Ted Lasso S3E9 Review: La Locker Room Aux Folles Hands the Mic to Roy
Colin's secret finds the room before he is ready, Isaac throws a punch about somebody else, and Roy stops his press-conference bit for one story.
The episode is built around three men who cannot say a thing out loud and a fourth who finally does. Colin has been carrying a secret for years. Isaac has been carrying Colin’s secret for a week, badly. Nate has been carrying a small private dignity around Rupert that the man at the next table is busy trimming for fun. And Brett Goldstein’s Roy Kent, given a podium for the second time in a season after refusing it nine episodes in a row, tells a story about Sunderland that lands like a depth charge. The half-hour comedy that opened with a kit-man scolding a coach about hot dogs has decided, in its second-to-last hour, to write a long quiet scene about a man who beat the protagonist’s young self half to death and was right to be that angry, even though he was not. Ted Lasso has rarely been this still.
Isaac swings at his fan because he cannot swing at himself
The cold open is a victory lap that the season has earned. Brendan Hunt’s Beard concedes to Roy that switching the team’s philosophy mid-season was nuts and is also working, the players are laughing on grass, Isaac is captain, and Jason Sudeikis’s Ted hangs out a window grinning at them. The dirty-socks gag with the Dani-and-Van-Damme corner sets the room’s affection level at full. Then Colin asks his teammate for a beer and a chat after training and Isaac walks past him without a glance.
What follows is the season’s smallest and meanest piece of work. Isaac, the captain, Kola Bokinni’s Isaac, has known since he saw Colin kissing a man on a phone screen in episode six, has not said a word, and has flipped into the kind of withholding cruelty that small towns invented. The match against Brighton breaks him. He misplays an early pass, shouts at Hughes on the pitch for a mistake that is half his own, and when a Richmond supporter in the stands yells the word at his back, Isaac vaults the wall. The Sky Sports panel back at the pub, with Anthony Stewart Head’s Rupert in the chair this week not literally but in the air around it, decides Isaac is unfit for the captaincy. They are wrong about the why and right that the act was a line he should not have crossed. The episode never lets him off the hook for the punch. It also never lets the show pretend the punch was about a slur.
The halftime locker room is staged as a slow burn. Isaac will not say what he heard. Colin volunteers. The room ripples, Cristo Fernández’s Dani says it is just poopy and to ignore it, the team has the immediate instinct to perform tolerance the cheap way (“you’re gay, big whoop, but we don’t care”), and Ted gets up and bombs a story about a Kansas City buddy named Stevey Jewell and the seven-layer dip the man ate alone watching Denver win two Super Bowls. The bomb is the point. Sudeikis lets the room laugh at him, accepts the bumbercatch from Mohammed-shaped territory (“American football reference, an absolute fumble in this situation”), and lands the rewrite cleanly: we do not not care, we care, we care very much. The pivot is small. It is also the thing the episode is actually about. Tolerance is performed cheap. Care is expensive.
Nate hears the word “girls” and finally hears Rupert
Nick Mohammed’s Nathan has been a slow read on his own boss for half a season, and tonight is when the page finally moves. Edyta Budnik’s Jade brings him lunch at the office. Rupert arrives uninvited, identifies her accent as southern Poland (Nowy Sącz, in fact), tells Nate that if he were not so brilliant Jade would be out of his league, sniffs at the smell of Greek takeaway from the place where she hostesses, and parks a “don’t screw this up” on the way out. The line plays as paternal mentoring. Jade reads it as Rupert seeming wealthy but nice-like. Nate agrees, sort of. The show has been telegraphing what Rupert is for a season and a half. The point of the scene is that Nate still cannot see it.
The pub-night sequence pays off the setup with the precision of a watchmaker. Rupert invites Nate for a drink, just the two of them, a guys’ night. Nate skips a pint with Roger and the lads to make it. He arrives. Rupert is at the table with two women whose names he confuses, calls them girls, and steers everyone into a private room with two bottles of champagne and a slowed-down line about how it is a guys’ night, trust me. Mohammed plays the moment without comment. The phone in his pocket lights up with a text we never see. He stands. He tells Rupert he is so sorry, he needs to leave, long story. He walks out of the slow-motion frame the show has been holding around Rupert for a season and a half, and the show lets him keep walking. There is no swelling music inside the room and no resolution scene later. The pivot is a man choosing the woman who brought him lunch over the man who has been telling him he is the wonder kid. It is the first time Nate has refused Rupert anything.
