Ted Lasso

Sunflowers Season 3 Episode 6 Editor’s Rating 4 stars ****

Ted Lasso

Sunflowers Season 3 Episode 6 Editor’s Rating 4 stars ****

You don’t have to speak Dutch to figure out things are continuing to go poorly for the Greyhounds as “Sunflowers,” the sixth episode of Ted Lasso’s third season, opens. The glum music is matched by the dour expressions on the faces of Roy, Beard, and Ted as they sit on the sidelines at the close of an exhibition match — scratch that, “friendly” — in Amsterdam. The opposing team is sportsmanlike enough as the match ends, but the crowd is anything but friendly. They came to see Zava, but Zava is no longer a Greyhound. And that points to another question: Who are the Greyhounds without their flaky superstar? Or, as a Dutch reporter puts it, much to Roy’s annoyance, is it possible they’re “nothing without Zava”?

To Ted’s eyes, they’re a team in need of a night in Amsterdam without a curfew. It’s the only thing that can shake off what Beard calls the pineapple percussions. (“Dole drums.” “Doldrums.” It’s a stretch, even by the usual wordplay standards of the series.) Ted’s announcement immediately affects the team’s spirits, and Beard suggests that Ted needs it even more than the team. Well, most of the team, anyway. In his continuing efforts to sculpt Jamie into a world-conquering superstar able to fill the Zava void, Roy peels his pupil away from the rest of the team. Jamie cheerfully complies. The lessons are working.

For “Sunflowers,” Ted Lasso breaks its cast into smaller units, and then breaks the units down a little more. A few characters are virtually absent or have little to do. Nate appears only as a hallucination, and Keeley, though she does make a brief appearance as the host of a tourism video presumably made during her modeling days, has a date with Jack in Norway to check out the most intense aurora borealis imaginable. (The “aurora borealist,” one might even say.) Everybody else gets their own adventure in Amsterdam after dark. That makes for an episode that runs over an hour but also serves as one of the season’s highlights.

For Rebecca, the evening takes her to an unexpected destination. After talking to Sassy on the phone, she’s hailed by a Handsome Dutch Stranger (the character goes unnamed, but Matteo Van Der Grijn plays him) who’s trying to tell her she’s standing in a narrow bridge’s bike lane. But before he can get the information out, Rebecca ends up in the canal. Fortunately, HDS lives on a nearby houseboat complete with a shower and a dryer. The only problem: Drying Rebecca’s clothes will take nearly three hours.

It doesn’t take much to convince Rebecca to stick around. HDS is a generous host who makes excellent tea and excuses himself to give his guest privacy while she showers. What’s more, he returns with all the ingredients needed for a delicious dinner and quickly establishes himself as an expert at administering first aid, even if he reflexively seals it with a kiss. (The first-aid training comes from the military, but he’s also a dad.) And while it might be a little awkward to lounge around in the clothes HDS’s ex left behind, it’s not that awkward.

HDS tells Rebecca his story and they bond over their shared love of the song “She Believes in Me,” though they’ve come to it via different versions. When her clothes finally dry, she extends her stay by dampening them again. She resumes drinking and takes HDS up on the foot massage she earlier rejected before falling asleep on the couch. The next morning, a bit blurry on what happened, she asks HDS for a recap. One kiss later, she’s on her way, having never learned her host’s name.

Is this the end of HDS? Was this just a kind of emotional one-night stand? And how does it play into the story the show has been telling about Rebecca all season, one focused on her loneliness as a childless, single woman who becomes fixated on a fortune teller’s predictions? That’s to be determined, but this episode seems like the return of the more confident Rebecca of old.

Meanwhile, Ted’s on a different sort of reflective journey, one he begins but doesn’t finish with Beard. Ted suggests they visit the 2.7 star-rated Yankee Doodle Burger Barn for their night together to get “a little taste of home.” Sensing Ted needs to shake off some pineapple percussions of his own, Beard suggests a psychedelic is in order. (For as close as they are, Beard and Ted are very different people.) Likening the experience to the equivalent of “fresh white snow” covering the well-trodden neural pathways and forcing those who consume it to “begin anew,” Beard knocks back some laced tea while Ted hesitates.

Taking mercy on his pal, who doesn’t want to stick around the hotel, Ted sends Beard out into the night. But ultimately, a combination of boredom, depression, and curiosity leads him to drink (most) of his own serving of tea and check out Amsterdam alone. This takes him first to the Van Gogh Museum, where an erudite employee offers some insights into Van Gogh’s life and struggles while Ted responds that the sunflower is the state flower of Kansas. This could be a banal exchange that makes Ted the butt of the joke, but it doesn’t play that way. Ted’s clearly moved by the painting and the conversation, and this connection between where he’s from and where life has taken him means something to him on a deeper level than mere coincidence.

