NFL
By: Rick O’Donnell
Don’t look now, Ted Lasso fans, but season 4 is half over. We still don’t know who our main antagonist is. Seasons 1-3 gave us the Richmond rival in Rupert Mannion, played by the late Anthony Head, as the thorn in the side of the Richmond team as well as Ted and Rebecca. However, we don’t have that character this season yet. Surely the women’s team struggles to be taken seriously and achieve financial stability. However, there’s always an outside source who makes things difficult in these types of movies/shows. So who is our most likely candidate?
All signs are pointing to Zelda Southport, played by Tracy Ullman. Yes, the same Tracy Ullman who helped introduce the world to The Simpsons. However, that’s not why she’s the villain here.
Something has been off with Zelda since she’s been introduced on the show. She was originally supposed to help the team with finances and marketability, presumably by Keeley. Still, Rebecca had her doubts, saying she wasn’t the type of person she wanted to work with. Somehow she’s sticking around, and it’s not sitting well. At first, it seemed like no big deal. However, all of a sudden she keeps showing up sporadically. At times, she’s unwanted, much as Rupert used to show up at the fundraiser and the bar for the famous darts scene.
An unwanted guest is hardly enough to make a full-fledged antagonist. It’s an annoyance at best. Still, there’s something about her that throws up all sorts of red flags. Initially, Rebecca is put off by her when we first meet her character. Then she shows up again when the whole team gets arrested, and she bails them out along with Ted and Beard. To the casual viewer, that seems like goodwill, but the writing seems to be on the wall as something she could hold over Rebecca’s head later on.
Then, of course, there’s the Lady Greyhounds’ first game at Nelson Road where she shows up with a bottle of booze and gets Rebecca hysterically drunk before she has to donate to a children’s charity at halftime. Not to mention, as soon as Keeley leaves, she immediately starts downplaying the relationship between her and Rebecca as if she was trying to drive a wedge between them. Speaking of donating to children, did anyone else find it weird that she bought 2,000 tickets and “donated” them to schools, but the crowd was suspiciously empty? Sure, the club gets that money, but it undercuts fan support, leading to long-term effects. All of these things, on their own, are minor cuts, but ultimately seem to be opening a much larger wound.
So what would her motive be? Who knows. Maybe she stood to benefit from the super league that Rebecca torpedoed in season 3. After all, that was supposed to be started by the ultra-rich to turn the game into more profits for themselves. It’s less likely, but maybe she’s Mattijs’ ex-wife who set out to break up his newfound love affair. Heck, at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t the woman Roy had multiple dates with to break up every relationship Rebecca’s gotten close to. Something is off about her character, and it doesn’t seem like she has the team’s best interests at heart.
At the very least, the turning point for season 4 of Ted Lasso has to be coming up soon. There’s a paper trail about who the antagonist is so far, so it’ll be interesting to see once it’s revealed whether the audience caught it along the way.
