'How I Met Your Mother': Do bad and good will happen
Happy days are here again, How I Met Your Mother is back! Okay, maybe they're not terribly happy days if you're Ted and desperately looking for the mother of your future children, but as we get to watch the search, the happy days are back for us (and really, that's what's important).
The joyous night started off with Ted informing a green suited-up Barney that the group wouldn't be doing St. Patrick's day this year. There would be no green beer, no green jell-o shots, and no green vomit the following morning. Never one to be defeated however, Barney managed to convince Ted to ditch Marshall and Lily's game night and go out with him. Oh, and there just happened to be a girl with a yellow umbrella at the club too (Ted wouldn't meet here but she was there).
Sadly, the guys weren't able to get into the club, there were too many women in the club and the bouncer wouldn't let Barney and Ted enter the club with their dates in tow. Continuing their ongoing notion that if they do bad good things will happen, the guys ditched their dates, put champagne on someone else's tab, and Ted hit on a married woman. The woman, Ashlee, wasn't just married, she was also, Barney assured Ted, a 516. She may have wanted to be a 212 (Manhattan's area code) or 718 (Brooklyn/Queens/The Bronx), but she was a 516 (Long Island). And, I think we all know what that means (sorry Long Island, it's time to face the facts, and I think we both know what those are).
In the end, it didn't make a difference that she was a married 516, the guy whose tab Ted had been putting drinks on had figured out what was happening and was miffed. He punched Ted out, which Ted actually imagined to be yet another good thing because Ted got to drink for free for the rest of the night.
Over in Dowistrepla, The rest of the gang was at the new apartment, which, sadly, was somewhat canted. Not just canted in the Mad About You Jamie thinks the floor is crooked way, it was much more in the mold of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Marshall and Robin figured it out first, and despite Marshall's protests, Robin told Lily the truth. Marshall had tried to explain to Lily that the problem with the place was that there was a dead Confederate general haunting it, but Robin refused to go along with the story. Though initially distraught at the crooked floor, Lily's mood improved immensely after a swell game of Apartment Roller-Luge (which has people try to get out the door sitting on a skateboard with a metal colander on their head).
In a way that was very true to HIMYM's winding-narrative style, and mildly disappointing, Ted discovered the next morning that things hadn't occurred at all in the manner in which he had earlier recounted. His new phone had caused him to butt-dial Marshall several times over the course of the night (17) and the voicemails told the true story. It hadn't been Barney's idea to ditch the girls to get inside the nightclub, it was Ted's. Barney hadn't pushed Ted to sleep with Ashlee, Ted had gone that route on his own. Ted had turned into a less-cool version of Barney and done it all by himself.
Marshall was able to set Ted on the right path, the don't-sleep-with-married-women-unless-you're-married-to-them path, and Ted returned to the club to find his misplaced, butt-dialing phone. While the search of the club did not turn up the missing phone, a rainstorm prompted Ted to grab a misplaced umbrella that someone had left there the night before. A yellow umbrella. A yellow umbrella presumably belonging to the mother of Ted's future children.
So, there you have it. A pretty funny episode and a good way to return from the WGA strike. My biggest problem with it was the narrative structure. I don't mind the episodes where the show jumps around in time, gives different points of view, and let's us see what actually happened versus someone's recollections, I just thought that the switch happened awfully late here. The story of the previous night took the vast majority of the episode to tell and we didn't learn it was almost entirely false until it was over. That twist needed to happen earlier, there needed to be more of the actual side of the events for me to be truly comfortable with the twist.
Thus, my question(s) of the night: am I wrong? Did you like not just the switch, but when it took place? Were you hoping for something more out of the return episode? How, precisely, do you feel about it all?
You take a moment, think about your answers and comment below. In the meantime, I'll be over at The TV and Film Guy's Reviews.
I'm guessing that most viewers will come to the same conclusion that I have in that the girl that Ted bumps into at the club is his future wife.
I felt this ep (just like the Big Bang Theory before it) felt rushed. i.e. had the writers had more time to polish the ep it would have been better/run smoother/been funnier.
I hope that it was just a 1 week problem and that we'll see better eps the rest of the way - although, I must confess that I am going to be holding the bar very low for next week's Britney ep. That being said I am looking forward to seeing Sarah Chalke inhabit HIMYM's world.
I was just glad to have a new episode to come home to.>_
They wouldn't have shown Ted bumping into that girl in the club without a reason.
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What about: "Can we shoot pool on you?"
Best line of the night.
The person with the yellow umbrella waiting in line to get into the club was wearing jeans, as was the woman Ted bumped into in the club. Is she the mother of Ted's children? I guess we have to wait and find out.
The woman Ted bumped into was definately the wife. Otherwise what is the point. People don't bump other people on TV without some purpose. The interesting thing is, she was entirely unmemorable. She could be in the background of half a dozen more scenes and I wouldn't notice. Which is sort of interesting.
I think Ted should have another serious or semi-serious girlfriend, similar to Robin. I am tired of the girl of the week thing. Ted is not a Barney, as this episode proved. There can only be one Barney!
Oh and I loved Marshall and Lily this episode. I am friends with a Marshall and Lily type couple and so the smelling of the hands and what not is spot on.
How much longer will the audience hang in if we don't get some concrete evidence of who the mother is? The one thing I am finding after the strike is I didn't miss any of these shows. I had to force myself to watch last night when I would have been eagerly awaiting it. I think the whole thing of not revealing the mother is getting a little thin now. While I liked it at first, I just want it to be over. I guess that is why we need to whole flavor of the week deal, so we are left guessing.
Based on the creators' unholy desire to get Alicia Silverstone on the show, I had to think the bumped-into-girl was probably the winner of a "get a walk-on part" contest.
Related to that: Barney's Shirt, word is that the mother will be revealed next season, thanks to the show's uncertain renewal status every year.
Well Barney's Shirt, it seems to me you got/are getting your wish.
The way the episode was staged and the rushed feel, may be attributed to possibility that CBS has chosen to not renew the series for next year but have given the show a chance to end it by ending the story(something they didn't do with some other notable series such as Joan of Arcadia). That was my feeling watching it. As such, the casting of the girl for that part may have been less considerred then the producers of the show would have liked, which is why she seemed unmemorable.
However, the bump was pretty obvious, especially if you've watched the show. My guess is that she's not the nother, rather she is maybe a friend of the mother and Ted ends up hooking up with her somehow then when things don't work out with her, then runs into the woman who will be the mother which is revealed to us by her noting that he has her unmbrella.
I truly hope this is not the end of the series. I think if the writers are creative in the way they give us nuggets, that they could drag the story out quite delliciously over at least 1 more season. But I agree that the nuggets need to feel more tangeble then they have been up until now so that at the end they tie together brilliantly, like they did at the end of last season around the Marshall and Lily weedding storyline.
Lastly, I'm not sure that the switch could have taken place at any other time since it definately had to be tied to the cell phone. It just seemed that the switch was kind of rushed in the action and I didn't really understand at first what it was meant to point out about Ted. That is what seemed kind of forced, maybe because they never really gave you any meaningful indication that Ted was actually turning into Barney at the beginning of the show (indeed he started out by resisting Barney).