Ted Lasso S1E6 Review: A Cursed Treatment Room and a Midnight Show-and-Tell
A worried sitcom about a worried man hides the cost of his marriage behind a Lamborghini key, a blanket, and a 400-ghost ceremony.
“Two Aces” is the first Richmond episode where the cheer starts to feel rehearsed, and the show is very aware of it. Ted opens the hour late to work, telling a story about getting lost on a walk that nobody in the room believes is really about a walk, then catches himself on the word “bury” and pivots to “bathe myself in work.” His wife’s name slips out once and is filed away. From there the half-hour proceeds as a Ted Lasso showcase — a new striker singing his own name, a treatment room curse, a midnight bonfire of personal items — and the joke under every set piece is that the man running the carnival is the one most desperate to stay inside it.
Bury, bathe, and the word that lost its meaning
Jason Sudeikis plays the cold-open monologue as a man hearing himself in real time and disliking what he hears. The walk explanation has too many turns, the self-correction on “bury” is too quick, and the offhand “Michelle” is the actual headline. He lands on bath bombs, asks Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) for his favorite, and Beard answers “Crème brûlée honey” without looking up. Nate Shelley (Nick Mohammed) declines the bath premise on aging-skin grounds, which is its own quiet character beat — Nate already worries about getting older while everyone else around him worries about getting fired.
Sudeikis lets the room read him before the script does. When Beard quietly asks Nate to help plan practice, the answer to “Is he all right?” is a flat “No.” That two-word exchange does more work than the entire press scrum that follows it. Ted spends the rest of the hour leaning on tics that used to be charm — calling Higgins “sweetie,” riffing on “plan” until Brett Goldstein’s Roy might call it semantic satiation, pivoting any silence into a bit. The show isn’t asking us to laugh at him for it. It’s asking us to notice that the bits are load-bearing now.
The Allen Iverson sermon to Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster) — “We’re talking about practice, man! Practice! Not a game” — is the episode’s most charming gag and its most pointed one. Ted is using a famous American press-conference meltdown as motivational theater, and Jamie’s not impressed. The punchline is Isaac stepping in to remind Jamie he’s “a second-teamer,” which lands because Isaac is genuinely tired of this guy. Ted got the room without quite earning it.
Dani Rojas, football is life, and the treatment-room ghosts
Dani Rojas (Cristo Fernández) arrives in slow motion and a chant. The script could have given Dani any catchphrase and chose “Football is life!” — three syllables that wallpaper the rest of the half-hour every time the plot needs a tonal reset. Fernández plays it as actual joy rather than punchline joy, which is what makes Beard’s instant “I like him” feel like a verdict the audience already shares. Beautiful cross from Sam Obisanya (Toheeb Jimoh), header into the net, and the chant has already replaced the question of how good Dani actually is.
Jamie’s response is a pickup-game showdown by the goal. He outduels Dani at corners until Dani matches him, then climbs down with a sour “I got lucky.” Dunster is doing precise work here. Jamie has been told, twice in one hour, that someone else can do his job, and the swagger gets thinner each time he leaves the pitch. He also limps out of training citing an injury that no doctor signed off on — sulking on the bench, refusing to set up cones for Colin — and the framing makes clear the injury is mostly pride.
Then Dani gets actually hurt. He trips over nothing — “Something tripped me. Something not there” — and the team, to a man, confesses that the Richmond treatment room is cursed. The reveal lands as comic beat first (Sam asking what “hoodoo, voodoo, juju business” is in earnest) and thematic beat second. Higgins (Jeremy Swift) walks in with a poster from 18 November 1914, and the curse stops being a joke. The poster invited young men to a footballers’ tryout that was actually a wartime recruitment drive. Four hundred lads enlisted from this very building. Very few came home, and the room where Dani tripped is the room where they got their physicals.
The way the show handles this turn is the cleanest writing in the episode. Ted, in the middle of explaining the history, tries to soften the blow by claiming it wasn’t the treatment room. He gets caught lying inside one sentence — “It was. I’m sorry, I’m lying to ya. I don’t even know why I’m lying” — and the line works as both a joke and a thesis. Ted’s first instinct under stress is still to manage everyone else’s feelings, even when the truth is the better tool. The team votes itself, via Isaac, into the midnight ceremony. Richard worries that 400 ghosts is too many ghosts to fight. The pivot from comedy to ritual happens inside two scenes, and the show earns both registers.
