PicoBlog

We’re halfway through Ted Lasso’s third season, and “Sunflowers” is what Kathryn VanArendonk has proposed we think of as a “departure episode”: after a disastrous friendly in Amsterdam, Ted decides to remove the team’s usual curfew, hoping to break the team out of their funk. A sort of inversion of last season’s “Beard After Hours,” this hour—yes, a full hour—follows everyone but Beard as they explore one of Europe’s finest cities, where to quote the synopsis “one night out unlocks truths for many.

Although I was probably the internet’s most prominent Ted Lasso skeptic among critics covering the second season back in 2021, I want to be clear on something: I didn’t go into this season thinking that the show’s collapse was inevitable. Even as someone who had some serious issues with how that season played out, the core of Ted Lasso was still solid in my eyes; while some of the decisions at the end of the season—mainly throwing a wrench into Roy and Keeley’s relationship—were suspect, I didn’t consider them enough to suggest the show was headed in the wrong direction.

As we near the finale and the eventual reveal of who killed Edgar, he remains surprisingly hard to pin down. Was he the gawky but loving paramour of Grace’s dreams? The stilted but welcoming host we saw with Aniq? Or is he, as both Isabel and Sebastian have portrayed him, cold, calculating, and ready to betray those closest to him in pursuit of money? In Isabel’s case, at least, she’s got a bit of a smoking gun, or napkin, so to speak.

“That is so beautiful.” That phrase, spoken multiple times this week on The Curse, is becoming one of Whitney’s catchphrases. She always says it in the same tone of voice: solemn, respectful, yet empathic. But it’s also an incredibly hollow compliment, emphasized by just how often Whitney uses it. The reverence she pays to Cara’s explanation of her impassioned teepee performance is no different from the way she responds to Brett’s laughable caricatures of Native wisdom.

What does Dougie’s ideal version of Flipanthropy look like? It’s something I’ve thought about a lot during these last two episodes, but especially this one. I get it, in theory: he can clearly tell how quickly the Siegels’ marriage is falling apart, and perhaps how little was there in the first place. That offers a perfect opportunity to juice up the conflict and drama in the show, which can only benefit the ratings (and, therefore, the paycheck).

Remember when I called last week’s episode “less viscerally disturbing and more wickedly entertaining”? So much for that. “The Fire Burns On” may be the shortest episode of The Curse, clocking in at only 38 minutes, but it feels like one of the longest. There’s still dark humor here, certainly, but the prevailing emotion is dread. This is an episode packed to the brim with evil vibes. Let’s start near the end, with the scene that has remained unpleasantly lodged in my memory since I watched it: Abshir’s chiropractor appointment.

Finales for continuing shows with serialized elements are predictable. It’s the nature of the episodic medium. The season-specific storylines are going to get resolved, the main conflicts for next season are going to be previewed, and we’ll end hanging off a cliff. So from my point of view, it’s not what happens in a finale that is the main point of interest. It’s how those predictable beats get deployed. Let’s take the big reversal/reset point of this finale as an example.

After last week’s happy wedding and successful Newport dinner, we all should have known there was nothing but trouble ahead. The predictable trouble is the strike which has been looming for several episodes. And we get right into it, with the mill workers chanting Eight eight eight! and vowing to meet the guns of the militia with weapons of their own. “Warning Shots” builds from that beginning to the final moment, when George Russell blinks.

“You can’t be Robin Hood and the King.” You also can’t be whatever The Regime is, I’d argue. Upfront, I should say that this will probably be the last weekly review I write about The Regime. While I intend to keep watching, and will come back for the finale, the absence of weekly discussion and ongoing dialogue strikes me as a clear sign that whatever interest the series has drawn, it doesn’t justify the expense of paying me to be confounded with it.