#anyway trent crimm you will always be famous please make it throught the last two relatively unexplored
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well. that was an episode of something alright.
no but truly whatever is happening is so fucking disappointing wrt the emotional journey and catharsis for these characters, and honestly i feel condescended to as an audience member and as a football fan. you can't just slap an isolated didactic speech over a heart tugging score and call it story telling, you can't take an 11th hour 180 turn while ignoring the characters for 10 episodes and call it character development, and you can't take a story of mass working-class fan protests against club owner greed and give it to a rich white lady as her slay girlboss story without it being actually gross.
sorry but this was 63 minutes...of what exactly?? just going through the story lines in some kind of vague order of least to most consequential for sam, keeley, roy, rebecca, and nate and this gets long so under the cut it goes:
sam - what was this supposed to even be? ok so you bring back edwin akufo for the superleague story (which by the way, changing this to the akufo league instead of the story's inspiration the european super league - which was proposed by white european billionaires - is some level of racism i can't even...) to do what? get some laughs in by retreading the grudge? putting sam through the ringer again for...??? what was the end result here? like i'm genuinely asking bc i don't understand what i'm supposed to get from his being all smiley and putting the nigerian national team photo in his locker? he's happy because jamie gave him a shout out and that's good enough for him? what the fuck is this even supposed to mean?
keeley - what was the purpose of any of this genuinely. the amount of time we spent with kjpr and i have no idea what keeley does, if she's good at her job, how she's built her relationships with her silent co-workers. when she was at richmond we got to see her in action and her stories brought out not only her own character but other characters we cared about. keeley has been utterly passive this season - her biggest moment of agency was hiring shandy and that was exploded and scrubbed from the narrative. everything else from jack to the leak to being defunded just happened to her and she cried about it. and now rebecca's swooping in to refund her again and genuinely what is even happening here? the conflict for her character that was set up last year was that she was experiencing success in a completely new way and she was scared she wasn't going to live up to it and the conflict between the work she felt she needed to do to live up to expectations and how that would affect other relationships in her life, especially that with roy. how was that addressed? at all? we've seen her nebulously stressed, we've been told she's working a lot without being allowed to experience what she's doing, we've seen her try and emulate both ted and rebecca without success, and what? what else? a couple of looks between her and roy? her getting picked up and put down by a vc funder both financially and personally? what kind of synthesis has she reached here???
roy - which brings us to roy. we get the 'i'm talking about my football career but actually i'm talking about my relationship with keeley' in the chelsea episode which was great because it set up a conflict for roy this season - the idea that he cuts and runs to put distance between himself and moments of vulnerability to avoid possible failure and as a result never truly engages and enjoys experiences or people in the moment. great brilliant amazing love it -- what the fuck happened. i feel like you can vaguely connect something about how his training jamie is teaching jamie not to do what he did - to actually give his emotional all to his development as a footballer instead of detaching when things were at there most frustrating with zava there. that where roy used his anger and gruffness as a mask, jamie was using his cockiness but both to the same end of detaching from a situation they felt was out of their control. but i feel like i'm carrying a lot of water with all that, and while yes there have been moments of roy being more open this season, he's for a lot of it been relegated to weird comic relief if you can even call it that? (sorry but the rope monologue and the dick string training are both fucked up and weird and went on for way too long). he pulled a ted at the press conference (and told someone else's miscarriage story hmm)? he and keeley have been kept apart for the entirety of this season so like....i don't know? what was this? a fake holiday to wedge in a scene with his sister, phoebe and jamie? an epiphany that he was a mess? that he caused damage? and he writes a letter and now everything's good roykeeley back on track? the fact that they were kept apart for the majority of the season just feels like.......was any of this actually sorted through? did we experience either of these characters interact in any way where they challenged each other in this journey? that lead up to this reconciliation? this culmination feels so unearned.
