The Unexpected Weirdness of Ted Lasso

A filler episode in season 2 is stuffed with esoteric symbolism

It may surprise the reader to know that, in spite of my passion for gazing into the abyss and plumbing the depths of The Mauve Zone I am, in fact, a gigantic sap and no sitcom suits me better than the saccharine, Emmy-saturated sweetness of Ted Lasso.

For the uninitiated in the mysteries of Apple’s streaming service, Ted Lasso appears on the surface to be a clinic in the fish-out-of-water American-in-England comedy situation but the show is so much more than that. Jason Sudeikis is the eponymous Ted, an American football coach inexplicably hired to coach a lower-echelon English Premier League football team. He is woefully inappropriate for the job but Ted’s disarming personality ultimately wins everyone over, including the fickle fans of the team, AFC Richmond (a sort of stand-in for what was originally Totenham Hot-Spurs who are, in fact, having a pretty great season as of this writing). It’s warmth and charm all the way down. It’s a cup of hot chocolate on a snowy day; funny, but not hilarious, redemption arc after redemption arc, and its heart proudly on its sleeve. The worst part of it is that there aren’t more episodes and the upcoming season 3 is its last.

It’s also the last thing I ever expected to write about here. There is nothing particularly weird about it, with one exception: a filler episode called Beard After Hours.

Coach Beard’s Dark Night of the Soul

I wouldn’t mention it if it weren’t weird as fuck and completely out of step with the rest of the series. During the season one run, the show hit a certain critical mass with viewers and critics and on top of already being renewed for a second season, Apple ordered two additional episodes to round the season out at twelve. The first of the two is a Christmas episode that’s pretty consistent with British TV Christmas specials but the second is the episode in question, written by Executive Story Editor and one of the show’s stars, Brett Goldstein (who plays grouch-supreme, Roy Kent). It concerns the show’s one character blind spot, Coach Beard (played by series co-creator, Brendan Hunt), Ted’s Executive Officer. He’s a man of few words, The Silent Bob to Ted’s Jay, who occasionally breaks silence to dispense context and precious wisdom but his past is almost entirely in shadow. He’s a chess master, he reads a lot, and keeps track of all the details while Ted focuses on the bigger picture. But in this episode, we finally get a peak through the keyhole.

Following Richmond’s crushing 5-0 defeat by Manchester City, Beard kicks off an adventure inspired by Martin Scorcese’s yuppie-horror nightmare, After Hours, that starts at the local Richmond pub, takes him to an exclusive, members-only club in the company of Baz, Jerry, and Paul a trio of lads from the pub, to the home of a mysterious woman whose boyfriend then chases him through the London streets by night where he is then attacked by the father of Richmond’s ace striker, Jamie Tartt, in a scene lifted straight out of A Clockwork Orange, and then to a nightclub in a church where he seems to reconcile with his wishy-washy sometimes girlfriend, Jane.

The entire episode is a pastiche of tropes where Goldstein’s script plays with a lot of other filmmaker’s ideas but Brett’s own touches are where things take a turn for the strange. Or maybe it’s Joe Kelly, he has a writer’s credit, too, but his resume doesn’t exactly scream, “I know a lot about tarot!”

There’s a leitmotif running through the entire episode, an echo of the previous episode, where Richmond took on Man City, whose fans sing the song Blue Moon. In this episode, the one which follows it, a blue moon hangs heavily over numerous scenes.

The Moon, being a card in the tarot which represents reflection and a terrifying journey to the truth, is particularly apropos for the episode. It begins with Beard reflecting on Richmond’s humiliating loss on a long train ride home which transforms into reflection and inner-conflict over his humiliation at revealing his love for his on-again-off-again girlfriend, Jane Payne (played by series story editor, Phoebe Walsh). Up to this point, Jane has been a tangential presence on the show, occasionally spoken of but rarely seen and what we’ve heard of her isn’t terribly good. What we can tell about her is that she’s manipulative and probably psychotic. He’s also haunted by hallucinations of football commentators, Gary Lineker and Thierry Henry, on television screens, making very personal comments about him and the team.

