Spoilers ahead.

There is something almost heroic about the way Ted Lasso refuses to die. Not the character. The franchise. Ted has been dying, or leaving, or spiritually relocating to Kansas, or learning to accept himself, or discovering that fatherhood is complicated, for approximately 47 television lifetimes now. But the show itself? Oh, no. That thing is apparently a cockroach in a garbage can. You can close the book, turn off the lights, scatter the cast across three continents, and announce a perfectly respectable ending—and three years later somebody at Apple starts hearing the cash register go ka-ching and suddenly here comes Ted Lasso again, beaming like the last human on Earth who hasn't noticed that the party ended hours ago.

“Being Alive,” the fourth-season finale, is therefore less an ending than a particularly elaborate rearrangement of the furniture. And that is the fundamental problem with it. The episode is not without heart. Good Lord, it has enough heart to supply a cardiac ward. Mae's death hangs over the hour; Roy is terrified about becoming a father; Ted finally confronts the truth about his own father's suicide; Rebecca decides to stop waiting for life to happen to her; Roy takes the Chelsea job; Ted voluntarily steps down from managing the Lady Greyhounds; Alice Chilton gets the promotion she deserved all along. Then Brandi Carlile sings a melancholy version of the theme while Mary Oliver's poetry arrives to administer the final intravenous dose of Meaning. And yet I kept staring at the screen thinking: Is that it?

This is what happens when a television show has been around long enough to become its own tribute act. The finale begins at Mae's wake, which ought to be devastating. Mae was the pub's beating heart, the connective tissue between generations of Richmond characters, and her death in the previous episode should have detonated an emotional crater. Instead, the wake becomes a television version of cleaning out the refrigerator: here's Beard, here's Rebecca, here's Keeley, here's Henry, here's everybody standing around remembering Mae while the plot politely waits outside.

Then Henry asks Ted how his grandfather really died. Now this should be the scene. Ted has spent years constructing a personality around surviving the suicide of his father. Season two actually did the hard work, allowing Ted's optimism to become something complicated—a coping mechanism, a philosophy, a mask, a genuine moral choice. Now Henry is old enough to begin asking the questions Ted himself spent decades avoiding.

Ted lies. Then, later, he tells the truth. Except we don't hear him do it. That is not subtlety. That's withholding. The dramatically important thing would be to see Ted tell his son this terrible truth and watch Henry receive it. Instead, the scene has been reduced to an emotional receipt: Thank you for your purchase. Your trauma has been processed.

Meanwhile, Roy is becoming a father and Brett Goldstein is doing what Brett Goldstein does best: staring at people as though they've just informed him that civilization has ended. He gathers the Diamond Dogs—Ted, Beard, Higgins, Nate and, now, Alice—to ask how one becomes a good father. This is probably the best scene in the episode, and it is also a little heartbreaking because it reminds us what the show used to be good at: putting damaged people in a room, letting them talk, and allowing jokes to emerge naturally from character rather than from a writers' room desperately throwing tennis balls at a wall.

Alice's advice to Roy—to not disappear when he feels inadequate—is terrific, as is the basic idea that Roy's terror of fatherhood is itself evidence that he might be a good father. But then you remember that Keeley's pregnancy has been treated for much of the season as an excuse to have her sit down, lie down, feel sick, or react to Roy. The emotional possibilities of her becoming a mother have barely been explored. The show has given Roy the existential crisis and Keeley the morning sickness. That's not character development. That's a division of labor.

And then there's Zelda. Oh, Zelda. The season-long Richmond ownership mystery finally reveals that Zelda has been quietly buying shares in the club because she wants the respect of the male football establishment. She appears to have won. Then Rebecca and Higgins reveal they've outmaneuvered her. Then Hugo turns on Zelda. Then Mae's two-percent stake, left to Rebecca in her will, gives Rebecca 51 percent and saves the club. This is less a plot twist than a filing cabinet falling down a staircase.

But mechanics aren't drama, and the finale keeps confusing the two. The worst part is what Mae's death becomes in retrospect. Her passing supplies the decisive two percent. Which means a character we've spent years loving has effectively been converted into a posthumous plot coupon. The show wants us to mourn Mae while simultaneously using Mae to solve the shareholders' problem. That is emotional bookkeeping.

Then - because apparently nobody has told this show that one ending is enough - Rebecca proposes to Matthijs. “Fuck it, marry me!” Fine. Great. Whatever. Except why should I care? A romantic relationship that has barely been dramatized suddenly becomes the emotional culmination of Rebecca's arc. You can tell me they're perfect for each other. You can show me a montage. You can have Rebecca get down on one knee. But if you haven't made me believe it, you're asking me to clap at a wedding invitation.

At least Roy gets a genuine goodbye. He accepts the Chelsea job, despite Rebecca's initial resistance, because he's finally willing to take a risk. And there's something beautifully appropriate about Roy leaving Richmond just as Ted leaves the head-coach position. Ted, meanwhile, promotes Alice to head coach of the women's team and becomes her assistant alongside Beard.

This is probably the season's smartest decision. Alice has been one of the show's most interesting additions, and Tanya Reynolds has brought more electricity to the fourth season than several of the show's veteran characters combined. The handoff makes thematic sense, too: Ted's greatest gift was never his ability to coach soccer. It was his ability to make other people believe they were capable of something more. Passing that responsibility to Alice should feel like the culmination of everything we've watched.

Instead, it feels suspiciously like a pilot episode.

Look! Alice can be the new Ted! Look! The Lady Greyhounds can be the new Richmond! Look! There are babies! Look! There are coaches! Look! There are more stories! Please, Apple, stop waving the carrot.

The finale doesn't even give the Lady Greyhounds' final match the dignity of an actual conclusion. The stadium sells out, former Richmond favorites show up, the women take the pitch—and then the episode cuts away. Imagine ending a football show by refusing to show us the football game.

And that, ultimately, is what “Being Alive” leaves behind: not anger, not grief, not even much disappointment. Just a strange, hollow shrug. The first three seasons understood something wonderfully unfashionable: kindness could be dramatic. Vulnerability could be funny. People could change without becoming completely different people. The show didn't need cynicism because it had something more difficult - sincerity.

Season four still possesses that sincerity. It simply doesn't know what to do with it anymore.

The performances remain good. Goldstein, Waddingham, Reynolds and Sudeikis can still generate chemistry with a glance. There are little flashes of the old electricity everywhere. But they're flashes, sparks from a machine whose batteries are dying. The finale wants to tell us that being alive means accepting messiness, taking risks, loving people while knowing you will lose them, and moving forward anyway.

It's a lovely message. Unfortunately, after ten episodes of increasingly scattered storytelling, the message starts to feel less like wisdom and more like an excuse.

Being Alive ends with everybody moving on. Maybe that's what Ted Lasso needed to do three years ago. And maybe that's why this finale hurts. Not because it is tragic, but because you can finally see the great show it used to be, still sitting there somewhere beneath all this noise, smiling politely and waiting for someone to stop making sequels.