rebecca - and speaking of unearned, the entire set-up for her arc of getting the fuck over rupert and finding joy in the team without it being about someone else was there. from her rashness in swooping zava from under rupert's nose, to her yelling at ted about winning, the 'him-you-mean-them' conversation, her maniacal behaviour at half-time during the west ham game. but where was the move out of this? she met a guy on a boat? she..........what??? how have we seen her grow out of this moment? what have we seen besides this deus ex machina of....what? remembering a story about rupert's childhood and bing bang boom - oh he was just a child once too? and the end, job's a good'un? fast forwarding through the total football catharsis short-shrifted rebecca, too. if the football is the expository tool to reveal things about our characters, the idea that a strategy that puts a singular thing at the focus to the detriment of everything else is bad for football and it's bad for people is a great narrative device. but...just as we're being told and not shown that it's working on the field, we're getting the same treatment off. rebecca is realising that the community both in and around the club is more fulfilling than a psychic's quote unquote predictions and using the club as a tool for narrow-focused spite -- ok show that??? show her reactions to the fans attending training. show other small moments where she enjoys the game? puts the club above embarrassing rupert at all costs? that moment with higgins talking about possibly firing ted bc of the winless streak could have been a glimpse of that but it was thrown away instead (but to be honest, how much of that is a retreading of her journey in s1?). so what do we get instead - girlbossery with, i'm sorry, a really fucking beyond heavy-handed moment with seeing her young self in the mirror? that does what? tells us that she's able to stand firm in a room full of men? did we...not know that? that she realises she's in it bc she loves the game? does she?? again, by not seeing the moments of total football triumph, we missed out on the opportunity to show her falling in love with the sport and becoming a true fan, not just an owner. if that's even what i'm supposed to be getting from this!!?? not to mention that her big moment of realising passion for the beautiful game was more important than her spite was directly ripped from the headlines but completely twisted. as i mentioned before, in april 2021 a bunch of white european billionaire club owners did indeed try to form a european super league out of a closed group of 12 of the richest european clubs, but clear cash grab wasn't stopped by a rich white lady having a moment of #selflove and altruistic benevolence, it was stopped by a mass protest of working-class fans pointing out the clear capitalist greed of the move:
nate - and god if all of this isn't just a slap in the face to nate's character arc. again, the set up of the first two seasons was clear and great! nate's struggle with self-worth especially rooted in his inability to live up to his father's expectations; his being bullied and undervalued and then clinging to someone who was giving him the affirmations he was craving, his projecting those unresolved issues onto ted who both couldn't live up to those expectations, and who made his own mistakes as he struggled through his own personal turmoil and mental health issues. the way all of those unresolved issues and referred anger came to a head for the both of them in nate's exposing ted's panic attacks to try and hurt him the way he felt hurt. and then falling into the arms of someone who was ready to exploit nate's talent and insecurity for his own gains. it's so good! it's so fucking good that it's bananas that we barely get to see any of his reconcilation play out! we get the beginning with rupert's emotional manipulation on display...and then what? nate is sidelined for the majority of the season! he's absent in some episodes altogether! HE QUITS HIS JOB OFF SCREEN AND WE GET NONE OF HIS INNER THOUGHTS AS TO WHY EXACTLY AND WE'RE LEFT TO DO THE WORK OF FILLING IN THE BLANKS??? we get that tell-not-show moment with his family with his dad's map, but like then there's no significant interaction between nate and his father until this episode? we get most of nate's personal development through his relationship with jade instead of diving into his relationship with his parents and teasing that out to build up to the emotional cathartic moment in this episode? there's so much untapped complexity in nate's arc! that tension with his parents, how the pressures both his father as an immigrant and himself as first gen are amplified by the pressures of rigid masculinity. how his father felt the need to stifle that creative sweetness in himself to make sure nate succeeded and had the best opportunity because of the combined pressures of race, class, masculinity, and feeling out of his depths when faced with his son's brilliance. nate's conflict between expressing his own softness and creativity v his feelings of the expectations of masculinity and success. so much of that could have been drawn out instead of sidelined and then infodumped and concluded in a few minutes of one episode! look! nate plays the violin aren't you feeling emotions? so many minutes of nate laying in bed and so few of the exploration of his and his father's dynamic that was set up to be the hingepoint of his frustration, insecurity and anger that manifested in his ruptured relationship with ted and richmond! and it's back to the total football -- that jade is part of his development isn't a bad thing! showing nate as becoming fulfilled both familially and romantically is actually good, esp for a character of colour! the idea that a healthy life is a full life with many different elements of one's community playing in tandem and concert to build towards a fulfillment and joy! but like...ok??? do so that???? and not all in one moment with All The Right Words At The Same Time???? what the fuck man this feels so fucking surface level and i just with the sheer amount of minutes given to episodes this season, what the fuck were they spent on if not this???
i'm sorry, but epiphany moments like the four (four!!!) in this episode work in romcom movies because we have 90 minutes with the characters. we accept certain shorthand for character growth because we understand the constraints of the narrative framework. it's bananas and fucking lazy to think that's OK for a serial format, especially one that's ballooned in time over the past season! what the fuck have those minutes been used for except for apparently spinning the fucking wheels on all of these development arcs until the last saccharine moment? aren't you crying with emotions, hmmmm?????
none of this feels earned and i feel genuinely gross at being thrown a few Emotionally Coded scenes and being expected to have my little heartstrings pulled enough that the squandered and self-indulgent mess of this season - that threw all of this character development into the trash - doesn't matter. we've spent years with these characters, the first two seasons carefully set up deep conflicts that should have been given careful and deep resolutions.
instead this episode gives us a naked ass and insists that it's clothed in glorious tie dye.
it's a naked fucking ass. and whatever patchwork loincloth the last two episodes whip up, it can't make up for the wasted potential, laziness and self-indulgent disaster of jason sudeikis's showrunning.
#ted lasso spoilers#ted lasso critical#seriously dead dove do not eat#but like...fairly i think? dead fair dove do not eat lmao#anyway trent crimm you will always be famous please make it throught the last two relatively unexplored#and therefore relatively unscathed by whatever the hell is going on here
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