Stopping for what appears to be a shitload of beers at the pub, Beard picks up Richmond fanatics, Baz, Jerry, and Paul and takes them on a mission to infiltrate an exclusive nightclub called Bones & Honey where another suspiciously mystical figure appears, The Woman in Red.

Charlotte Spencer as Red, Babalon illustration by Lindsay Dorlac

At first she’s just an alluring presence, the one point in space more notable than the rest. But when Beard’s pants are torn on a piece of Bones & Honey’s furniture, she offers to fix them for him and they go back to her apartment. It should be a scene leading to a sexual encounter. Her entire vibe is allure and mystery, and actress Charlotte Spencer is quite beautiful, but when she says that she’ll fix his pants, she does just that and Beard makes no assumptions. What happens, instead, is a darkly philosophical conversation on the nature of love and, to an extent, will. Oddly, on the way over, she not only wears a coat with a tiger print pattern on it, but Beard’s underwear also bear the same pattern, as though a piece of him needs to be tamed. Once Babalon’s boyfriend shows up, her nature is revealed by way of the Strength card.

As she mends his pants and they talk, they mull over the nature of desire and love and she is definitely more in keeping with Aleister Crowley’s version of the Strength card, Lust, than Pam Smith’s Strength, loving all of her past loves wildly, feeling them deeply, and then letting them go without regret. Beard laments that his happiest memories are when he’s single and this troubles him. He also lives in conflict with his feelings on Jane, who he loves deeply, but can’t figure out if this emotion is born of something deeper or the result of animal magnetism, to which Babalon replies, can’t it be both? The Strength card is famously ambiguous as to what’s going on. Is the woman taming the lion or is she petting it? Why can’t it be both? Strength can be interpreted as coming to recognize the wild nature of the thing you struggle with and learning to strike a balance with that by going with the flow and finding a compromise between what you need and what the lion needs. So Beard isn’t left in her apartment in his underwear, she hands him a ridiculous pair of disco pants with stars sewn to them, as if to remind him that every man and every woman is a star. Just as Beard is drawn to Jane who sometimes makes him feel insignificant, Beard can’t walk away from the struggle due to his inexplicable love for her, but he must not forget that he, too, is a point of light in Nuit’s sky.

Babalon’s boyfriend, a mountain of an angry man, shows up and jumps to the conclusion that Beard is there to knock boots with Babalon. In the show credits she’s simply known as Red but I’m projecting Babalon on to her for reasons which I hope are obvious. On top of being consistent with the imagery of the cards Strength and Lust, she’s also a symbol for the creative/destructive urges toward sex and death, being that Beard was initially drawn to her overt sexuality at the nightclub and is now facing being pummeled to death by her monstrous Beast of a boyfriend who chases him across the rooftop of her apartment. Beard escapes, like The Fool, by leaping from the roof into a full dumpster below, and catches a ride to his next trial upon The Chariot inverted.

If Beard had truly come to an understanding by this point, the bus would have taken him closer to home, but having simply grabbed the bus as it passed (which was previously seen driving by with a giant eye painted on the back), he’s thrown off when a grouchy old lady points out to the driver that he didn’t pay.

The secondary theme to this episode is Beard’s house key. In Scorcese’s After Hours (a terrifying ordeal inexplicably sold as a comedy), the film’s star, Griffin Dunne, loses some keys and endures a late-night struggle for survival in The East Village. In Beard After Hours, Beard is constantly losing his keys. It’s an obvious nod to the source material but the symbolism of keys is constant in the tarot, as well. In Crowley’s Book of Thoth he calls the cards of the Major Arcana Atu, or keys, and in the flow of the episode’s story someone always hands Beard his keys, telling him, “You dropped these” just as he’s moved along a little further through this dark night of the soul.

