Ted Lasso Season 3 Is At Its Best When It Lingers On Roy Kent's Vulnerability

This post contains spoilers for "Ted Lasso," season 3, episode 2, "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea."

Brett Goldstein's foul-mouthed "Ted Lasso" character, Roy Kent, might come off as abrasive, but underneath it all, Roy's really a big sweetheart ... or at least a vulnerable human being. True, Goldstein has joked about Ted's death, and Roy isn't afraid to ostracize sports reporter Trent Crimm, who's now working independently of The Independent on a book about the AFC Richmond team. In "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea," Roy even gets the whole team to go along with him and shun Trent. He shares an office with Trent but gives him the cold shoulder (and the balloon-popping treatment during a phone conversation). When Trent tries to be nice to him in the parking lot, Roy responds with a blunt: "F*** off."

Trent's reaction to this frames him as the more relatable one: "Wow, okay," he says as Roy slams the car door in his face. Later, however, the inability to talk around Trent causes a problem for AFC Richmond, since his locker-room presence during halftime immediately quashes the strategizing the team needs to bounce back. After Ted (Jason Sudeikis) takes Roy aside, telling him his ego is about to sabotage things, Roy finally end his beef with Trent, and we learn the reason he held a grudge against him in the first place.

It turns out Troy once wrote a bad review of Roy's soccer performance when Roy was just a young rookie. This wounded Roy, and he's been carrying around a clipping of that review all these years. It's a moment that humanizes him, and "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea" is at its best when it puts Roy in the spotlight and shows his vulnerability like this.

Roy's ex-girlfriend, Keeley (Juno Temple), is off on her own office adventure in "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea." They spend most of the episode apart as gossip about their break-up spreads. If you're like me, you may have been left wondering why Roy even ended his relationship with Keeley.

Toward the end, we learn that with the meaning of the episode's title, and see another great moment of vulnerability from Roy. Ted asks him what it was like for him to be back in Chelsea, where he was once a star player. In the stadium, the fans gave Roy a warm welcome, but he recalls a match that he played there during his last season when the team won big yet he realized that his skills were declining. He says it made him realize, "I can't keep up anymore. I'm not good enough." And he couldn't stop thinking about that, and he "knew it was only gonna get worse," so he left the team at the end of the season, much to everyone's surprise.

"A lot of folks think it's better to quit than be fired," Ted muses, and Roy agrees but confesses that a part of him wishes he had stayed and just enjoyed himself. We're left to understand that this entire scene is, as Trent observes, a "metaphor" for Roy and Keeley's relationship. He was afraid of being left behind as Keeley started her own PR firm and appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair without him (despite their photoshoot together). This is why he broke up with her. It shows more of the character's aching vulnerability, and that's the real highlight of "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea."

New episodes of "Ted Lasso" air Wednesdays on Apple TV+.