Ted Lasso S2E5 Review: A Kebab, a Power Pose, and the Sound of Roy Coming Home
Three Richmond rescues happen in parallel — a captain, a kit man, and an ex-captain — and the episode trusts you to feel which one is the real one.
“Rainbow” is the episode Season 2 has been quietly setting up since the opening of the year. It runs three rescues in parallel — Isaac McAdoo’s lost-captain spiral, Nathan Shelley’s restaurant humiliation, and Roy Kent’s pundit-chair purgatory — and the structural bet is that they will rhyme more than collide. They mostly do. The hour also contains the most unembarrassed romantic-comedy gesture the show has attempted to date, scored to a Rolling Stones needle drop the script has been preparing the audience for since the cold open. It works because the script earned the gesture by spending an hour with everyone else first, and because Brett Goldstein has spent four episodes turning Roy into a man who is now physically incapable of staying away.
Rom-communism, Isaac, and a coach who admits he is guessing
The episode opens with Ted’s locker-room speech on rom-communism, which is the show’s funniest sustained piece of writing this season and also its most honest piece of authorial mission-statement. Jason Sudeikis’s Ted hits pause on a match replay to tell a slumping team he believes in romantic-comedy logic, surveys the room for Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Hugh Grant, the three Kates and Renée Zellweger, and lands on the actual thesis: fairy tales do not start or end in the dark forest, the dark forest is always in the middle, and the job in the dark forest is to have zero expectations and let go. Isaac, who has not been listening, barks “we need to stop playing like shit” and the comedy of the scene is that Ted’s faith in the form is being translated, in real time, into the exact opposite advice by the captain who needs it most.
That gap is the engine of the half-hour that follows. Ted goes to see Isaac and finds he has no idea what is wrong, and admits it. The line he gives Beard is the most quietly important sentence in the episode: he usually has a player talk to the team captain before he intervenes, but he can’t very well ask Isaac to pull himself aside without messing with the space-time continuum. Isaac is a big dog. He will only listen to a big dog. Nick Mohammed’s Nate offers, gets a single beat of confused silence, and is told gently that they will need a real big dog. The joke is light. The structural admission is heavier. Ted is willing to outsource a player problem to a former captain who quit television in the first scene of the season.
The kebab church, the offer, and Roy stalling the answer he has already chosen
Roy is reading a paper in a kebab shop he calls his church when Ted scoots his boot right over. The exchange is one of the cleanest two-hander scenes the show has done. Goldstein plays Roy as a man who already knows what the answer is and is trying to delay it with as much profanity as possible. He tweets, he gets JIFs, he is good at the pundit gig and would like to be allowed to be happy. Ted asks for a favor for one Mr. Isaac McAdoo. Roy says let me finish my kebab and pray on it. The kebab is the negotiation tactic, and Goldstein lets you see the second the negotiation becomes real: the moment a stranger at the counter calls them father and son, and Roy does not bother to correct him beyond a reflex.
The waiter then quietly throws the episode its mission statement. He explains that he left medical school a week before graduation because being a doctor, which he was good at, was not what he was meant to do. He loves making a doner kebab. Brendan Hunt’s Beard later quotes Walt Whitman about leaving elegance to the tailor, but the kebab man’s confession is the actual line the episode is built around. Doing the thing you are good at is not the same as doing the thing you are for. Roy is good at punditry. He is for the touchline. Ted does not even press the point. He drops a five-pound note in the collection plate and walks out.
Keeley, Rebecca, and “make yourself big”
The Nathan plot runs alongside the Roy plot and earns its own episode’s worth of feeling. Nate, played by Mohammed with a kit man’s permanent stoop, has called a restaurant called A Taste of Athens in Tooting to book a table for his parents’ 35th wedding anniversary. The hostess is named Jade and she does not respect him. He cannot get the window table. He tells Juno Temple’s Keeley he wants to be famous and Hannah Waddingham’s Rebecca walks in mid-sentence. Keeley pivots: Nathan does not need fame, he needs a table. Rebecca offers to buy the restaurant. Keeley refuses on Nathan’s behalf, citing a teach-a-man-to-fish proverb that ends with the restaurant becoming a Starbucks, and the two women decide to teach him assertiveness instead.
