about as well as one might expect, which is to say that the drop-off from the “Diamond Dogs” — I told you we’d get here — is comparable to that between Alvy Singer’s first and second lobster dates in “Annie Hall.” Does the awkward fiasco remind Nate of what made his time at Richmond with Ted special? Oh yes, it most assuredly does.
And in case he abruptly forgot, he gets another reminder when Ted, Beard and West-Ham-clothed Henry show up at his match. Visibly stunned at first, he then briefly allows a small smile past his lips.
Yet it’s soon clear that Nate still has a way to go. When Rupert later texts him, “Sorry about Ted being there. Won’t happen again,” Nate begins to type, “It’s okay, I thought it was funny.” But even that level of moderate snark seems insufficient. So Nate deletes it in favor of a corporately cold “Good. Thank you.”
Still, his ongoing path seems clear. Even in the aforementioned “boyfriend” scene with Jade, what lingers is the smile on his face as he looks at a news photo of Ted, Henry and Beard at the match.
Keeley and Jack (and Roy and Jamie)
Did I mention the preponderance of red flags in this relationship last week? Why, yes I did. But whether or not the relationship is actually over, as this episode suggests it may be, the developments are connected only peripherally to Jack’s creepily over-the-top love-bombing.
Rather, we have what could be called a fairly literal “ghost in the machine”: a selfie sex video Keeley filmed for a past paramour that has made its way onto the internet and, by extension, Keeley’s phone. Keeley is mortified and begs the seemingly omnipotent — read: ultrarich — Jack to fix the situation. “I’m gonna take care of it,” Jack promises.
But the photos ripple outward quickly. When Sam tells the rest of the team, Roy leaves the room angrily while Jamie looks worried. Could the latter be wondering what terrifying vengeance the former might be contemplating? Jamie doesn’t know about the rope-dipped-in-red-paint scenario, but he had firsthand experience with the genitalia strings.
But no, it’s simpler than that. Jamie is genuinely concerned, as he expresses near the end of the episode — and concerned not only that the video was leaked but that he may have been unintentionally responsible. Keeley had sent it to him, of course, and he confirms that his password is the highly crackable “password,” even if he cunningly disguised it by using two “S”es. For anyone rooting for a Jamie-Keeley reunion, this is a clearly promising scene. For the rest of us …
Roy is genuinely angry, and not merely at the leak but at what was leaked. He approaches Keeley and, after saying all the right things, moves on to say precisely the wrong thing: “Who’s it for?” — a question to which he has almost certainly guessed the answer. Keeley promptly exits, and who could blame her?
An overdue aside here: What in the world is the show doing with Roy and with Keeley? The original sin was not merely breaking up the two of them, but doing it at the start of this season (and so offhandedly) rather than at the end of last one, when the emotional impact would have been exponentially greater. The show has only compounded that misstep with how it has presented each character since — let me start with Roy and then return to Keeley at the end of the section.
I made the case last season that Roy had become the star of the show, and it wasn’t a hard case to make. But this season? His screen time is a fraction of what it was, and his charming, obscenity-laden crankiness has devolved into outright sadism. (See, again, the paint-rope and penis-strings.) And now this scene with Keeley?
Was Brett Goldstein, who plays Roy, too busy with “Shrinking” — he is one of the creators of the show, which is quite good — to occupy as central a role as he did last season? Were the other writers punishing him for his televisual two-timing? Whatever the explanation, “Ted Lasso” is killing one of the best things it had going. No matter what the intended narrative payoff, happy or sad, it’s hard to envision it making up for the way Roy’s been portrayed for two-thirds of the season and counting.
But back to Keeley and Jack. It turns out that the latter’s “taking care of it” is not quite as envisioned, when Keeley receives the abjectly apologetic note that she is expected to post to social media. Confronted about the statement, Jack demurs that her dad’s lawyers drafted it. But her solution to the dilemma is simply another, different apology note for Keeley to put her name to.
Keeley refuses. And after showing her hand probably more than she intended — “the person I’m seeing, the person whose company I’m funding” — Jack shows herself the door with no promise she will return.
I confess that this scene didn’t really work for me in any direction: On the one hand, Jack seemed far too quick to make such an existential issue of the dispute, even for someone clearly accustomed to getting her way; on the other, Keeley seemed implausibly surprised that a lover or a boss — let alone someone who is both — would be unhappy about the public exposure of her partner/employee’s sex tape.
But this relationship has always seemed a bit forced, a way to give Keeley’s P.R. firm story line the semblance of a plot without actually spending any time on her job itself. Keeley has been largely broken off from the story of Ted and the team with the premise of embarking on her own career. Yet instead of giving us any meaningful sense of that career, her season has consisted almost exclusively of Shandy drama followed by Jack drama, with regular scenes to discuss each with Rebecca.
Indeed, there are times it’s hard to believe — between traveling to Amsterdam with Rebecca, Aurora Borealising in Norway with Jack, and then taking the day off for mini-golf — that Keeley has a job at all. Likewise with Jack, who was initially introduced as something of a business titan but who seems more and more to be the daughter of a billionaire who dabbles in investing while reserving most of her energy for amusing herself.
While I’m on the subject: It’s wonderful that “Ted Lasso” has made such a clear effort to have substantive female characters in a show about a men’s sports team. But it would be awfully nice if one of its two female multimillionaires had achieved her fortune through skill or perseverance rather than marrying or inheriting it from a man. (How much time, for that matter, has the show devoted to Rebecca’s job? Awfully little since Season 1, when her “job” was principally undermining Ted.)
Last season, Keeley and Roy were the delightful hub around which much of “Ted Lasso” revolved. This season, they’ve both spiraled out into disappointing spots on the periphery of the show.
Colin
Keeley’s relationship with Jack is not the only potential casualty of the leaked sex videos, which Colin initially laughs off with a self-protective “I guess I know what I’ll be doing this weekend.” But after Isaac commands the team to empty their cellphones of any signs of past sexual encounters, he sees Colin lagging behind and snatches his device. We don’t see what Isaac sees, and obviously we don’t have to. If we didn’t know it already, Colin’s crestfallen face speaks as loudly as any dialogue.
What will Isaac do? I have no more idea than any of you. I expect there will be considerably more to say about this next week.
Odds and ends
There was no mention of Rebecca’s charming Dutchman from Episode 6. Does this mean he really was just a one-night love affair to remind Rebecca she still had the ability to fall so happily? Or is he being held in reserve for a late-season surprise? Obviously, I’d prefer (and honestly, anticipate) the latter. But I’d ideally like it sooner than later, by which I mean immediately.
So, Keeley sent a topless photo to one of her teachers when she was 15? Are we supposed to find that amusing?
On a lighter note, here’s to Jamie’s extensive inventory of deodorant sprays.
As with the Episode 5 locker-room banter regarding “She’s All That,” “My Fair Lady” and “Pygmalion,” I thoroughly enjoyed Dani’s reference to “Les Misérables,” followed by another player (left back Jeff Goodman?) concurring, “[Expletive] yeah, 24601!”
Likewise, Rebecca’s description, however unfounded, of the Eiffel Tower as a “lamppost with a publicist.”
I’m not entirely sure what to make of Alyssa, Jack’s college friend whom she and Keeley meet at mini-golf. Perhaps an ex?
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