Summary
Ted Lasso properly establishes its Season 4 setup in “Curiouser and Curiouser”, and it’s both very funny and still very adept at tugging on the old heartstrings.
It’s almost annoying how good Ted Lasso is. It doesn’t seem right that a show should disappear for years and come back with an ill-advised reboot premiere and feel as if it hasn’t lost a step. Sure, Season 4 hasn’t yet achieved the peerless level of its prime, and it may never again, but that isn’t really the point when its baseline quality, in terms of both effective comedy and emotional sentiment, is still so high. Freed from the scene-setting responsibilities of the premiere, Episode 2, “Curiouser and Curiouser!”, is a reassuring return to the grass.
Don’t get me wrong, this is still a setup episode. But instead of having to contrive a way to get Ted back into a job, it’s instead laying out the conflicts and dynamics that’ll underpin the remainder of the season, keeping some old relationships ticking away while also introducing some new ones. There’s a lot of stuff here that is needlessly good, which I’ll point out as we come to it, but we might as well start with the high-level stuff and work outward from there.
Firstly, let’s discuss the elephant in the room. There’s a sort of ticking-clock device hanging over this season, in the sense that the investment made in AFC Richmond’s women’s team needs to see a return. It takes Higgins all episode to pore through the documents, but his ultimate conclusions are dire. The long-term viability of the women’s team is extremely low, and if the investment turns out to be fruitless, it will have serious — potentially catastrophic — knock-on effects for the men’s side as well. This spectre of underfunding and general disinterest hangs over everything else like the sword of Damocles.
Hence our first problem. In hiring Ted for the head coach job, she inadvertently skipped over the incumbent assistant coach, Alice Chilton, who was expecting the job. Alice is famously bad-tempered and difficult to work with; her opening scene finds her telling Rebecca that she’s resigning on account of Ted’s appointment while admonishing her for not considering any female applicants. This kick-starts the episode’s funniest recurring gag, where Rebecca starts to radically overcompensate for her perceived sexism, giving empowerment speeches at press conferences, ordering “any Bell Hooks book”, and constantly trying to reiterate that she has women’s best interests at heart.
But it also leaves Ted with an issue. Alice is very good at her job, clearly the best-qualified candidate, so he doesn’t want her to leave, even though her staying means accepting him in the job she wanted. There’s no surprise about where this ultimately goes, but it’s extremely well-handled. Ted’s endlessly optimistic demeanour is irresistible even to the ice queen, and he’s eventually able to compel her to stay by appealing to her nature and referring to her own backstory as a promising player sidelined by injuries. It’s a neat writing flourish, since Ted had taken the same approach with the players earlier, trying to figure out what makes them tick, and Alice had dismissed the importance of their “origin stories”.
On the subject of the players, and even some of the backroom staff like Caroline the physio, we’re still in the early days, so most of them come across as caricatures. Of note are a romantic couple, some twin sisters, and a nutcase goalkeeper nicknamed “Boots” who refuses to wear gloves so that she can “feel everything”. Expect personal subplots as we go, just not in this episode, which has other, more pressing concerns to deal with first.
One of these is the locker room situation. Ted Lasso Season 4, Episode 2 is constantly playing up the institutional and perception challenges that the women’s team is facing. During Ted’s press conference, he’s asked questions almost exclusively about the men’s team. (Side note: Earlier, Roy was seen giving a conference and referring to one of the journalists as “Paddington Bear”. When the same guy asks Ted a question, he’s revealed to be dressed exactly like Paddington Bear, but nobody ever comments on it). The women have also been shoved into a tiny space with a single bathroom in lieu of a proper locker room, so one of Ted’s first orders of business becomes getting that sorted out.
This is handled by Keeley and Roy, who are still “really really good friends”. Keeley manages to blag the visitors’ locker room from Rebecca, who’s still preoccupied with being a feminist, and Roy has to help her set it up because he has extensively booby-trapped it — including the use of a trained rat named Jonathan — to make the visiting sides uncomfortable. There’s oodles of sexual chemistry between these two, but the season clearly isn’t going to re-pull the trigger just yet. Besides, Roy has other things on his mind, namely the fact that Coach Beard clearly wants to defect to Ted’s staff and daren’t say so. Eventually, Roy dismisses him, citing some obscure regulatory breach, which is a nice gesture.
There are two big emotional moments here in “Curiouser and Curiouser!”. The first is when Ted shows the girls their new digs, which have been done up spectacularly off-screen, and the second is when Ted compels Alice to stay on, which also leads to a funny crossed-wires scene with Rebecca right after. Something tells me their working relationship isn’t going to go as smoothly as Alice and Ted’s, but that’s okay. Rebecca has learned enough about feminism to dismiss the fiscal concerns and go all-in on the women’s team, despite the risks, so everyone is fundamentally on the same page. For now, anyway.