Next stop: Yankee Doodle Burger Barn, where Ted, a good Midwesterner, opts to sit in the Windy City section. Americana drips from the walls, and surrounded by Chicago images like deep-dish pizza and Chance the Rapper, Ted finds himself thinking first about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, then about football. What if the Greyhounds adopted a strategy akin to what made the Bulls champs by becoming an unpredictable, ever-shifting triangle? With the aid of condiment dispensers and a borrowed pen. It’s a gusher of inspiration aided by a hallucination about the history of the triangle! Clearly, the psychedelics are working!

While Rebecca makes a new friend and Ted goes on an ostensibly drug-enhanced vision quest, the team is roiled by a series of conflicts. Okay, maybe not roiled, but after deciding that they’ll spend the evening together as a team, deciding how to spend that evening leads to lively debates. A boat tour? The Hague? A trip to see a single tulip? A movie night in? Finally, they settle on two options: a sex show or a private all-night party followed by a hearty breakfast. To arrive at an answer, Isaac turns to democracy, which quickly stalls out. Though a pair of servers steers them away from the sex show and toward the party, they find themselves deadlocked about where to eat. Inspired to find a compromise by an impassioned Isaac, they settle on a night in engaging in an epic pillow fight.

 Conversely, Colin knows exactly what he wants to do, but he can’t do it as part of the team. With his hoodie as a disguise, he heads to a gay bar, unaware that Trent is following him. Until now, it’s unclear what Trent intended to do with Colin’s secret, which he could have planned to incorporate into his book or otherwise make public. Trent seemed like a nice guy and Ted liked him, but was he?

The answer is yes. Trent understands what Colin is going through because he went through it himself. Trent relates a story about coming out to his wife while emphasizing that he understands Colin faces a different sort of pressure as a professional athlete in a sport that’s been inhospitable to openly gay players. “My whole life is two lives, really,” Colin explains. But even if this arrangement works, it’s not making him happy. He’s realized that Doc nailed it when she suggested he has an “ache” that can only be reconciled when these two lives become one.

While Colin and Trent bond, Higgins attempts to introduce Will to the Red Light District to draw him into the seedy Amsterdam underworld of … jazz? At first baffled as to why his boss is dragging him along (“Is everything all right at home?”), Will starts to get the picture when Higgins brings him to the plaque marking the spot where his jazz hero, Chet Baker, plunged to his death. By the end of the night, Higgins will be slapping the bass to Baker’s “Let’s Get Lost,” and Will will have become a jazz convert (the invitation to join a three-way with the attractive Dutch couple helping to seal his newfound love).

Higgins and Will bond a little bit, but Roy and Jamie get to know each other on an even deeper level. They swap stories about their childhood. Roy reveals that he never learned how to ride a bike because of painful associations with his late grandfather, in the process realizing that this now fills him with shame and leads him to make Jamie a victim of his own negative feelings. It feels like a breakthrough for Roy, even if the episode breezes by the moment to get to a funny sequence of Jamie teaching Roy how to ride a bike.

Later, Jamie talks about his previous trips to Amsterdam, the first one with his awful father, who took him to the Red Light District (which may or may not have been traumatic; Jamie can’t remember). Both Roy and Jamie apologize to each other for being dicks, before Roy reveals he thinks Keeley has a girlfriend. All Jamie can do is express mild surprise as they head off in search of a windmill.

This is a more intriguing shape than the Roy/Keeley/Jamie triangle looked like it would take. In fact, it now appears not to be a triangle at all. Keeley has, perhaps wisely, removed herself from both men, both of whom loved her but couldn’t do right by her. Whether or not Jack offers a more fulfilling alternative remains to be seen, but for now, the series has sidestepped a seemingly clichéd situation by making the answer to Keeley’s dilemma “none of the above,” even if what this choice means to her exes is still unclear.

As the day begins, everyone converges on the bus, including Beard, who’s dressed in a Bowie-inspired costume and wearing a pig nose. It’s, Ted guesses correctly, “Piggy Stardust.” (If we’re being pedantic, that’s more of an Aladdin Sane look, but let’s not dwell on that.) The tea, Beard explains, was a dud, which confuses Ted but doesn’t stop him from sharing his strategic brainstorm of “fast, fluid, free” football. This, Beard tells him, is essentially “Total Football,” whose roots date back to Holland in the 1970s. Whether it’s original or not, it’s going to be the Greyhounds’ future. And, as they pull away, the future looks a lot more open than the past.

Biscuits

• We’re now officially halfway through this season of Ted Lasso, so the aerial of this change-of-pace episode makes sense. By design or not, it also shakes up the season in a way that opens up possibilities for what’s to come. Maybe Ted has finally cracked this football thing. Maybe Rebecca will stop obsessing over what she doesn’t have. It’s also, despite the length, the season’s breeziest episode. Higgins’s jazz pilgrimage and the pillow fight are fun, if not exactly essential, elements that keep it light. Roy teaching Jamie how to bike is funny in a way that the show has rarely let itself be this season. And none of it gets in the way of the episode’s emotional elements. (Also, it makes Amsterdam look lovely.)

• Jazz is so often a punch line that it’s nice to see a show celebrate it. Jazz: It’s good.

Ted Lasso Recap: Going Dutch