Barney is once again a single man and is back to scamming his way into every woman in New York’s bed. It turns out he has a playbook full of tricks and we get so see some in action in segments styled after 1950′s infomercials (The Lorenzo Van Matterhorn; the “he’s not coming”; the Cheap Trick). Lily is disgusted by this and steals the playbook. Barney doesn’t mind as much because he has ripped out the last page that describes a play called “the scuba diver”. Lily tries to warn Barney’s target at the bar but it turns out that the scuba diver had nothing to do with Barney being in a scuba diver’s outfit but with him figuring out that Lily would steal the playbook. Strangely enough, Robin is there to witness the whole thing and there’s a nice moment where Barney apologizes to her for thinking that she was completely fine with watching him chase new women. Marshal is convinced that now that Robin is no longer looking for a boyfriend that the love of her life will soon enter her life. And the episode ends with just that… or so we think.

This good episode and I think was mostly used to set everyone back to original places post the Barney/Robin relationship and hint at Robin’s future. The humor that was lost with Barney’s manwhore status is back and it turns out that it had been missed (MILSWANCA- Mothers I’d Like to Sleep With and Never Call Again, the PG version of MILF). We’re back to the wide realm of possibilities for our single characters!

Oh yeah, I’ll go ahead and spoil the rest of my summary: Robin and Barney breakup. There’s  a Storm Trooper, Neil Patrick Harris in a fat suit, and Alan Thicke as Alan Thicke and somehow all of this ends with the end of Barney and Robin… and I couldn’t be happier. From what I’ve read online a lot fan hated the episode, claiming that the two felt of of character but I felt that they were finally in character for the first time all season. The strange part is that I had actually liked the idea of Barney and Robin together at the end of the last season, but when theory turned into actuality I wasn’t so in love anymore. I think the writers found themselves at a loss when they finally paired them together, then tried to make them some warped version of Marshal and Lily that simply didn’t work.

But back to the episode summary. Robin and Barney are obviously unhappy being together, but are both too stuborn to admit it (Ted calls this “relationship-chicken”) so Barney starts overeating and Robin stops caring about her appearance. And that sounds so much more depressing in writing than it was in the show, it was funny I promise. So Ted and Marshal try to make them breakup which only makes them end up engaged. They beg Lily to help them (in one season it’s revealed that Lily is a master at causing breakups, having sucessfully ended 7 of Ted’s relationships) and she recreates Barney and Robin’s 4 biggest fights. But as they sit in the stakeout car, they watch the couple leave looking happy and together. The twis is that it turns out what seemed to be Barney and Robin emerging as a stronger couple was Barney and Robin deciding to be friends again.

Two weeks of enjoyable episodes! Maybe this will become a trend again.

The show starts with Older Ted explaining to his kids how that year brought new upstairs neighbors who were constantly, and with a pause and an awkward thought from me on how I would explain the situation to my own hypothetical children, Older Ted chooses the euphemism of bagpiping to be the code for the new neighbors amorous activities. We hear actual bagpiping and for the rest of the night bagpiping is the stand in word for sex.

Barney and Robin continue with their “we are the most awesome couple ever” deal, claiming they never fight due to their fight-avoidance techniques which consist of either Barney leaving the room or Robin getting naked (wow this show really likes using sex for humor). When Barney questions how easily Marshal gives into Lily’s demands, Marshal realizes that he hates cleaning the dishes just because Lily doesn’t like having a sink full of dirty dishes. So while Barney and Robin leave for their weekend ski trip, Marshal confronts Lily while Ted confronts his bagpiping neighbors.

By the end of the weekend Marshal and Lily are in a huge fight, Barney and Robin are acting overly affectionate, and Ted has discovered that his loud neighbors are actual his very elderly loud neighbors. This discovery prompts Ted to seek out Barney’s downstairs neighbor to see what is really happening with Barney and Robin. It turns out their super-happy friends have been constantly fighting since their ski trip. After they are outed, the two turn to Marshal and Lily who are still bickering. Faced with their friends much more ridiculous issues, Marshal and Lily reconcile which in turn leads to Barney and Robin making up.

This was a cute episode that made it easy to forgive how little Ted’s storyline is progressing. So the episode was filler, but fun filler.

This is where the season picks up, at least for me, though we still don’t get anywhere figuring out who the mother is. Ted isn’t that big of a factor in the episode, except when he shows up there’s poetry but more on that later.

