Ted Lasso S2E10 Review: Rick Astley, a Hate Confession, and a Eulogy That Nobody Saw Coming
Rebecca's father dies, Ted's panic attack drags his own father back into the light, and a 1987 pop song becomes a love letter sung in front of a coffin.
“No Weddings and a Funeral” is the hour Ted Lasso has been building toward since the locker room panic attack three episodes back. It takes the show’s loudest jokes and its most private griefs and stages them in the same room without flinching. Hannah Waddingham’s Rebecca buries her father. Jason Sudeikis’s Ted finally tells Sarah Niles’s Sharon Fieldstone what his own father did. The episode closes on a coffin, a Rickroll, and the entire congregation singing along.
Rebecca’s bedroom, the Rickroll, and a mother who refuses to be sad on cue
The cold open is a small lie the episode keeps returning to. Toheeb Jimoh’s Sam and Rebecca are in bed, post-coital, debating whether to tell people, when Harriet Walter’s Deborah lets herself in with spare keys she has had longer than her daughter realized. She greets Sam’s boxer briefs with a line about clunky exposition leaving little to the imagination, then drops the news of Paul’s death the way some parents drop news of a dead pet. He died. The smash cut to title card buys the show permission to be a comedy for forty minutes by being honest about the engine underneath.
The Rickroll arrives in Rebecca’s childhood bedroom and never really leaves. Deborah has “Never Gonna Give You Up” playing in every room because it makes her feel happy and Paul liked it. Rebecca wants the noise off. Her mother counters that the old Rebecca used to love that song. Rebecca’s grief is buried under a refusal to be sentimental about a man whose sentimentality she does not trust. Deborah’s grief is the refusal to stop loving him for it. The song is the bridge.
Ellie Taylor’s Flo “Sassy” Collins arrives through the bedroom window in workout gear and a Tracy Anderson joke that buys the room a laugh after the death has landed. Sassy is Rebecca with the volume left on.
The locker room death-meeting, and Roy’s bus driver
The training ground scene is the pre-game. Three players debate what to do with their bodies. Dani would like a biodegradable sack that grows a fruit tree. Brendan Hunt’s Coach Beard volunteers that a body weighs 21.3 grams less after death before ruining it by pointing out that whoever measured this clearly murdered the test subject. Phil Dunster’s Jamie wants to die, you live, you’re done, good night. He is on his period, per Beard.
Then Brett Goldstein’s Roy and Juno Temple’s Keeley get the scene the locker room could not host. Keeley wants Roy to be the biodegradable tree. Roy wants Keeley to avenge him against the bus driver who is going to kill him. Keeley points out the bus driver was swerving to avoid a child. Roy did not know about the fucking child.
The funeral, the family room, and a vicar who keeps asking them to lower their voices
The funeral is staged like an ensemble setpiece this show only commits to once a season. The Richmond team arrive in formalwear, not a trainer among them, and Jeremy Swift’s Higgins reports that all of them came. The pan across Higgins, Nick Mohammed’s Nate, Sam, Colin, and Isaac in matching suits is the thesis: nobody at Richmond liked Paul Welton, and every player Rebecca employs showed up because they like her. Higgins’s “that’s how much they care about you” is the show in one line.
The family room is the real engine. Sassy crashes in with bottles stolen from a boy in a white robe and goes straight at the dating question, accusing Rebecca of glowing like a girl who has just been properly plowed even at her father’s funeral. Keeley screams it. Deborah, drifting in behind, supplies the answer. The reveal of Sam in front of the mother, the best friend, and the publicist gets the loudest single beat of the hour without any moralizing.
The other half is Deborah and Rebecca alone, the conversation the season has been holding back. Rebecca tells her mother Paul cheated, that she saw it as a child, Friday the 13th of September 1991, Mrs. Reynolds screaming his name. Then Deborah says it: of course she knew. She knows everything. Rebecca’s hate, locked up since fifth grade, has been hate at her mother as much as her father. Rebecca tells her mother she hates her too, for letting him treat her like that. Deborah’s answer, that being alone is fucking horrible but necessary and rather wonderful, is the writing the second season has been promising and has not always delivered.
Ted on Sharon’s couch, and a story about a book called Johnny Tremain
The biggest swing is the Sharon house call. Ted has called her mid-panic-attack rather than fake his way through another funeral, and Niles plays the arrival with a wry “when someone’s not great, that allows me to get in there and do my thing” that earns laughter and trust in the same beat. Ted offers her tea. She hates tea. Wet paper bag.
