Warning: Reviews of Ted Lasso season 4 episode 5 will contain spoilers.

Every great coach has to find the right balance between their role as a mentor figure to their players, and being strict enough to ensure the team is focused on the task at hand. Episode 5 of Ted Lasso season 4 thankfully re-focuses on Ted (Jason Sudeikis), and the push and pull between his coaching philosophy and coach Chilton’s (Tanya Reynolds), along with a healthy dose of the season’s side-plots. Meanwhile, the women’s team preps for their first official match versus Chelsea.

If nothing else, episode 5 of season 4 is a showcase for Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham), and serves as a solid reminder of why she won an Emmy for her performance. She begins to unravel once Matthijs (Matteo van der Grijn) reveals that he’s accepted a new job and will be moving imminently, with his daughter, to London. Yes, it’s a standard sitcom plot for a character to view what should be great news as a negative. But in Rebecca’s eyes, their long-distance relationship has worked just fine – this season has already shown how hard it can be for her to tear herself away from her job. Waddingham’s meltdowns grow increasingly funny as the episode goes on, first to Ted, then her drunken shenanigans during the match, and later as she’s commiserating with Keeley (Juno Temple).

We know that season 4 of Ted Lasso is edging towards some kind of revelation with coach Chilton, and while episode 5 takes solid steps in that direction, it delays the inevitable once again. The show used to be refreshingly modern when it came to not drawing out storylines unnecessarily – remember Nate and his disenfranchisement with Ted? – but we’re now halfway through the season and I don’t know when the other shoe will drop. Though the end of the episode certainly indicates some internal reflection will come from Chilton, after Ted suspends her for one game for being too harsh on the players. Does this storyline feel like too much of a mirror to the aforementioned Nate-Ted conflict? Not yet; their differences mostly concerned differing strategies to football, and Nate’s ego, believing he never received enough credit. With Chilton, we simply don’t know enough about her yet, though Reynolds’s performance is more complex than you’d initially think.

Speaking of characters the show simply doesn’t know what to do with, we have coach Beard (Brendan Hunt). The great Erik Adams wrote recently for The AV Club about how Ted Lasso has turned Beard, a character who mostly existed for quips and one-liners, into someone we frankly know too much about. Episode 5’s detour into Jane’s (Phoebe Walsh) one-woman show, and Beard’s need for closure on the relationship, solves a problem nobody was asking for and grinds the episode’s momentum to a screeching halt. Were it not for Ted meeting the stage manager and flirting a bit, the entire segment could easily be excised entirely, and my grade would go up significantly.

Finally, we need to talk about Keeley. I rank her involvement in the show as much higher than Beard’s, but it’s beginning to feel more repetitive. She learns that Roy (Brett Goldstein) has already completed her ten date challenge, and is openly looking forward to seeing him officially, but he reveals that he’s been going on several repeat dates with the bartender from last week. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Richmond’s first match is severely undersold, leaving the stadium about half empty, in spite of Keeley’s best efforts. I’m all for finding Keeley in an uphill battle of a world indifferent (at best) towards women’s sports, so I’m hoping that Ted Lasso season 4 continues to find new avenues for her, rather than another reheated will-they-won’t-they plot between her and Roy.

Lest it go unsaid, episode 5 is probably the best showcase for Ted himself so far, highlighting why he’s such an effective coach while tapping into the darker side of his personal life. It’s not at the same level of what worked so well in seasons 1 or 2, but it’s a refreshing reminder for a show that has put him on the backburner for the past 4 episodes. It feels odd to say, this deep into season 4, that we don’t know how well Ted is adjusting to life back in Richmond, but his halftime speech pulls double duty by accomplishing this, and inspiring his team to climb out of a 2-0 hole. Plus it has the added benefit of showing how effective his coaching style is against Chilton’s negativity. It seems that I come off of every Ted Lasso episode saying that the following week will be better, a continuation of what I like about that week’s offering. Normally I’d decry this as the symptom of a subpar show overall, but episode 5 is a welcome, very good, addition to the season so far.