Lily and Marshal are eager to hang out with Barney and Robin but have a history of coming across as too strong and very desperate. Of course this happens when the four decide to hang out, leading up to a breakup of sorts between the couples. Lily and Marshal begin seeing another couple, Barney and Robin feel jealous and start to go through all of the clichés of a breakup. The story resolves with Robin and Barney winning Lily and Marshal back and the four share a hug in the rain.

As for Ted… Barney mocks him for wearing a tweed jacket and Ted argues that it attracts women. But when a women spends the night at his apartment but falls asleep before anything happens Ted is dubbed the “sexless innkeeper”. Barney explains the role of the sexless innkeeper in a poem that sounds like something by a dirty Charles Dickens. Ted proves Barney wrong when he meets a girl who likes the tweed jacket and proves that he isn’t the sexless innkeeper with his own poem version of the events.

Unless the nondescript blond woman standing in Ted’s bedroom doorway was the mother (and I’m praying she isn’t) viewers are still nowhere closer than they were last season in knowing who the mother is. Once again, Ted bored me and all my laughs came from Lily and Marshal. This episode marked the first allusion to past episodes: Robin and Barney get a look of pity/annoyance from the host at a restaurant when they ask for a table for 2 when it’s filled with couples on double dates referring back to when Marshal tried to get a table for 1 during brunch.

Also if you want to see the extent of Lily and Marshal’s eagerness, CBS created the website that the characters talk about during the episode: http: ItWasTheBestNightEver.com

Episode 5: Duel Citizenship

Robin faces deportation to Canada after a bar fight unless she applies for American citizenship. Barney decides he is going to make her as American as possible. He seems to succeed until Robin stops by her favorite Canadian bar. After heavy drinking with the Canada’s women’s curling team, she ends up in a hotel in Toronto. Barney arrives to bring her home but while having breakfast Robin is mistaken for American. She feels depressed that she doesn’t seem to belong to either country but after being cheered up by Barney she opts for dual citizenship.

Ted and Marshall plan to drive to Chicago to eat at their favorite pizza place before it closes down, a trip they used to make all the time in college. However Marshal invites Lily along making the trip significantly different than what it used to be. After stopping at a bed and breakfast Ted kidnaps Marshal and they drive to the pizza place where they have an argument that gets resolved on the drive back to get Lily. Lily has been so relaxed at the inn that she didn’t even notice that Marshal was gone.

So far, this episode bored me the most, so bored that I couldn’t think of sarcastic comment while writing my summary. After what seemed to be the redeeming previous episode, this one felt like filler. It’s as if the Barney Robin storyline is now being force-fed to viewers and that the Marshal-Lily-Ted story line was there to fill in the gaps between. Though it was nice to hear the song I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) by the Proclaimers again, a reference to previous episodes. I have higher hopes for tonight’s episode or maybe I’m just setting myself up for disappointment.

Episode 2: Double Date

After a season premier that focused more on secondary characters, this episode split it’s time more evenly. Ted is on a blind date, only to realize that he’s been on the same date with the same person a few years back. This leads to Ted and his date retracing their steps trying to figure out what went wrong and how these lessons could be applied to future dates.

The second story line follows revolves mostly around the strip club Barney has forced Marshal into going with him to after discovering that Marshal felt guilty about having any sort of fantasy about another woman without constructing an elaborate mental plot in which he is a grieving widower. While there they see a stripper who looks exactly like Lilly, who is so excited about the fact that she goes to see her doppelganger performing and drags along Robin who is annoyed with Barney’s strip club visiting.

While it was nice for Ted to get some storyline in this episode, there was only so much mocking of his former pretentious attitude that I felt I could take. And since we find out early in the episode that this woman isn’t the mother, I really didn’t care to know anything about her (much less that she had a weird obsession with dressing her cats). Most of my comic relief (and interest in the future season) came with Lily and Marshal, and the mention of seeing the rest of the cast’s doppelgangers (we see Robin’s double: a butch woman, and Marshal’s, a mustachioed lawyer).

But as it was only the second episode of the season, I had high hopes for the rest…

Episode 3: Robin 101

Again, this episode focuses more on the plights of characters who are not Ted. Barney is quickly discovering that he has no idea how to date a girl, much less one with as many quirks as Robin. Wanting to be a good friend, and improve his teaching skills, Ted creates a course dedicated to understanding Robin since he dated her for a year. Naturally Robin find out, gets mad, but then calms down when Ted explain to her that he’s never seen Barney put so much effort into keeping a girl.

