Warning: Reviews of Ted Lasso season 4 episode 2 will contain spoilers.

Listen. I love Ted Lasso as a show, and I generally enjoy show co-creator Bill Lawrence’s body of work. But as I’ve become more and more familiar with his recent projects, I’ve come to realize that they generally don’t take place in the real world. Take season 4 episode 2 for example, and the imminent onset of the Richmond FC’s women’s team. Does it make sense that Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) would go through the trouble of fielding and hiring a team and crew before understanding the financial viability of such a massive endeavor? Probably not, but Ted Lasso has never been a show concerned with sticking to the rules of reality.

Luckily episode 2 of season 4 is more focused on Ted’s (Jason Sudeikis) reintroduction to the Richmond family. But first, we find the anti-Ted of the season, coach Alice Chilton (Tanya Reynolds), a no-nonsense, no-humor coach who was passed over for Ted and quits in protest (more on that in a moment). This, and the ensuing press conference announcing Ted as the coach, sends Rebecca into an existential spiral, fearing that she’s not a feminist. It’s a solid reminder of why Waddingham won several Emmy’s for the role as she continues to find every surface-level way to beef up her feminist bona fides, including finding a local bookstore and buying as many Bell Hooks novels as she can find. The end of the episode puts her in a tough spot, and sets up a potential conflict for the rest of the season. If the women’s team isn’t financially successful, it could not only tank their team but it would have a negative effect on the men’s team as well. Again, I’m no financial planner, so I can’t tell if this makes logical sense, but it’s enticing enough to be invested for the rest of season 4.

Now that we’re back at the Richmond headquarters, the reunion with Ted and Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) and Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt), who are now coaching the men’s team, was all but inevitable. It’s easy to say that Goldstein doesn’t have to stretch his acting chops in order to play Roy, but watch his work on Shrinking and you’ll see how vastly different those characters are, and how effortlessly he slips back into Roy’s gruff exterior. This week, he’s mostly just used as a kind of bridge between the men’s and women’s teams, and to facilitate Beard’s reunion with Ted. At least we get a sweet scene between him and Keeley (Juno Temple) when he goes out of his way to renovate the visitor’s locker room into the new women’s room. Hopefully the Ted Lasso writers room has something more interesting in the works for both character besides another will-they-won’t-they retread in season 4, but episode 2 was an effective use of their screen time.

As I wrote last week, one of the death knells for the show in season 3 was in the expansion of its roster of characters and its inability to balance meaningful storylines. Episode 2 of season 4 threatens history repeating itself once Ted meets and gets to know more of the members of the team. There’s great potential for comedy with all of them, but I won’t do the work of introducing them one by one because it’s impossible to tell how important they’ll be in the greater narrative of Ted Lasso so far. The good news is that none seem like re-skins of characters we knew from the men’s team.

What season 4 episode 2 makes clear is the push-pull dynamic between Chilton and Ted, as we learn more about what lies beneath her thick exterior. Ted Lasso‘s mission statement has always been about whether people are capable of change, and we’ve seen Ted work his magic on a number of characters throughout the show’s run. The main difference this go-around is that he already has a team that’s on his side and want to believe (though maybe that’ll change once the football season gets underway), and they mostly get along with one another. We’re still early enough in season 4 that many of the pieces are being set up on the board, but the pieces so far are interesting enough to keep me invested.