Ted Lasso S2E3 Review: Sam Obisanya Picks a Fight Bigger Than Football
A sponsor scandal pulls a quiet striker into the loudest fight of his life while Ted's old morale trick finally meets a problem it can't solve.
“Do the Right-est Thing” is the episode where Ted Lasso starts running a story it cannot fix with kindness. Sam Obisanya looks at a billboard, learns what is paying for it, and tells Hannah Waddingham’s Rebecca he is out. The team follows him onto the pitch with tape across their chests. Ted, for once, is in the background of his own show, asked to comment on a courage that did not belong to him. It is the best episode the season has produced so far because it knows when to step aside.
A photo shoot becomes a moral problem
The cold open belongs to Sassy Smurf and Stinky, which is to say it belongs to the writers earning a victory lap before they ask the audience to sit through harder material. Ellie Taylor’s Sassy is back in Rebecca’s kitchen with her thirteen-year-old daughter Nora and a tampon joke about errant cobblestones, and the rhythm between her and Rebecca is the show’s quickest shorthand for a friendship that has survived an entire marriage. Ted wanders in calling everyone Sassy Smurf and Marlboro Man, asks whether the new “receptionist” is his, gets corrected on the math, and TTFNs out the door. Sassy’s verdict on him as a partner — eager to please, the whole time — is the closest the show has come to letting an outsider name his thing.
Then the show pivots to Toheeb Jimoh’s Sam in the locker room being shown his Dubai Air shoot prints. Keeley calls him a mood, a moment, a mantra. Thierry chirps that it is an ad for ugly people. Colin promises to draw a phallus on his face the second the tube station prints go up. The scene is light, it is hand-on-back, it is the rare locker-room beat that does not need a teaching moment. The reveal of the sponsor’s parent company comes later, in private, when Sam shows up at Rebecca’s office and says he needs out because Cerithium Oil has spent decades turning the southern coast of Nigeria into what he calls a hellish, fiery swamp.
Jimoh plays the whole sequence with a calm that earns itself. He is not angry, he is not pleading, he is informed. Rebecca’s response is immediate. Of course you do not have to do it, Sam. I will take care of it. Keeley adds a quiet hell yeah. It is the easiest meeting the room has ever held, and it is the one that sets fire to the rest of the hour.
Rebecca’s old life calls in the favor
The Cerithium Oil CEO is an old friend of Rupert’s named Richard, and the phone call between Richard and Rebecca is the most exposing minute Waddingham has been handed this season. He flirts with the breeziness of a man who assumes the flirtation is part of the favor. He invites her to the yacht. He brags that his new wife enjoys watching. Rebecca asks him to make the Sam problem disappear without fuss. Richard agrees and then, without a beat of warning, asks her to release the player. Get rid of Obisanya, he says, and chuckles, and tells her to give his love to no one. The off-screen accident he proceeds to have, with Right! Right! Right! drowning him out, is the funniest punchline the show writes in the half-hour and also a moral cleanup the script does not deserve. Richard’s bones, presumably, are fine. The conversation he forced on Rebecca is not.
Higgins suggests they should give Cerithium a bell. Rebecca says she will handle it. The handling is the part of the episode where the season starts to know what it is doing. Rebecca dictates a letter that goes, in her actual mouth: Hey dick hole, you creepy old pedo, Sam isn’t going anywhere asshole, you’re a shitty old man with a tiny shriveled penis, I feel sorry for your wife, sincerely boss ass bitch. Keeley translates the dictation into corporate English in real time. Daphne gets her love. Sam stays. The scene is a thesis statement about money and language: the polite letter is the lie, the dictation is the truth, and Waddingham plays both at once. The phone vibrates later with Richard’s name on the screen. Boss ass bitch lets it ring out.
Led Tasso, and the limit of the morale gag
Jamie has come back to a locker room that did not vote on his return. Phil Dunster plays the early scenes with the gloss of a man who genuinely believes a public apology will work because Jamie Tartt has never had a public apology met with anything other than applause. The apology is the funniest sustained bit of the episode. Colin objects to the jaundiced worm line in his hometown paper. Bumbercatch objects to Jamie hitting on his mum in front of his dad. The French speaker, with a translation from Dani about a cupped fart, objects in two languages. Someone closes with You got us relegated, mate. Jamie says I am not a worm. The locker room does not laugh.