Lily and Marshal show up sporadically in the episode. Marshal is trying to get rid of a barrel he’s had forever (long enough to name is Mabel and be very sad about parting with her) and placed it in the “Bermuda triangle” of their street, a spot where items mysteriously vanish without the group ever seeing who’s claiming their unwanted stuff.

I was bored with this episode (knowing the number of rabid fans this show has, I’m almost a bit afraid to admit that). Looking back, I’ll that what was essentially the character study of Robin was interesting as was Barney’s ADD in the classroom. Lily and Marshal didn’t provide the same amusement as the former episode and the story about the barrel felt forced, as if the writers felt that they had to have the couple doing something, anything in the episode.

If there was one redeeming moment throughout the entire episode, it’s the refrence to Dead Poet’s Society. I laughed more in those few seconds than during the rest of the episode.

Coming soon Massive update pt.2

First let’s recap what happens. The show opens at the beginning of the summer with the group sitting at the bar as always discussing the one event that had been a long time coming, Barney and Robin’s very public kiss. As Lily fantasizes about all the things they can now do as couples, Barney and Robin interrupt her with the news that they’ve decided not to pursue the relationship and continue being only friends. After the theme song, we’ve time skipped to the end of the summer. Ted is panicking about his first day as a professor, unsure of whether or not he wants to be a tough professor or a cool relatable one. To help ease his fears, Barney gives him some advice “NEVER answer questions on the first day” and Marshall gets him a fedora and a whip in honor of his “favorite professor”. Of course there’s an accident with the whip and when Ted, Marshal, and Lily return to the apartment for some first-aid they come across Barney and Robin making out on the couch. It turns out they lied and have been secretly hooking up all summer, and, much to Lily’s horror, avoided “The Talk”. Apparently “The Talk” is the ever important conversation one must have to determine where, if anywhere, a relationship is heading. Barney and Robin have avoided it by having sex each time either broaches the subject. Lily remedies this by locking the two in a room and threatening to not let them out until they’ve defined their relationship. Meanwhile Ted is in his first class, and we find out something interesting: the mother is in this class. But this isn’t an architecture class, it’s an economics course. Since Ted has decided to take Barney’s advice on not taking questions, he launches into a bipolar introduction of architecture while dozens of students stare at him and look very confused. When he finally reaches his actual classroom he’s relaxed enough that his actual introduction to the class goes well. Barney and Robin decide to lie to Lily and tell her they are dating. The episode ends with Lily telling Ted that they are actually lying to themselves about lying about the relationship.

All in all, a nice episode, but not the best example of why I love this show so much. The Barney/Robin fans all seem pretty happy, reading through the comments I get the vibe that these scenes have been long awaited since the pairing first happened. Maybe because I rushed through all 4 seasons in a week I feel that it all came together a little too quickly. A relationship that has been so complex was seemingly resolved in about 15 minutes. But the Indian Jones references made up for most everything else, and now I wonder if my professors ever imagined themselves as Indy at any point in their careers…

And to once again leave you with some video, here are the first five minutes of the episode!

Now if I have to give a comparison to better help understand the show, I’d say that How I Met Your Mother is a more focused version of Friends. In the end, the majority of the story line is dedicated to the actions that brought Ted to his future wife, as opposed to the open-ended drama that Friends offered. However, Ted is Ross, prone to falling stupidly in love far too quickly and his Chandler is Marshall, who is far less snarky but still the best friend. Lily, despite being married to the Chandler-like character, is a mix Rachel and Phoebe: quirky, funny and always loving and matchmaking. Robin is Monica, if Monica worked in the broadcast news industry and was Canadian, but the same driven and neurotic attitude is there. Finally Barney is the obvious Joey of the group, with hundreds of pickup lines as opposed to Joey’s seemingly infallible one.

To be honest what got me into this show was the fan base. Whenever I’d be looking up info on one show I’d inevitably come across someone mentioning this show and the conversations that sparked from there seemed filled with endless inside jokes and theories (because 5 seasons in and viewers still have no clue who the mother is). Then suddenly I loved it for those same reasons. See HIMYM rewards people who have been with the show for the long haul, obscure references from events from the previous seasons send old fans into hysterics but don’t confuse new watchers.

Anyways this week the fifth season starts and I’ll be interested to see what’s happens as this is the first season that I’ll be watching from the beginning. And to reward readers for sticking around this long, here are some clips from Family Guy where How I Met Your Mother is spoofed. Enjoy!