The gift of mockery: Ted gets slammed.

[dreadedcandiru2]

As we know, we're about a year or so away from Connie leaving town because the idea that Ted might actually consider moving on with his life to be so great a humiliation that she simply cannot live in a town that doesn't really care. While it's always fun to assume that what Connie really fled was the sheer apathy inspired by a total non-event, the end result is that Elly came away with the mistaken (but understandable from her Ted-hating perspective) impression that Ted commanded it somehow.

It's thus with great pleasure that Lynn hints at the end of the Early Years by having Ted get totally owned on at least two separate occasions. The first is about ten months or so from now when Ted's latest 'take me back' thing is rebuffed and John hammers us over the head with a leaden moral about Ted's fears of being 'trapped' in a marriage with the 'wrong' woman and totally not leaving his poor mother to die alone in some horrible nursing home. This sort of thing lasts until Christmas 1985 when he takes a long time cluing into the fact that Connie has found the manipulative douchewad of her dreams.

After this, Ted starts to become far less prominent owing to real life writing the story. You see, the farther back in time Lynn's time in the hated, adultery-tolerating, genius-disrespecting, dentist-idolizing town of Lynn Lake got, the less her need to burn the straw Lynn Laker Ted became. He eventually got trotted out for people to mock and laugh at.