All art seeks to manipulate your emotional experience as you take it in. You can’t avoid feeling something about a work of art, so it naturally follows that the artwork itself is going to make an active intervention in those feelings. That’s practically the first thing you recognize about art when you’re young: you feel without having the tools to articulate what that feeling is, or what it means. 

There comes a point when that act becomes too willful and heavy-handed, however. To paraphrase former U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, I know craven emotional manipulation when I see it, and this week’s episode of Ted Lasso, “Mae Rides the Bus,” fulfills the brief all too well. 

The visibility of the grinding gears sharpens when you try to hide them, as well. Ted Lasso as a series might be considered the cuddlier version of the broader Taylor Sheridan project: it wants so badly to deflect criticism of its philosophical point of view that it will pepper in little story elements to provide plausible deniability of its true intentions. Shows like Yellowstone and Lioness want to have it both ways on the liberal-conservative divide, just as Ted Lasso wants to show just enough toughness when it gets accused of being too sweet. After all, Richmond got relegated at the end of Season 1, and they didn’t win the Premier League in Season 3. Ted embodies toxic positivity, but that’s what broke up his marriage. Boots learns she has to wear gloves after breaking a finger on a tough save, even if the absence of those gloves were never a problem during Richmond’s winning streak. See, audience member? You were out of line to tut-tut our storytelling plans! 

All of those chickens come home to roost in this week’s episode, which centers on Richmond’s road trip to Bristol. If they win, they earn automatic promotion to the WSL, the top women’s football league in England. If they draw or lose, they may have to battle for a promotion playoff spot or worse. It’s the biggest game of the year, and while Gemma’s finally healthy, she’s not ready to start. The team goes down 2-0 by halftime, Boots (Jude Mack) breaking her finger in the process. Beard tells her that promotion is better than experiencing the full sensation of life, and wouldn’t you know it, she plays the second half with gloves, shocked at their efficacy.  

“Mae Rides the Bus” doesn’t just stop at Boots’s broken-finger revelation. From Gemma’s injury recovery to Shannon’s (Shannon Hayes) moment in the sun, co-showrunners Jason Sudeikis and Jack Burditt pull the rug out from under the truly hard and tough moments that no amount of characterological backtracking could ever properly address. 

Players deal with injury scares all the time that don’t materialize into the worst-case scenario. What rankles is when that scare is used as a big, weighty bit of emotional payoff for Gemma (Abbie Hern) and Alice (Tanya Reynolds) without Gemma ever risking the possibility of a year away from football. It turns out that’s exactly what Episode 8 was doing. This week, Gemma’s clean bill of health frees her to learn the lesson that she needs to be patient and wait to go full throttle until she is fully healed. Never mind that the coaches should have never put her in that situation in the first place: we need Gemma’s arc to pay off. 

Alice’s journey to becoming a good coach follows the same principle. The barely articulated source of her anxiety, fear, and anger seems to be the injuries she suffered as a young player, but there are plenty of ex-players whose careers ended too early and who went on to become coaches without ever expressing any of the stunted darkness that Alice has. When she talks to both Gemma and Shannon in a firm but encouraging way, it’s unearned in the extreme. The show wants her to become wise after months of being a hard-ass without doing any of the work to demonstrate how a person could start as the latter and end up the former.

Shannon represents this both-sidesing in the most blatant and incoherent manner. Sudeikis and Burditt don’t want to commit to the creaky sports-movie cliché of having the hardest-working, less-talented player be the big hero in the biggest moment, but they can’t let Shannon miss a taste of glory, either. The solution is for Shannon to score a goal at the last minute that doesn’t win them the game, but rather just serves as a cherry on top of the sundae. Sudeikis and Burditt betray their lack of conviction by giving Shannon a meaningless spotlight, not the game-changing spotlight. 

The capper, and one of the more egregiously cynical examples of this type of emotional manipulation you’ll ever see, comes at episode’s end, when we discover that beloved owner of the Crown and Anchor, Mae (Annette Badland), has quite possibly died. 

Mae has been afforded more screentime this season than in previous years. She is a full-throated supporter of the women’s team, attending every home match. The writers had Ted live in the apartment above the pub as an excuse for Mae to pop up more regularly. She has become a boss/babysitter to Henry (Grant Feely), and even had a fun afternoon as the Deep Throat to Higgins’s Bob Woodward in Episode 8. 

This week, she joins the team on their travel bus to witness their possible promotion. She gets to lead the pregame talk, where we learn that she wanted to be a professional footballer, but came of age at the tail end of England’s 50-year ban on organized women’s football. She serves as the team’s unofficial mascot for this seismic occasion. 

Little hints get sprinkled in throughout the episode that in hindsight were clear foreshadowing. Mae mentions her health several times, and feels compelled to sit down at halftime after 45 minutes of non-stop cheering, only to be rousted again when “Jump Around” hits the PA system. 