Then the script asks Sudeikis to do something he has not been asked all season. He tells Sharon his father quit. He hated him for it. He still hates him for it. The panic attack at the funeral was a memory of the one he did not attend. Sharon asks him what he loved. The Johnny Tremain story, of a fifth grader who had not read a page of a book the night before a test, and a father who stayed up the entire night reading it cover to cover so he could narrate the plot in the car the next morning, is the longest piece of dialogue Sudeikis has been given on the show. He plays it dry and quiet, then the realization arrives in real time: his dad did not know he was a good father, and if he had known, he probably would not have done what he did. The line catches in Sudeikis’s throat. Ted asks if it is illegal to ask for a hug. Niles says of course not, and of course she is charging him for the house call. The funniest possible button on the heaviest possible scene.
The eulogy, and what a song actually means when you finally listen to it
Rebecca walks to the lectern without a speech. The vicar has just made a joke about Paul listening to Richmond matches on his phone every Sunday. The crowd has laughed. Rebecca stands at the lectern and cannot get the second sentence out. The episode commits to a long, quiet hold on Waddingham, and then she does the only thing she has left. She quotes a Rick Astley lyric. We’re no strangers to love. You know the rules, and so do I.
It works for two reasons. First is craft. The song has been seeded since the cold open, planted by a mother who never stopped playing it and resented by a daughter who refused to let it be hers, and the moment Rebecca picks it up as eulogy she is taking her father back from her own anger. The second is the room. Sam recognizes it first, then Ted, then Keeley, then Sassy. By the second verse the entire congregation is singing along. The shot of Sudeikis in the pew, tear-streaked and mouthing every word, rhymes with his Sharon scene thirty minutes earlier. Rebecca is making peace by singing the dumbest pop hook of the late eighties at a man who probably deserved less.
The Rickroll only works as a joke if you do not know it. The eulogy only works as catharsis if the joke also lands. The episode does both at once.
The wake, two confessions, and a share transfer
The wake runs out of space and admits it. Anthony Head’s Rupert arrives with a baby and a knife to the throat: he has convinced Bex to give up her shares in Richmond and would love Rebecca to have them. Deborah accepts with a smile that does not move. The show is planting the gun for episode eleven.
Jamie corners Keeley by the drinks and tells her, at her boss’s father’s wake, that he came back to Richmond not only to get away from his own father but because of her, and that he loves her. Forty seconds later Roy apologizes for the bus driver bit, tells her his grandfather died and he prayed for a year to talk to him like Obi-Wan, got fuck all out of it, and only learned that he has one life. He loves her. Keeley stands in a hallway with two declarations and nothing to say to either. The silence on Temple’s face as Roy walks off is the cliffhanger the back half will spend.
Rebecca tells Sam she has to break it off. He is too wonderful. He could really hurt her. Sam asks why that scares her instead of him. Jimoh plays it with the steadiness of a man who has already won an argument he did not want to be in. Sam’s parting promise that he is only going to get more wonderful is a warning. He is right.
What this episode argues
Grief is the same shape as a song you used to know all the words to. Deborah loves Paul forever because she does. Rebecca hates Paul because she had a reason to. Ted hates his own father and loves a single memory of him reading a book all night. The hour does not pretend any of these positions is correct. It only insists you have to say the loving part out loud, even if the hateful part is the truer thing inside you, because the song does not know the difference and neither does the room around you.
The other argument is that the men of Ted Lasso are finally allowed to be the ones who break first. Ted on Sharon’s couch is the inverse of every press conference scene he played in season one. The Rick Astley song that follows is the rescue the script gives the entire show, not just one man.
Verdict
“No Weddings and a Funeral” is the episode most often cited as the season-two peak, and the second viewing only strengthens the case. The cold open earns its smash. The Sharon scene earns its hug. The eulogy earns the congregation singing along. The Jamie-Roy double love confession is the only stretch where the script over-spends a beat, and even there Temple’s silence carries it. The Sam break-off lands with the kind of regret the show will have to live with. The Rebecca-Deborah confrontation is the best two-handed scene Waddingham has been given.
The cost is that an episode this complete makes its neighbors look thinner. The back half has to follow this with a Nate heel turn and an exhibition match, neither of which lands with the same weight. For one hour the show weaponizes the dumbest song in its mother’s record collection as a working eulogy, and gets away with it because every character on screen has earned it.
Rating: 9.4/10