Roy Kent at the podium tells a story he has never told a press conference
The press-conference subplot does the most heavy lifting and gets the least decoration. Hannah Waddingham’s Rebecca asks Roy to fill in for Ted, who is on a parent-teacher call with his ex and his son Henry. Roy says no, then yes, then bombs the Joe Walsh vs Jimmy Page question so badly Rebecca has to step in and panic her way into calling Eric Clapton the guy from Cream. The next morning Roy is dragged in front of Rebecca, dressed down for it, and ordered to do the next one. He resists in his usual register, eats it from her in his other usual register, and gets the chance one more time after Richmond’s two-one comeback win.
Then the show does something unusual. It puts Roy at the podium and gives him a full unbroken story. Sunderland, an old-timer’s first pregnancy, a joke Roy made that statistically he was probably the real dad, a beating in the dressing room afterward — black eye, chipped tooth, three broken ribs, six matches out, the man kicked off the team and never picked up by another club. The summer after, in a pub, the old-timer told Roy that his wife had lost the baby a month before that joke. He had told nobody. Goldstein plays the swallow before he gets to it. The press is silent. The story is about a man who hit someone and was carrying a thing nobody knew about, told to defend a man who hit someone and is carrying a thing nobody knew about, by a man who has spent eight years working out that the violent register is the only register a press room ever lets him use. He gives Isaac love. He says the why is none of his fucking business. He calls the next reporter Five-O’Clock-Shadow Head and Goblin King. He does not perform the lesson. The lesson performs him.
What this episode argues
Three closets sit side by side. Colin’s actual one, which the team has now seen inside and is starting to figure out how to be useful around. Isaac’s adjacent one, the closet of having loved his friend before he knew the word for it and reacting to a stranger’s slur as if the stranger had read his diary. And the one Rupert is trying to lock Nate into, the men-only back room with two bottles of champagne, where Jade is replaced by interchangeable Libbys and Kelsies and Nate is told this is what success looks like when you have a key to the private room.
The hour says, with a straight face, that the cheapest thing a person can do is announce they do not care. Ted hangs himself on it on purpose, with the seven-layer dip, because the episode needs a worked example. Care costs something. It costs Roy a podium story he has never told. It costs Nate a guys’ night he had been saving up for like a small boy. It costs Isaac the captaincy he is barely holding onto, because the way he has shown up for Colin all week has been a refusal of the thing he is now being asked to do. The argument is that there is no easy version of being in a room with another person. The room either gets the cost or it does not.
The other thing the episode argues, more quietly, is that Roy Kent has been ready to coach all season and has been refusing to. The Sunderland story is the first time the show lets him stand in front of a room and not bite. Beard’s read on it, after Ted has slipped out of the post-match crowd, would be that Roy was always going to be a coach the moment he stopped insisting he was not.
Verdict
This is the strongest hour of season three by a long way and one of the show’s best ever. The Sunderland monologue is the kind of writing Goldstein has been carrying around for a decade and finally got to put down, and it reframes the Isaac arc without softening the punch. The locker room halftime walks the line between earnest and embarrassing more honestly than the show has ever managed, partly because Billy Harris’s Colin gets the small “I’m flattered” beat and partly because Ted is allowed to whiff the speech before he saves it. The Nate-and-Rupert sequence is the most controlled thing the show has done with that storyline, no monologue, no confrontation, just a man getting up and leaving a private room. The Jack send-off lands with a “too-firm handshake” line that earns a Waddingham double take. The football is real football. The pundit cutaways are weaker, as they have been all season, and the George Cartrick chorus is starting to wear, but it is doing real work this week as the public the locker room is choosing not to be. Toheeb Jimoh’s Sam barely appears, Phil Dunster’s Jamie almost not at all, Juno Temple’s Keeley is sidelined into the Jack-breakup B-plot. None of that is fatal. The episode knows what it is about. It says it plainly. It does not perform the lesson.
Rating: 9.1/10