Summary
Nate struggles with scrutiny while Keeley worries she sees too much of Roy.
This recap of Apple TV+s Ted Lasso season 2, episode 7, “Headspace,” contains significant spoilers.
Read the recap of the previous episode.
Has Ted Lasso become a hangout sitcom? With each passing episode, the conflicts that defined the first season (Rebecca trying to sell the club, Ted struggling to fit in, Jamie vs. Roy) feel like a distant memory. In their place are…vibes? There’s still conflict, but the majority are basic sitcom setups — nothing that can’t be solved in thirty minutes. There are interesting moments of something dark bubbling beneath the surface of several characters, but it all feels like something intended to pay off later in the season and feels unsatisfying episode by episode. The first season depicted characters who had built up walls that Ted helped pull down. Now the walls are down, and the characters are just…nice. It doesn’t make for the most compelling television.
Ted Lasso season 2, episode 7 recap
For starters, the Roy/Keeley plotline is something that Community handled with a cookie joke (in the Season 1 finale). Roy storms out when he learns Keeley wants space — and has been talking about it with the others. His anger feels unmotivated. Even for Roy, all his previous outbursts have been clearly telegraphed. This just feels like a lazily written conflict, and the conclusion, involving Roy planning a luxury bath, is weak. At least Roy’s reactions while reading The Da Vinci Code are amusing.
We check in with Sam and Hannah, but nothing really happens. It’s just a reminder of what we learned last episode, with a scene of them running into each other and meant to elicit gasps of “ooh, they don’t know.” Sometimes it feels like the writers have been going to the “It’s a six-hour movie” school of TV writing, where scenes like this don’t form any arc within the episode but are meant as a segment of a long second act.
Just as frustrating is Ted’s encounter with therapy. After an out-of-character tantrum where he insults Fieldstone’s profession, he comes back and apologizes — only after she confronts him and compares her job to his. It’s still not quite explained why a man who values feelings has difficulty grasping a profession that deals with that, seeing as he very much believes his job to be similar, but ah well. The worst part of the story is that when he does agree to talk, the scene cuts away before we hear anything. We get no insight into what’s making Ted tick. Again it feels like a middle scene in a story, as does the scene at the end where Trent Crimm (the Independent) asks him about the last episode’s walk-out. Ted sticks to the food poisoning line in a way that feels like it’s foreshadowing the most uninteresting media blow-up of all time.
The ending
Finally, I’ll turn to Nate, whose storyline is so compelling, not because it’s any more complete than anything else this episode, but because Nick Mohammed really sells Nate’s burning insecurity. His ten minutes of fame are happening, but he’s incapable of taking criticism, particularly from one of the players, Colin. After insulting him, Beard makes him apologize. He does, and everything is good. But his rage is still there, bubbling underneath, and he takes it out on Will, his new kit boy. It’s a gripping scene; how his sudden advancement has left him with little sympathy for the man who occupies his former job. He’s in the big leagues now but doesn’t seem cut out for it at all. If only there were a man who could save him.
What did you think of Ted Lasso season 2, episode 7?
