Ted Lasso S2E4 Review: A Dentist, a Drone, and a Christmas Built by Three Small Field Trips
Three storylines run on parallel rails of generosity — Roy and Keeley adopt a niece's crisis, Rebecca rescues Ted from a FaceTime gone sideways, and the Higginses host a whole team — and the half-hour stays warm without going saccharine.
The Christmas episode is a tonal trap. Lean too hard into yuletide and the show becomes a card. Resist it too much and the show is a Grinch about its own premise. “Carol of the Bells” splits the difference by giving every major character somewhere to be on Christmas afternoon and refusing to plant any of them at the same table until the final two minutes. Three short field trips — Keeley and Roy’s dental door-knock, Rebecca and Ted’s elf cosplay, the Higginses’ open house — cross-cut like a busy advent calendar. Each is a contained gift. The hour’s argument is that Christmas is a logistics problem solved for other people.
Roy and Keeley get a niece and a problem
Sexy Christmas does not survive contact with the doorbell. Keeley, played by Juno Temple, opens the door in a Santa-themed bit of lingerie and a “Merry Sexy Christmas” announcement to find seven-year-old Phoebe on the step instead of Brett Goldstein’s Roy. Temple plays the recalibration in one held beat — eyes flick down, smile resets — and the gag works because she is the one in costume, not because Phoebe is wide-eyed. The text Roy sent on the way over has not landed. Roy’s sister has been called to surgery. Phoebe is theirs for the day, and Phoebe has been crying about something she will not name.
The crisis turns out to be a Secret Santa gift of toothpaste and mouthwash from a classmate named Bernard, who has told the school that Phoebe’s breath is rancid. Roy’s first instinct is to drive over and beat up a little kid, which Keeley vetoes, which Roy resents on principle. Goldstein has spent two seasons sharpening the gruff-uncle register into something genuinely tender, and his exam-the-evidence scene — leaning in for a sniff, recoiling, then trying to hide the recoil from a child — is one of the funniest pieces of physical comedy in the season. Keeley’s version is steadier. She tells Phoebe she has spent twenty years in locker rooms with men and has smelled worse, then takes a sniff and concludes Phoebe is medically dying. Both responses are honest. Neither is cruel.
The dentist-hunt subplot is the episode’s most pure-engine sequence. Roy declares they will knock on ten doors in his posh neighborhood and pay Phoebe and Keeley a thousand pounds each if they fail to find a dentist. He calls his neighborhood “stupid” and “posh” in the same breath, which is the most Roy Kent thing he says all hour. The bit where he chooses to demonstrate that embarrassment is survivable by confessing to a recent bus-incident at a birthday party — and Phoebe quietly admitting she does too, sometimes — is the kind of Roy-and-niece exchange the show has not yet allowed itself to write. Goldstein plays it as if confessing to a war crime. They agree to both try and knock it off. The pact is the most parental he has ever sounded.
House ten produces a dentist who is also a fan, and Phoebe is diagnosed with antihistamine dry-mouth caused by her new cat Dauphine. The dentist suggests rehoming the cat. Phoebe declares the cat her soul mate. Roy declares, on the spot and at length, that nobody is taking Dauphine anywhere, because that would be insane and he is not a monster. Sarah Niles’s Dr. Sharon does not appear, but the shape of her work shows up anyway. Roy has spent the day choosing a tool other than his fists, and the cost is that he has to say so out loud in front of a seven-year-old.
Ted’s FaceTime crashes; Rebecca shows up with a coat
Ted, played by Jason Sudeikis, has a plan. He has told the locker room he is going to spend the day on FaceTime with Henry, watching gifts unwrap in two dimensions. The drone he sent his son is meant to last all afternoon. It lasts ninety seconds. Henry pilots the drone out of frame, then out of the room, then off the baseboards. Michelle apologizes, cuts the call, and Ted is alone in a flat with a record playing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and a glass of something he gags on. Sudeikis stages the gag without dialogue. The shot of him watching a black-and-white horror film through a window as carolers sing outside — the man on the TV is screaming “Help!” while children sing “Silent Night” — is the most direct visual the show has ever used to say what loneliness looks like for this character. The episode trusts the image. It does not stay on it long.
Rebecca, played by Hannah Waddingham, knocks. She has cancelled Sir Elton’s piano party. She tells Ted to grab a coat and wear the silly hat. The reveal — that for years she and Rupert delivered surprise gifts to children whose letters to Santa had gone unanswered, and that last year she had skipped it to drink and plot horrible things — is the one piece of Rebecca-Rupert backstory the season hands us in this hour, and Waddingham underplays it. She does not editorialize. She brought a sack and an address list. Ted is the elf.