The hallway sequence that follows is the secret heart of the hour. Rebecca tells Nathan she has a secret for walking into rooms full of football-club chairmen who look at her like a schoolgirl with pigtails: she finds somewhere private and makes herself big. She stands on her tiptoes. She raises her arms. She lets out a slow, controlled growl from the chest, and Waddingham plays it as a woman teaching a younger person a tool she has had to use in earnest. Keeley’s reaction — “Fuck, you’re amazing. Let’s invade France” — is one of the funniest line readings of the season, but the framing is what carries. Rebecca tells Nathan he deserves whatever he wants. The verb matters. She does not say “earns.” She says “deserves.” The show has been arguing for two seasons that some people need to be told this in clear English before they can hear it.
Mohammed plays the restaurant return with a beat-by-beat physical translation of what he was just taught. He bombs the rehearsal in front of his parents, panics, retreats to the bathroom, and runs through the power pose in front of a mirror. He hisses “you are Nathan fucking Shelley” at his own reflection, spits, and walks back out. He gets the window table. He gets it without raising his voice, exactly as Rebecca said he would. The script then does the small mean thing that any honest writer of this character has to do: it lets Nathan ask Jade for her phone number on the way out, lets her say no, and lets him reply “Me too. I’m not a dog.” The episode is not pretending the new confidence is unmixed.
What this episode argues
The structural argument is that the dark-forest speech is true. Isaac, Nathan and Roy are all in their own middle act. Each of them needs someone with a particular kind of authority to walk into the forest, refuse to leave, and stay until something changes. Roy borrows the block of flats he grew up in and lets a captain remember that football is a thing he used to play as a kid because it was fun, even when his legs and feelings were getting broken. Rebecca lends Nathan a power pose. Ted does almost nothing in the rescue itself and instead does the upstream thing — he asks Roy to come back, knowing he might say no, and then waits. The episode trusts these three rescues to rhyme without underlining them, which is the rom-communism speech smuggled into structure.
The other argument, less spoken, is about who the rescuer becomes. Roy spends the cold open being humiliated by George Cartrick on Sky Sports, the same George Cartrick Rebecca fired in the pilot for his shorts and his sexism. Roy laughs along with the panel mocking George’s drink-driving piss episode and the laugh feels hollow, even to him. The kebab man’s line lands then. The power pose works on Nathan because Rebecca has already used it on herself. And Sarah Niles’s Dr. Sharon Fieldstone reappears, this time with a David Bowie quote that doubles as a thesis about Roy’s whole career: if you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor. The episode argues that the people who can rescue someone in the dark forest are the ones who have stopped trying to look elegant about being there.
Verdict
The Higgins-and-the-rainbow runner has been threaded through the hour from the start. Jeremy Swift’s Higgins gets caught playing Solitaire by Rebecca, listens to his wife’s ringtone, and explains that he was attempting to be a brooding punk on the night they met until “She’s a Rainbow” started playing and he poured a pint over his own head doing air bass. One stranger in that bar did not laugh and handed him a damp bar towel instead, and he has been married to her for twenty-nine years. The best brand, he tells Rebecca, is just being yourself. The line is treated as a kindness to Rebecca, who is shy-giggling over a Bantr stranger quoting Rilke about dragons guarding our deepest treasures. It is also being aimed past her at the rest of the episode. When the needle drop arrives, the show is unembarrassed about it. Roy is mid-sentence trying to scout a seventeen-year-old’s debut, and instead delivers a quiet self-indictment about sitting on the outside looking in, judging boys he cannot look in the eye. The Richmond warm-up cuts in on the monitor. “She’s a Rainbow” starts. He excuses himself, takes one cab he tips with his own cash, another with his watch, blags his way past a gate with a ticket meant for a Reba McEntire, and limps onto the touchline as the crowd chants him onto the bench. Ted says “Really glad you decided to” and Roy says shut up. Just shut up. You had me at Coach.
This is the episode that justifies Season 2 retroactively. The rom-communism speech, the kebab confession, the power pose, the restaurant hostess, the cab driver’s anniversary, and the bench arrival are the same scene six times, each played in a different register, and the script trusts the audience to feel the rhyme without naming it. Bill Lawrence, Joe Kelly, and Goldstein-the-writer split a story that could easily have been a single rescue and instead let it be a Richmond-wide one. Some of the broader comedy — the Sheffield Wednesday Saturday runner, the Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds gag, the Showgirls aside — is the show on autopilot. The episode’s best move is its quietest: the kebab man’s line about loving what he is meant to do, planted in the middle of an hour about three men who need to admit the same thing about themselves. Goldstein and Sudeikis play the bench reunion as if neither of them has been waiting for it. They have. We have. The needle drop is allowed.
Rating: 9.1/10