Okay, so I've had a lot of different reactions to S2, as a massive fan of S1. There are some things that they've done this season that I think are missteps, but overall I've been waiting it out before judging the season's quality because I know that this season is going interesting places and it just hasn't been clear what they are yet. This week, of course, is when the show really kicked off the journey to the interesting place and I'm really excited about that.

One really interesting thing that I'm enjoying is that while the show has always been about relationships, the kinds of relationships have shifted. Sure, we have Rebecca's dating life and Bantr- and I'm definitely intrigued to find out where this is going with the identity of her secret correspondent! And of course Roy and Keeley seem to be going strong. But while Season 1 seemed to be about the characters as friends, colleagues, romantic partners, etc, now it seems to be transitioning to them as parents(/parent figures) and as children.

Obviously, first of all we have Ted. Ted is a dad who is thousands of miles from his kid, seems to have a lot of father issues on his own (his dad PROBABLY committed suicide, but we don't know), and has basically turned being Jamie's father figure into a personal mission, almost to the extent of abandoning the rest of the team. This episode, Roy tells Ted that he ruined Jamie as a football player by making him too nice- which puts into relief how Ted has basically been choosing parenting Jamie as a person over being a coach to him and the team at large, because they've been floundering without the two aces that Ted had envisioned.

Jamie, of course, was set totally adrift in his career by how damaging his dad was to him, and it seems that being confronted by how paternal Ted could be last season, and seeing the direct contrast between Ted and his dad in the final game of last season, probably made Jamie less able to tolerate his dad's bullshit. Because Ted sees how shitty Jamie's dad is he kind of imprints on him as a father figure- but that leaves other people out in the cold. When Ted realizes that Sam has a great dad, he decides that Sam doesn't need him as much- while forgetting that Sam doesn't need him as a dad, he needs him as a coach who makes decisions on behalf of the team. Nate BADLY needs Ted's mentorship as an assistant coach, and he also happens to have a crappy dad who has clearly had a negative effect on Nate's self esteem, but Ted is so focused on Jamie (and/or whatever other demons are inside his head) that he's ignoring Nate- who needs Ted's guidance as a boss. Ted's life and mentality have become so driven by seeing himself as a father (and almost definitely as a son) that he's forgetting the other roles he's supposed to be having in people's lives.

The themes of parenting (whether real parents or parental figures) have come up plenty of other times as well this season- Nate's arc regarding his terrible reactions to power seems to have a lot to do with the way his dad treats him; we see Nora with both Rebecca (who she looks up to) and Sassy (who she seems mildly embarrassed by); we see Rebecca with her own mom, from whom she seems to have learned a LOT about how to be in a relationship; we see the Higginses as parents, though that's obviously a bit lower-key; we see Sam and his respect for/closeness with his own father; we see Roy and Keeley in a pseudo-parenting role with Phoebe; and, to be honest, we see Keeley having gone full mom-role with Jamie. She was already halfway there last season before she upped her self respect and left, but now it's basically full on.

Basically, the line this episode from Ted about how knowing about people's parents is an instruction manual for how their kids were messed up seems to reflect a running theme, and of course the reveal of Beard's mom as a QAnon believer in the same episode where we see him staying with Jane is pretty apropos.

I think that the role of Dr Sharon is really interesting in this context. Ted's main issue here is that he has forgotten his boundaries- instead of being a coach, he has allowed his personal life and his neuroses and his issues to leak into his job so that he now sees himself as a dad. Dr Sharon is the person who said in E1 that "football is life and football is death, but football is also football" (more or less). She's the person who puts things in perspective and reminds them what's important- the person who allows them to compartmentalize. She analyzes people from the outside without knowing who their parents are. It makes the fact that Ted has chosen her to talk to really interesting to me (he could have chosen Rebecca, who probably knows too much about him for his taste), and of course it remains to be seen how it plays out.