Early in the season, we saw the entire Richmond squad so incensed by video footage of Nate destroying Ted’s homemade “BELIEVE” sign that they spent an entire half of football being penalized for assaulting various members of Nate’s team. Nate quit his dream job as head coach of an EPL team in between episodes, with no explanation other than his discomfort at club owner Rupert trying to get Nate to cheat on Jade. (Nor were we ever given any reason why Nate was so hung up on Jade, given how repeatedly cold she was to him prior to that moment.) Eventually, it turned out that all Nate really needed was for his emotionally-closed-off father to acknowledge Nate’s genius, and for Nate to play the violin, and suddenly everything was OK. And the writers’ method of doing that was a bizarre love story involving Jade, the hostess at Nate’s favorite restaurant, who had no personality and no apparent reason for wanting to go out with Nate other than taking pity on him after another woman was mean to him in front of Jade. Rather than show him gradually recognizing what an abusive person he had become, how terribly he had betrayed Ted by leaking his private medical information to the press, etc., the show seemed to view his redemption as a matter of Nate learning to love himself. But pretty much every choice on that journey was mystifying. Given the empathetic messages of the series, it was obvious that Nate would return to the fold by the end of this season. The worst offender of this was the storyline about Nate, whose rise from kit man to assistant coach was one of the first season’s most successful arcs, and whose descent into aggrieved villainy in Season Two was well-plotted, even if it upset many viewers. It was remarkable and strange how much of the season seemed to be occurring in between episodes or scenes. Soccer Jerseys Are Cooler Than Ever - These 8 Kits Prove It (The finale demonstrated another way in which he’d evolved on this front, since he finally recognized how the offside rule worked.) Mostly, though, Ted was just lurking on the periphery of other characters’ stories, looking sad, and only occasionally even offering the sort of corny but endearing dad jokes that were his previous stock-in-trade. Even there, Beard pointed out that he had dreamed up something that already existed, but at least it was the first time in the life of the series where Ted seemed interested in learning how to actually coach non-American football. There was an episode where the placebo effect from an ineffective psychedelic drug inspired Ted to dream up what he thought would be a new style for the team to play. And that was nearly all of what this year had to say about Ted. The third season opened with Ted feeling sad that his son Henry was going back to America, and asking Hunt’s Coach Beard if there was still a reason for them to be in England. In arguing for his lack of centrality to the story in the book - which Trent retitles The Richmond Way - Ted is unwittingly acknowledging how irrelevant he had become to Ted Lasso itself. (We’ll get back to that.) Whether or not Apple tries to pull a Hogan Family/ The Conners/ Mayberry RFD reinvention featuring all the characters other than Ted, his story feels concluded.īut there’s a third way to look at that note, even if it’s not what the episode’s writers, Sudeikis, Brendan Hunt, and Joe Kelly (who, along with Bill Lawrence, adapted the character from a series of NBC Sports promos in the 2010) may have intended. But the season ends with Ted back in Kansas, happy to be around his son Henry, and to be part of ex-wife Michelle’s life in some way. No one involved in the series - not Jason Sudeikis, not Apple, not the studio - has said word one about whether this was meant to be the end of the third season, the end of the series, or the end of the whole Ted Lasso Expanded Cinematic Universe. And it functions as something of a meta-comment about the viability of the series potentially continuing without its title character. The sentiment works as something wholly true to Ted and the philosophy he has espoused over the comedy’s three seasons. Late in what certainly seems to be the final episode of Ted Lasso, reporter Trent Crimm reads a note Ted has written him regarding Trent’s book about his season with AFC Richmond, which Trent has titled The Lasso Way. This post contains spoilers for the Ted Lasso season finale, “So Long, Farewell.”
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