Old Rebecca, the unicorn planner, and a Sam Obisanya knock
Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) is having her own quietly mortifying hour. Higgins enters with a list of unemployed managers calling for Ted’s job before Ted has finished losing it, and Keeley Jones (Juno Temple) arrives ostensibly for PR help but really to break news. The tabloids have decided that Bex, the woman Rupert left with at the gala, is now “New Rebecca.” Which makes the actual Rebecca “Old Rebecca.” Waddingham plays the moment without theatrical collapse — a flat “What?” then a half-second pause then a fully composed “Old Rebecca?” — and that restraint is what makes it land. The character has built a self in public; the public has retitled her overnight.
Keeley pulls a unicorn-printed work planner out of her bag, gets told to fuck off, and laughs about how Rebecca would react if it were the other way around. The two of them are becoming the show’s most surprising friendship without ever announcing it. The phone-numbers offer — “if you don’t got this, then you just call me” — is the closest thing to an emotional crack the Rebecca arc has gotten outside of her scenes with Ted.
Keeley’s other plotline ends on a Roy Kent doorstep. She has read his bio — the Sunderland scouting, the granddad, the “Winner, Winner, Football Dinner” charity rap. Roy’s defense misfires, calling her a show pony “trotting around while people clap,” and the pang of it lasts past the cut. Goldstein and Temple are already operating in a different register than the rest of the show, and the episode is wise enough not to overplay it.
Sam Obisanya, meanwhile, gets sent to recruit Rebecca for the ceremony, and Jimoh plays the scene with such open-faced sincerity it lands as a small thesis statement. He explains that he’s actually into curses, but mostly because of Harry Potter, then talks about why he likes the idea of getting rich from what you give the world rather than from family money. He has no idea he’s giving the room owner a quiet rebuke of her divorce. Rebecca agrees to come because Sam asked, and because Sam’s reason for liking J.K. Rowling is the kindest thing said in the building all day.
What this episode argues
The midnight ceremony is the show’s clearest mission statement to date. The men have been told to bring something they value and sacrifice it to lift the curse. Roy Kent shows up with a “blankie” — instantly corrected to “blanket,” conversation over — that his granddad gave him on the freezing day he was scouted to Sunderland at nine years old. The granddad was dead by Christmas. Sam pledges to keep up a photo of the 1994 Nigerian World Cup team until he makes the squad himself. Richard offers a baggie of sand from a St. Barts beach where he first slept with a supermodel, which Beard salutes as “Sam and Richard coming at ya from both ends of the spectrum.” Nate, after a beat of refusal, throws in the sunglasses a girl once said made him look like Clive Owen. The Lamborghini keys, the cat collar — Cindy Clawford, a 20-year companion — and the one pen the contributor can write his name with all go into the bin. Rebecca slips in late and adds the tabloid that retitled her. “Fuck the haters.” Nate quietly agrees.
Jamie shows up last, which is the episode’s real argument. After being shown the door by Keeley — “Maybe someday you should stop battling the people that just wanna help you” — he arrives with his first pair of boots and a story about his mother, who taught him football, and a father who only started watching once Jamie got good enough to brag about and called him soft if he didn’t dominate. Dunster, who has played Jamie all season as a defensive crouch, opens him up in one paragraph. “I wonder if sometimes I forget about making her proud. I don’t think that she would be lately.” That confession is the show’s case for itself: warmth in a sports comedy is not a default setting but a thing people choose, often late, often because someone else made the choice easier.
The kicker is that the curse was already lifted hours before. Dani is fine. Ted and Higgins withheld that information so the ceremony would happen anyway, because the room needed it more than the diagnosis did. The pen, the boots, the blanket — none of them had to be sacrificed for Dani. They had to be sacrificed for the men holding them.
Verdict
“Two Aces” is the moment Ted Lasso shows its hand: a show about people performing wellness under fluorescent lighting while the real grief is happening one phone call away. Sudeikis underplays the marriage news so consistently that the bath-bomb riff and the practice sermon read as load-bearing wallpaper, and Waddingham makes “Old Rebecca?” the funniest two-syllable utterance of the season. The midnight ceremony shouldn’t work — the conceit is broad, the pacing is suspect, the unlifted curse is a manipulation — and it works anyway because the show casts actors who can sell sincerity without italicizing it, and because Dunster’s monologue about his mum is the first time Jamie Tartt is allowed to be more than a haircut.
The episode does strain in places. The Allen Iverson reference assumes a level of NBA literacy from a British dressing room that nobody flags as odd, and the Scorsese-best-film tangent runs slightly long. But the closing image — Ted handing Rebecca the best batch of biscuits he’s ever made on the morning she has Jamie shipped back to Manchester City out of spite — is the show telling on itself in the best way. The kindness is real and the betrayal is real and they happen in the same kitchen, and Rebecca eats the biscuit anyway.
Rating: 8.7/10