Ted Lasso S3E4 Review: Nate Wins the Match, Rupert Wins the Room
Richmond meets West Ham in a London derby that ends 4-1, two red cards, one finished marriage, and one quiet ex-husband telling Ted he loves their family no matter what it looks like.
The fourth hour of this season has a hard structural job. It has to deliver the first Nate-as-rival match without making Nate a cartoon, it has to give Ted the loss the season’s been building toward, and it has to set up Rupert as the real antagonist now that the kit man stripe on his blazer no longer reads as redemption. It does all three by spending the entire hour on the question of who hurts whom and which hurts get spoken out loud. By the closing webcam call to Kansas, the show has stopped being about football and started being about adults trying to name things before the damage compounds.
Roy starts at four in the morning, and Jamie says yes
The cold open does the work a thesis statement would do. Brett Goldstein’s Roy rings Phil Dunster’s Jamie’s bell at 4 a.m., Jamie answers in his underwear, and the negotiation is brief. “Do you wanna be better than Zava or not?” Roy asks. Jamie wants to. The two of them go run in the dark. The choice this season has made about Jamie, that he has decided to want something more than attention, fits inside the word yes.
Zava, meanwhile, is doing his Zava thing. He tells the keeper formerly known as Zoreaux that a person can be whoever they want to be. The keeper renames himself Van Damme on the spot, sticks with it through warmups, gets a yellow card and then a red, and is still Van Damme by the end of the hour. The bit is funny in the moment. Late in the hour it lands differently, because the season has now established what happens when a man hears his old name and decides it is not his anymore.
Nathan and Ted finally meet in an elevator, and the elevator does the work
The bones of the episode are three encounters between Nick Mohammed’s Nate and the people he left. The first is offhand: Nate runs into Jade at the Greek takeaway he used to eat at alone, panics through small talk about his “big, big new busy job,” and gets gently dismissed. The second is intimate, and it is the scene the season has been quietly building. Anthony Head’s Rupert finds Nate working late, sells him on the lie that he has done nothing wrong, that he was never going to spend his life supporting Ted, that he earned this job, and that the right way to handle Sunday is to shake Ted’s hand and then beat him. The advice is structurally tender. The way Mohammed plays the listening is what makes it lethal. Nathan, who has spent every Rupert scene this season looking for a father, looks across the desk and sees one.
Then comes the elevator. Jason Sudeikis’s Ted, on his way down to the visiting dugout, ends up sharing a lift with Nate. Sudeikis plays it the way he plays most things, which is to extend a courtesy outward before checking whether the other party has earned it. He asks how Nate has been. He is doing it on purpose. He is also doing it because he cannot do it any other way. Nate, halfway through trying to start what might have been an apology — “the way I left—” — gets cut off by the elevator door and the sound of Rupert’s voice. “Nathan. There you are.” The cut between Nate’s instinct to apologize and Rupert claiming him back is the most efficient piece of editing the show has done all season. The handshake at full time never happens. Nate is asked about it by a reporter, says he got “caught up in the excitement of it all,” and his face does the rest.
Rebecca meets Jack, Keeley meets a stranger in a stall, and Bex sees too much
The B-stories braid into the A. Hannah Waddingham’s Rebecca arrives at the match nervous about Jack Danvers, the VC head everyone has assumed is a man. Juno Temple’s Keeley, on the way to the suite, helps an unknown woman in a bathroom stall through a period emergency and a candid monologue about the absurdity of skinny pads. The woman in the stall is Jack, and Keeley is already three minutes into a friendship before the introductions are made. Temple plays the recognition with a thirty-yard-stare of mortification, then a quick recovery.
Rebecca, meanwhile, has Rupert arrive in her box for a hello-Bex routine that costs her a few seconds of composure and gives Jeremy Swift’s Higgins one of the episode’s quietest beats — the man has been weathering Rupert’s energy for years and is still, in his own way, on Rebecca’s side. The Rupert-Bex thread does not stay in the periphery. After the match, Bex sees Rupert flirting with Anastasia, the model brought to dinner to flatter Nate, and the look she gives him is the look of a woman who has just done the math. The line she lands on her way out — “Your daughter deserves better, and so does Bex. Stop fucking around” — is delivered by Bex herself, and it is the cleanest piece of moral writing in the hour.
