hi, everyone.

I LOVE Alice Chilton. I love that Ted is used to working with people with idiosyncratic and precise ways of speaking and engaging because of Beard and clearly just really, really likes her right away; and on the flip side, I have been expecting that Ted would rub Alice the wrong way at first, and maybe he does a tiny bit, but he did his homework and she's a person who loves doing homework so there was almost immediate respect and I'm into it.

Sooo important that Ted pays attention to the football details this time around and seems enlivened by being a coach again. It would have been so disrespectful if he'd ignored the details in Alice's report and missed the opportunity to learn his players; he models learning their stories and getting to know them as people, but he's got to have the strategy down too, and I liked the skill/personality balance they've struck so far. Especially since Alice's conflict with Rebecca and all the gender stuff is at the forefront (will get to that in a second), I like that the initial coach dynamics are more solid.

Do Beard and Jane have no child??? Was the pregnancy the only (?) part of Ted's 3x12 plane visions that wasn't real??? I have to figure out how I feel about this. Mostly because I logged so many hours of fic-writing in which I deeply engaged with Beard as a father and it's been incredibly precious to me. But maybe for canon it's cool that this [presumably] did not come to pass considering, you know, in the world of canonical Ted Lasso, Beard is tangled up with Jane and not in a tender, supportive throuple with Ted and Rebecca. L O L.

While I deeply wish Roy and Keeley had been in a months- or years-long situationship by this point, I enjoyed their locker-room scene so much! They are just very fun and sweet and I love them.

A one time only edition of BBQ with the boss, omgggggg. Obsessed. And equally obsessed with the fact that Roy has been baking (and tossing in a greasy brown sack) "healthy" and extremely dense biscuits for Rebecca all this time. I can't imagine it was a daily occurrence, but I'm obsessed with this fucking fanfiction moment being made flesh on TV show Ted Lasso. It's so funny. Nothing is sacred; everything is sacred; the biscuits are his...responsibility.

The footballers are super fun so far and I'm excited to get to know them better! I will admit that I had this tiny fear that they were going to do some kind of 1:1 with the men's team in terms of different personalities, and so far that doesn't seem to be a thing at all. I wasn't super worried, but this show loves its callbacks and I just didn't want this to be a callback at the expense of really examining just how deeply different second division women's football in the UK is to what we've seen in s1-s3.

I feel like I need a whole 'nother section to talk about Rebecca in this episode. I'm purposefully writing my tumblr thoughts out before reading much discourse because I'm so sure people are hating the cringe, the secondhand embarrassment, and the really shitty "feminist" "lessons" Rebecca attempts to speedrun on her way to totally fucking up her interactions with Alice, and I sort of hate them too, but I think they were really effective for a lot of reasons and I'm excited for the Rebecca growth this hopefully portends.

My main critique with how Rebecca's story was handled this episode is primarily to do with time. Canonically and at many, many moments throughout this show, Rebecca has demonstrated very nuanced understanding of men and women and the impact Rupert had on her and the things Keeley may be facing while being love-bombed by a woman and just so many things. So for her to be this far into planning a women's team, and this many years divorced, and surrounded by a LOT of men and women who are very decidedly not stuck in the mindset she's in meant that the fact that she's still struggling with some real 101-level lessons is a little frustrating.

BUT. The vast majority of Rebecca's real engagement with gender so far has been in the world of relationships, and it completely makes sense to me that as someone who grew up surrounded by the world of men's football, she'd have some really big blind spots. Her whiteness, her privilege, and her sense of being a Good Person Who Obviously Is Doing Good Things For the Right Reasons did make sense to me.

And I can admit that this is probably an important part of the story—Rebecca's journey, but moreso the journey of this team—and even though I wish it wasn't being told through Rebecca specifically in such a prominent way, I do think that Rebecca has been really lauded and respected and loved at work, but not challenged at work in the way Alice challenges her. Because she just hasn't had people like Alice in her life at all. She needs that, and to me her corrective speech to Alice at the end was 1000000% meant to be read as an incredibly fallible, misguided, defensive attempt to be "cool" and "evolved" far, far before she'd actually gotten there.

I love that Deborah is rabidly anti-feminist. That has been very loud since 2x6. That woman views the pinnacle of women's existence to be an ability to maneuver through a marriage—and through the whole world of men—without losing what makes her a woman in her own eyes. It's unexamined and I thought the entire lunch scene was so perfectly written. Her desire to turn a fad diet into a spiritual or ethical Experience, therefore wasting the female server's time with inane thoughts. The way Rebecca has clearly come to the conclusion on her own that being a feminist is a good thing, but clearly has no understanding of her mother's feelings about the term because Rebecca has also left so much unexamined. The lunch scene was up there for favorite parts of the episode.

So, while I guess it remains to be seen how I'll feel about this aspect of Rebecca's story, it felt super obvious to me that Rebecca was acting from a place of fear and defensiveness and making some really frustrating choices. My hope is that what they're setting up with Rebecca keeping Keeley from certain planning/financial details will parallel with Rebecca's struggle to actually live a genuinely feminist life, and I could see them each learning from each other in a complementary way in my ideal s4.