Even creepier is the thought that Keeley’s health issues (she has high blood pressure and she’s unknowingly pregnant, so she can’t get overexcited during Richmond games) may have been a misdirect for Mae’s problems. Surely the writers wouldn’t pull such a cheap trick, but they have created a situation where it’s impossible not to consider. 

Mae is last seen going wild in celebration with the fellow traveling fans after Richmond seal their victory and promotion. She wanted to be among them instead of Rebecca’s private section, to experience moments just like this one. She has never looked more at home than when she is screaming for joy over Richmond’s triumph. The club has given her something she was never able to experience herself. 

The next time we cut to the supporter section, Mae is nowhere to be seen, because she has collapsed off-camera. A worried Bristol staffer informs Rebecca that something has happened to her. The song “Oh Love” by Kingfishr — a Temu Mumford & Sons — swells on the soundtrack as Rebecca descends to the locker room to inform Ted of the horrible news. 

Take a step back, and you realize that the only function Mae served all season was as a tool to help other characters arrive at some narrative or emotional discovery. She was never given anything more than lip service to any sort of character depth, and that heartfelt pregame speech actually underscores that fact, not undercuts it. More insidiously, in light of Gemma’s not-actually-that-bad-an-injury, we may discover in the finale that Mae is not dead, but just had a nasty health scare. Were that the case, then any sadness evoked by Mae’s possible death would have been for no reason other than to make the audience feel sad for a brief moment. There are few more cynical cards to play in fiction than the Chewbacca gambit, and Ted Lasso certainly hasn’t earned the right to play it. 

This week’s episode nakedly exposes the truth: any genuine pathos derived from tough moments in a story about women’s footballers could never live arm in arm with “BELIEVE” ideology. “Mae Rides the Bus” is as bathetic as it gets. What possible conclusions could the season come to in the finale I daren’t speculate, but rest assured that no matter how bad things get, they can be wiped away with a twitch of Ted’s mustache. 

GAME NOTES

• We are apparently speed-running the sitcom relationship tropes now with Roy and Keeley, who wasted eight episodes not getting back together, and only one episode to be overjoyed expecting parents. Congrats to the happy couple, I guess. 

• Roy’s attempts to keep Keeley calm during the Richmond-Bristol match by reenacting it with her makeup kit was very cute, I will admit. 

• As many predicted, Rupert was not the real mystery buyer trying to start a hostile takeover of AFC Richmond, but rather Zelda was the big villain! I guess this explains why she has kept popping up for no apparent reason, but it still doesn’t explain why she is so desperate to snatch the club away from Rebecca. 

• Alex Blake’s performance as Hugo has flashed moments of real humor this season, Sudeikis and co. only gave us two scenes with him before this week, both of which comprised Zelda’s whole “I despise you, I adore you” schtick, without so much as a blink from Hugo. Suddenly, he’s also Zelda’s slimy little gopher, reeling the mythical Milk sisters into Zelda’s orbit? Yet another storyline that gave us A and C without B, and no artful ellipsis to let us infer what was excised.

• Beard now has an awful wig (or are they grown-out hair plugs??) and piercings to go with the spray tan and colored contact lenses. I almost wonder if this character was ever funny or endearing. 

• The story that Niamh and Siobhan (Aisling Sharkey & Rex Hayes) tell about the family pig farm honestly feels a little offensive toward Irish people. I doubt my ancestors from Antrim and Kilkenny would be laughing if they knew it came from a group full of English writers. 

• Furthermore, the narrative excuse for the story — the twins’ telepathic bond somehow needs to be utilized on the pitch — becomes the show’s latest attempt to have a new tactical strategy save their season, which is just as stupid as the previous ones. (Remember when Ted “invented” a 50-year-old strategy in a barbecue fever dream back in season 3?) Siobhan is a defender. In no team in the world would a defender be suddenly turned into an attacking midfielder with an entire preseason to train, much less a week. We know that Ted isn’t supposed to know anything about soccer, but Beard and Alice should know better. Just because you show it working on the equalizing goal against Bristol doesn’t mean we buy it.  

• Gemma comes on just before halftime (a dumb time to bring somebody in off the bench), and when she feels a twinge after a bad hit, may have to come out of the game when the second half begins. “I’m not gonna tell you what to do. I’m not gonna tell Ted what to do,” Alice informs Gemma after Gemma admits she was in pain. Alice, THAT IS LITERALLY YOUR JOB. I know you’re trying to get Gemma to take ownership of her own body and decisions by pulling herself out, but as an assistant coach, you have a responsibility to save a player from themselves. Be thankful Gemma made the right choice.

Evan Davis is a contributing writer to Decider. He hosts Expected Own Goals, a podcast about women’s soccer.