How I Met Your Mother

One of the things that has always stood out to me about the plot of this show is… why the heck is Ted telling all of this to his young and impressionable children? Why do they need to know how many women he and his friends slept with, how many times they got too drunk to stand, how many illicit drugs they tried? I appreciate Ted’s honesty with his children, but frankly there are some things about your parents you want to slowly find out over time and there are some things you just don’t ever need to know. Most of Ted’s story falls into one of those two categories.

This episode saw Marshall falling into Ted’s role, poetically telling three tales of the gang to baby Marvin, who can’t fall asleep without hearing a nursery rhyme. Lacking a book to read, Marshall chose to tell his own stories about the time Ted got asked out on a date or maybe not date by a fellow professor, the time Robin ate a whole wedding cake after being dumped, and the time Barney reclaimed player status over all of New York City.

As with a few episodes ago, the choice to stray from the wedding scene and into a flashback episode was a nice break, but the delivery of this particular episode was a bit messy. Choosing to tell three separate and unrelated stories didn’t quite hold my attention in the same way as the previous episode did, and while I deeply appreciated the rhyming method of telling the stories, it got a little old. (Though the bit where one of Marshall’s traveling companions delved into a pretty impressive freestyle about rhyming with Canada: “I’ve never met anyone who could clean up after Canada/except for my uncle from the Bronx, he’s a janita’” was hysterical.)

Still, each story on its own had its own great bits, and Barney’s quirks really carried the episode. For Ted’s story, Barney introduced one of his fabulous theories – the Dateline Theory, as displayed on a color-blocked globe: “the dateline is the border betwixt happiness and sorrow/on this side you go home tonight on this side you go home tomorrow.” When Ted’s date reveals she once dated a Yankee, the photographic evidence is an image of his date and Barney wearing a shirt labeled “Jeter,” one of his classic ploys. Barney’s own plot revolves around him confronting the various identities he generally assumes in a turf war over who can hit on girls in what part of the city after Barney accidentally crossed lines onto the East Side. The dramatic murder of all of his alternate personalities by poisoned champagne was perfectly executed and super funny. But Robin also had her moment, devouring an entire multi-layered cake and then topping it off with a keg stand. (That was no longer the night Robin got dumped but the night she got her stomach pumped.)

In all the episode was solid, but not astounding. It was nostalgic, but other than getting Marshall a few miles closer to Farhampton, it really did nothing to expand on the plots between Robin and Ted, or Ted and the mother, or Barney and Robin, or Marshall and Lily, or even their friendships as a group. It was nice to see the paralellism between Marshall and Ted’s talking to their children, but it wasn’t enough to make this episode a strong one for this season.

Tidbits:

  • “Teddy Westside’s got a date!”
  • “Be remembered for this sweet behemoth you’ve devoured.”
  • “West side college girls are not the slip tuxedo Charlie parks his boat in.”