There are minor Hermit and Wheel of Fortune comedic moments in the lead up to The Hanged Man portion of Beard’s journey, but they’re hardly worth mentioning and certainly contribute to the episode’s low viewer rating but the pivotal moment comes when Beard descends into London’s underworld, seeking delivery or oblivion.

From here, until the resolution of Death, the scenery becomes contained and claustrophobic. Everything is hidden under cover of night, with a roof over his head. It’s here that he coincidentally encounters Jamie Tartt’s father, who Beard personally escorted from the locker room, making sure to rough him up a bit on the way out. Tartt and his mates are characterized as old-school football hooligans. In the previous episode Tartt is brought in for important character moments for Roy, Jamie, and Ted. But here they’re mostly Brett Goldstein having a bit of fun doing a cover version of A Clockwork Orange and serving Beard up for his transformative experience with Death.

Tartt and his mates beat the shit out of Beard in this scene and Beard refuses to stay down, practically inviting the lads to actually kill him. However, right before Tartt can bludgeon Beard with a pipe, The Beast returns from the previous scene where he chased Beard around the rooftop but now with a different attitude. He rescues him and chases off the Droogs and then returns Beard’s wallet, phone, and keys (which he had dropped back when he was getting his ass kicked) and the pair leave the claustrophobic underworld, back into the overworld. The Beast explains how he’s struggling to tame the lion inside and falls to jealousy because he used to cheat on his girlfriends, but Babalon has taught him a lot to help him grow and get past that. Evidence of his taming is offered by way of The Beast leaving the scene riding a tiny scooter. Comedic touch? Yes. It’s a little zany, for sure, but how else do you indicate a giant force of potential violence brought to civility than that?

Lessons learned and the gauntlet passed, Beard is once again picked up by The Chariot, this time right side up, when a limousine carrying Baz, Jerry, and Paul shows up. The lads ended up winning a large sum of money from Oxford alum at Bones & Honey and used it to hire a limousine which takes Beard home and the lads to Nelson Road (where Richmond plays) to actually touch the pitch since their only interactions with Richmond matches take place at the pub.

Prior to this, phone in hand, Beard discovers that while he was off running for his life and then seemingly running toward death, Jane barraged his phone with texts and calls and just before the battery gives out he sees a message where she returns his affection, telling him that she loves him. Beard, exhausted and frustrated, returns home and breaks his key off in the lock just as it begins to rain driving us to penultimate manifestation of the episode, Judgement.

Beard, running through the rain, comes upon a church with a neon cross in the window, reminding him of the image Jane sent him earlier in the episode of her next to a neon cross. He goes in, does a bit of praying, speaking out loud his feelings about Jane, why he loves her, and is then drawn by the beat of music to a deeper part of the church where a rave is taking place. Drawn by the call of music. Going back to an earlier point in the episode, just before all this craziness kicks off, Jane sent Beard a text informing him that she’s at a club, without specifying which club, saying, “I think it’s what you need.”

There’s a comfort found in surrender. Beard could have gone running to Jane and ended up in a club. This is where he was heading from the start but to have ended up here without all the struggle in between would have taught him no lessons. He would have sorted none of his conflicts and never faced the abyss which required a decision be made. But now he’s here, having coincidentally answered Jane’s clarion call to the club. This is the rebirth. The prayer is the moment when he speaks his needs out loud. He wants to stay away from Jane, but he can’t. She adds a flavor to his life that he can’t find anywhere else and comes to the understanding that for better or for worse, he loves her and now realizing that she loves him, too, he can finally get over the push and pull of their relationship. Realizing this and surrendering, Beard begins to dance and Jane comes forth, coincidentally being in the same club as him, bearing a familiar symbol and they dance together.

Unfortunately, nothing changes. By the season finale, they’re broken up again and then back together in the same episode.