lavender menace

The matchbox with the army man, the magnets, all the little signs and clues that led us to believe it meant something… I don’t think those kinds of shots were baiting to be honest. I think they could have very well just been little reminders of Ted and Rebecca’s soulmate connection without implying it would become more. However, what WAS undeniably a bait moment was that first scene with them. It was honestly a little rude. I picture some writer adding it in for shits and giggles and it doesn’t sit well with me.

I said this in another post but I want to repeat it because it’s important. I do believe this is a show about Ted and Rebecca. Even though it’s called Ted Lasso, and even though they don’t end up together, and it’s also very heavily about the team in general and how they grow, this is a show in which Ted and Rebecca are the two most central characters. Jason Sudeikis said this himself when explaining why the show’s first shot is of Rebecca, likening it to Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid. Which is why…

Writing one of your main characters as having a happily ever after with a man who remains nameless in his fifteen amassed minutes of screentime is never a good writing choice.

I do believe that. And I don’t mean like, a college kid casually dating someone in an epilogue of some coming of age movie. There’s a more finite sense to that. I’m talking about endings in which it is clear that the person they end up with for good is still nameless. That is what happens here, and the result is that it gives us nothing to emotionally grasp onto. This daughter that is supposedly going to be Rebecca’s key to motherhood? We’ve seen no connection from them other than that Rebecca helped her up after a fall, and that she’s attracted to her father. We don’t even know how this child feels about gaining a new mother figure, or even where the ex-wife is or how she feels about it. It’s weird, it’s rushed, and it’s baffling that they expect so many viewers to truly root for that situation.

My second massive problem with the Rebecca ending and the way the show treated Tedbecca in general was that it felt so unnaturally avoided. (Again, this is just my opinion.) I see these two characters whose journies do heavily involve having love fail and leave them, and their processes in accepting it again. And so much of their pasts and presents are linked, entrenched in that soulmate connection that Jason confirmed, so having them find it in each other might have been predictable or cheesy, but it would have felt organic. Two people who have insane chemistry, whose lives are cosmically intertwined, and who have helped each other become better people? Ships have been built on way less. Ships have been formed from interactions with the weight of a straw of hay. Ted and Rebecca, in comparison, were an anvil.

Instead, the writers swerved. Like I said earlier, I don’t think they ever veered that much in favour of Tedbecca endgame anyway, and I never thought them to be open to the idea frankly. But still, it remains that I think based on this philosophy of rom-communism that was built into the show, it would have just made sense to merge them together into a relationship.

For example, in S2 E1, F-Tony asks two other characters if they have been fucking. He does not use the word fucking, He uses a word that I assume the writers thought was a milennial slang synonym for fucking.