The Bantr subplot pays off fastest. Keeley’s hire Shandy rewrites the app’s bio to a “fuck a footballer” tagline, triples subscribers in an hour, and Keeley has to walk it back in front of her new boss while still mid-flirt. Jack waits and lets Keeley do it herself. The exchange tells you how the power lines run in this relationship before they have had a first drink.
The match itself, and Ted leaving the locker room
The 4-4-2 talk in the staff room — Roy and Coach Beard tying themselves into a “Nate thinking like us thinking like Nate” knot — was funny because it was already lost. West Ham sit deep, soak the pressure, hit Richmond on the break in stoppage time of the first half for 1-0, then take Sam off the ball for a second goal seconds later. Brendan Hunt’s Coach Beard and Roy are still arguing about what they saw when Ted walks out of the dressing room at halftime to meet Rebecca, who tells him she believes in him, that he should forget about winning and have fun.
The choice the writers make here is unkind to Ted on purpose. He leaves the locker room during the most consequential halftime of his managerial life. Coach Beard, asked what to tell the team, gets a “surprise me” and a chuckle. By the time Ted comes back, his staff has shown the players the security footage of Nate ripping the BELIEVE sign in half, and the team has gone from catatonic to homicidal. Two red cards and four goals later, James Lance’s Trent Crimm watches a 4-1 defeat from the press box and Richmond have, in Arlo White’s words, played angry, dirty and ugly. The football story and the emotional story are the same story: Ted walked out of the room where the work was, told his guys to surprise him, and got surprised.
What lands hardest is the postgame locker room. Roy and Beard come to Ted asking, almost begging, to be yelled at. Call us pieces of shit. Hit us. Get it over with. Ted’s answer — “Tried something new. It didn’t work. Big whoop” — is delivered so flatly Goldstein has to react with a “What a fucking arsehole” to keep the scene from collapsing into Ted’s usual grace. The episode does not let Ted off the hook for his calm. The team needed a coach in that room, and Ted gave them a shrug. It is the first time the show has presented Ted’s good cheer as a withdrawal rather than a gift.
What this episode argues
The hour’s argument is about who gets to name the hurt, and the cost of staying quiet. Higgins, in the Diamond Dogs scene, recites the Co-Dependents Anonymous line about pain being like carbon monoxide — expressing it to the person who hurt you is opening a vent, holding it in will poison you. The episode is structured to test that idea on four separate characters. Nathan does not say what he meant to say in the elevator. Keeley does not say what she actually wants to say to Shandy until it is almost too late. Rebecca does not say what she has been wanting to say to Rupert for two seasons. Bex says it for her.
The fourth test is Ted, alone at his kitchen table, finally calling Michelle without being on the back foot. The webcam scene is the strongest piece of acting Sudeikis has done on this show. He tells his ex-wife that this whole thing with Dr. Jacob really ticks him off. He says he is upset they did not talk about it before it started. He says he loves her, he loves Henry, he loves their family no matter what it looks like. He does it without an exit ramp, without a joke at the end, and without asking her to do anything with it. Michelle’s response is two words: “Of course.” Then Ted hangs up. The show has spent three seasons making “I just wanted to hear your voice” the line that lets Ted off the hook from his own feelings. Tonight he stays on the line.
Verdict
This is the hour the season needed, and it lands its biggest scenes in the small spaces. Nate’s apology dying in an elevator, Bex telling Rupert to stop, Ted shrugging at Roy and Beard in a postgame room they wanted him to set on fire, and a webcam call where Ted finally tells his wife what bothers him about her boyfriend — all of those are scenes the show would have spent two episodes building to in a weaker season. Some of the supporting business is broader than the central register can carry. Zava’s “Smingus Dingus” line is the kind of bit the show has earned the right to do but does not benefit from in an episode this serious. The Trent Crimm pull-the-security-footage beat is a piece of plot mechanics the show could have skipped. Those quibbles aside, this is the cleanest piece of writing the season has produced, and Goldstein, Mohammed, Head, and Sudeikis are all playing at the level the script asks them to.
Rating: 8.7/10