The episode opens in the drudgery of Farhampton where Robin
is understandably grieving about her mother(*) not being able to make it to her
wedding so Barney declares that it will be his mission to cheer her up and, as
so often he does, accepts his own challenge. And while at this point I was very
fearful that this would turn into another 23 minutes of stalling, it quickly
turned into a complete flashback episode taking place 6 months prior to the
wedding, giving us a much needed reminder of what this show used to be: an
interesting premise about relationships with a moderate amount of jokes mixed
in.
(*) I don’t see any
scenario where her mother doesn’t end up before the end of the series,
especially after the recurring joke that the rest of gang knows almost nothing
about her.
The initial premise revolves around the idea that of whether
anyone in the group is truly platonic friends with anyone else. Despite Ted’s
best effort to insist that he and Robin are platonic, Barney explains how it
wouldn’t even take him 20 minutes to get back with Robin if given the chance.
In fact, Marshall and Robin are the only combination that would never happen
and we see that Marshall would rather have MacLaren’s blow-up, with them inside
of it, then have to kiss Robin. This theory gets Ted thinking and we spend a
large portion of the episode him discussing his feeling on this Marshall. While
I am completely over Ted/Robin storyline since we’ve known for eight years that
they don’t ultimately get together, but it’s been a long time since we’ve had a
Ted/Marshall hang-out and I really enjoyed the fact that they’re fans of the
Washington Generals.
Meanwhile while Ted and Marshall were at the basketball
game, Lily and Robin finally called Barney out on declaring challenges for
himself that were relatively easy to accomplish. So in order to prove he could
beat any challenge, he decides to marathon a bunch of them all in one night. As
annoying as the first challenge was, picking up a girl while talking like a
dolphin, it was fun to watch him try to accomplish them in a short period of
time. And wisely they didn’t keep it a running theme throughout the episode as
the girls quickly grew tired of it. Instead, Barney becomes the second member of
the group (well technically first since chronologically he met her before Lily)
to meet The Mother. Apparantly this mystery woman can solve the world’s
problems with ease, which is a little ludicrous, but it was a nice moment that
she became the first challenge Barney couldn’t complete and it resulted in him
realizing how much he wanted Robin.
As always, the show needs to utilize more of The Mother. It’s
not a coincidence that the best episodes of the season have occurred with her
in them. I’d really like to see a full flash-forward episode with her just
hanging out with the group after she’s been integrated in, it has the potential
for a great dynamic. All in all this was a very positive step in the right
direction and hopefully we’ll get more episodes like this going forward.
Other moments of note:
- This episode also brought the return of Bryan Cranston as Hammond Druthers. It’s impossible not to love Cranston but he was given absolutely no material to work with here, it’s a huge credit to him that it wasn’t cringe-inducing to watch his scenes thanks to ability to really sell a joke. However, I did love the continuity of him still having his baseball that Lily once tried to steal to teach him a lesson.
- “I can say with absolute certainty that Brussels sprouts are the comeback vegetate of a century.” – Ted panicking to come up with an excuse.
- “But then we can haunt the bar for eternity like we always planned.” – Marshall weighing the pros and cons of the bar blowing up.
- One more swipe of the blue French horn in hypothetical world. I’ve completely lost track of how many times that thing has shown up.
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