The two house calls play as a comic duet. Ted invents a story about Rudolph’s nose blinding him, claims the sack has been around the world twice, and offers the mother a sniff of the Himalayas. Waddingham lets Sudeikis riff and corrects only on the way out. The “Carol of the Bells” montage in the middle of the sequence — door to door, no audible dialogue, just the two of them handing wrapped presents to small children — is the moment the episode commits to its title. It does not need words. It needs Waddingham smiling.
The drive home does the heavier lifting. Rebecca admits the first Christmas after a divorce is shitty in a way she did not handle well last year. Ted does not absorb that as a tragedy. He treats it as information. Her confession that she might skip Sir Elton’s party because all she wants to see Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz do together is, in her words, fuck, is the writers refusing to leave us with a tidy parable. The two are not at the start of a romance. They are at the start of a friendship deep enough to joke about Bond and his wife. Ted’s “you got any other ideas then” is a question with no agenda.
The Higginses host, and the open house overflows
Jeremy Swift’s Higgins has been the show’s quiet utility infielder, and the C-plot finally hands him the spotlight. The Higgins family open-house tradition — opened to players without family in town — usually gets two takers. This year, it gets the whole team. Toheeb Jimoh’s Sam arrives first, asks for the restroom, and arrives also with jollof rice and goat meat, because his friends back in Lagos eat that on the holiday. The exchange where Sam says Christmas makes him think of colonization and then, without missing a beat, offers to celebrate the day anyway is the cleanest piece of writing the show gives any of the players in this stretch. Jimoh plays the line without irony. The Higginses absorb it without flinching. The episode keeps moving.
Dani Rojas brings pre-cheeked ponche. Richard brings foie gras and a date. Jan Maas brings fried chicken for reasons he refuses to defend. The party balloons until the dining room cannot hold it, at which point Julie Higgins has the players carry the table out into the snow. The shot of footballers eating outside under string lights is the prettiest single image of the season so far. Swift plays Higgins’s toast — to Lagos, Guadalajara, Groningen, Cordon, Montreal, Benin City, Harare, Kingston, Santa Cruz de la Sierra — as a man listing the cities his guests miss. The toast lands on family we are born with and family we make along the way, the closest the episode comes to a thesis.
Then Rebecca arrives outside the Higginses’ window with a backing band and sings “Baby, Please Come Home.” Waddingham, a working musical-theater performer who has been waiting for the show to use her voice, gets the catharsis. The number is not for Ted, exactly. It is not for Higgins. It is for the room, which is to say for everyone who showed up. Ted watches her from the window. He does not move toward her. He does not need to. The episode has spent thirty minutes establishing that the two of them are friends now, and a friend who shows up with a brass section is the gift.
What this episode argues
The cleanest reading of “Carol of the Bells” is that loneliness is solved by giving someone else a job. Roy hands Phoebe the job of knocking on ten doors. Rebecca hands Ted the job of being an elf. The Higginses hand the team the job of bringing food from somewhere else. Nobody in this episode sits with their own sadness for more than a single shot. The Ted-alone-watching-a-horror-movie beat is the longest stretch of stillness in the half hour, and it lasts maybe ninety seconds before Rebecca is at the door.
The other argument the episode makes, more quietly, is that the show is willing to skip a beat of plot to give a character a gift. Phoebe’s bad breath is not a setup for a larger arc. Sam’s colonization line is not a setup for the Dubai Air storyline alive elsewhere this season. The drone scene is not a setup for a phone call about Henry. Each is a contained piece of generosity, and the episode trusts the audience to take them as such — unusual structural confidence for a sitcom Christmas episode, which usually wants to convert every gift into a lesson.
Verdict
The risk of a Christmas episode is that it stops being the show in order to be one. “Carol of the Bells” is, in many of its choices, exactly the show — a Roy softer than he wants to be, a Keeley who reads a room faster than anyone in it, a Rebecca whose generosity surfaces when she has something to do with her hands, a Higgins whose decency expands to fit any size of crowd, a Ted who needs someone else to make him a plan. The Phoebe plot is the strongest of the three because Goldstein plays a kind of paternal attention he has not gotten to play before. The episode does not advance the Sharon arc or the Nate arc, and Brendan Hunt’s Coach Beard gets only a throwaway about a pagan Stonehenge ritual with his ex Jane. The trade is fair. A Christmas episode that gets out of its own way and lets four leads be kind to one person each is a structure the show has been building toward, and this one builds it cleanly.
Rating: 8.7/10