Ted’s solution is a relic he and Beard cooked up in Kansas. Led Tasso, the imaginary asshole coach who exists so that the team will resent him instead of the new guy. The blocking is broad on purpose: Jason Sudeikis stomps onto the pitch yelling about feet fingers, demands the players touch each other’s toes, threatens a thousand laps, compares dehydrated trees to any Tim Burton movie including Dumbo. Sudeikis throws himself into it with the eagerness of a man who has missed playing a bit. It is, on paper, the kind of sequence that should land. It does not. Jamie himself stops practice with a confused, exhausted, leave it out, yeah, and the camera holds on a tactic that has, for the first time, met a problem it cannot solve.
The kicker is Sarah Niles’s Dr. Sharon Fieldstone, who has been quietly watching from the side and explains the trick to Higgins and Nathan before Ted gets a chance to. You pretend to be an asshole so the team makes you the common enemy. Has it ever worked, she asks, and Ted and Beard stall at Chuck E. Cheese, an offensive lineman with his head in a VR machine, free beverages comped. Niles does not raise an eyebrow. She does not have to. The show has been building a worldview where Ted’s tools have a ceiling, and Sharon is the woman holding the measuring tape.
Roy, Phoebe, and feeling part of someone’s life
The Phoebe and Roy track runs parallel to the Sam track and it is the episode’s quietest victory. Brett Goldstein’s Roy is Phoebe’s chauffeur for the day, joining Keeley at the British Girl Shop for a dolls-have-trauma riff that lets Goldstein scowl through a sentence about how no one does the orphans better than us Brits. Keeley is on Bantr because Keeley is on every app she promotes. Roy is on his phone, miserable, until Keeley’s flirty messages arrive under the cover of a stranger she insists is described as a tall, hairy retired athlete with kind eyes and lovely arms. Roy figures it out instantly and they end up texting each other from the same couch. The bit is doing real work. Bantr is the show’s structural answer to the question of whether two people who already love each other can fall in love again from scratch.
The harder beat is Roy’s babysitting advice. Most adults think kids need to be constantly entertained, he says, and it is bullshit. They just want to feel like they are part of our lives. He demonstrates by inviting Phoebe to his podiatrist appointment. She says yes please. Rebecca, who has been swinging at Nora’s six-year-old version of fun and missing badly, gets the message late and asks Nora to come to work with her for a whole day. Nora says it would be amazing. Ever since you started doing it, she clarifies, when Rebecca asks since when. The Phoebe scene and the Nora scene are doing the same trick from two directions: a kid is not asking to be entertained, she is asking to be seen doing what you do.
What this episode argues
Ted Lasso has run a season and a half on the premise that kindness is a strategy. This episode is the first time the show admits there are problems kindness is not strategically positioned to solve. Sam’s protest does not need a hug. It needs a sponsor relationship terminated, a Nigerian government accused in public, and a man with a clipboard willing to be uncomfortable about whose money is on his jersey. Ted’s reaction at the post-match press scrum, when he steps aside and says he has never needed that kind of courage because bad things happening to people like me get written about without anyone being asked, is the most honest thing he has said all season. He is not the protagonist of the moment Sam is making. He is the white American coach who knows when to give the microphone back. Sudeikis plays the deferral cleanly. No winking. No saving the moment. Just I think what Sam and the team did today was courageous, and a hand toward the next podium.
Niceness, the show is arguing, is not the same as moral seriousness. The Led Tasso bit fails inside the same episode where Sam succeeds because the show is drawing a line under the limits of Ted’s toolkit. He sends Jamie to Dr. Fieldstone at the end of the episode with a line that doubles as the writers’ commentary on themselves: she is a brilliant therapist and, unlike me, she actually gets paid to listen to you complain. The locker room is going to need help Ted is not equipped to provide. He knows it. He hands the room over.
Verdict
The episode is the cleanest piece of plotting the season has put together. The Sam storyline is paced for breath. The Roy and Keeley material is the most honest grown-up romance the show has written. The Led Tasso experiment is a confident misfire by a coach who has previously been written as infallible, and Sudeikis is brave enough to let the gag die on screen so that Sharon can name it. Some of the broader business around Bantr will get more interesting later in the season once Sam logs in. The Richard yacht-crash gag is one tidy escape too many for a script that otherwise refuses easy outs. Toheeb Jimoh’s press-conference posture, calm but trembling, gives the half-hour its center of gravity, and Hannah Waddingham’s dictation scene gives it its punch. This is the episode the season’s argument was always pointed toward, arriving early enough that the rest of S2 has to earn what it asked for.
Rating: 9.0/10