How I Met Your Mother - 7x01 - The Best Man

We start out with Dad Ted telling his kids about the time he was Uncle Barney's best man and they both sat down and flash backed to the time he was Uncle Punchy's best man which involves flashing back to several other times Ted was Best Man at various weddings, each of which featured further flashbacks until finally we join Ted eating alone in a luxurious mansion overlooking an eroding beach at the shore of a collapsing citysca--what? No! We need to go deeper!

ANYWHO, Barney's wedding day freakout over whether he's chosen the right tie ("This is one is thin right now, what if it gets old and fat and I'll be stuck with this tie forever??"), somehow segues into the "present" when Ted was Punchy's best man at HIS wedding. Of course, this being Ted, we find this honor brings with it it's own Ted-centric drama: Schmosby.

Schmosby is Ted's internet sobriquet, popularized after his self-pity breakdowns at like eighty six weddings (all taking place during seasons 3 and 4) became a hit sensation on YouTube. Apparently Ted couldn't seem to get over his setbacks (Stella, unemployment, more unemployment...) long enough to give a god-damned best man toast, and has a habit of breaking down sobbing at nearly every wedding reception in the greater Illinois area. The couples seem to have taken this better than one would think, seeing as by this point, Schmosby is the entire reason he's still being invited to these weddings. The auto-tune remix version  even has a large following in Finland, from which a delegation has actually come to witness the latest performance in person.

The goodwill delegation from Finland would like to express 
their appreciation that you're such a god-damned loser, Ted.

Actually that sounds like a pretty cool way to spend a vacation. And how often does a small town in Ohio get a bunch of Finns stopping by? Take 'em to a Hoosiers game, sounds like fun.

Anyway, since Ted has now made the cover of New York magazine as the youngest architect to design a skyscraper, he's feeling pretty good about his self esteem. Or he should (as Barney points out), until he gets all Season1!Ted again and starts whining and pouting about not having three kids, a dog, and a mortgage yet. Wait, you DO have a mortagage, you crazy-ass dilapidated house buying freak. So perk up!



Barney is inflicting the wedding reception with ... wait a minute? Why the hell is the rest of the gang even here? These are Ted's high school buddies. Did Ted's best man invite come with a "plus four"? I mean, I totally understand letting the Finns take up a table of eight under the circumstances, but four random folks? Then again I haven't been to that many weddings, so maybe that's par for the course.

I tried my best to come up with a caption for this.
The farthest I got was a disgusting euphemism about "long and curlies"

Anyway, right. Barney is inflicting on the poor women of the reception some convoluted plot I didn't even really pay attention to until he busts out Guiness World Record length fingernails. Supposedly he focus tests the worst pick-up techniques he can, to figure out which ones won't work in New York? I don't know. I honestly could care less.

Robin, sporting newly short hair, is struggling with new/again feelings for Barney. She's into him, but he's making a pretty big deal that he's into Nora and besides they tried it once, and it didn't work. Lily keeps pushing that it's all about chemistry (which...considering what happened last time, really shouldn't be enough of a reason, but whatever). So of course their chemistry leads them to have a fun little dance number that I'm sure must have been embellished a little by SageTed, but is played perfectly straight right up until the phone call from Nora that gets Barney all giddy. Robin talks him through it, cue sad awwww.




All dancing at Ohio weddings is this awesome


Marshall and Lily, meanwhile, are trying to attend a liquor fueled wedding reception without telling anyone they're pregnant. This results in Marshall "drinking for two" and accidentally spilling the bride's delicate state, thus ruining the wedding. We zoom back to Barney's wedding where they both muse as that being the worst wedding one of group has ruined. Somehow I think Barney by himself must have ruined more weddings WAY worse.

--

So, how does this stack up? Nice. Not bad. Left me more interested than I've been in awhile. It wasn't as memorable as the home runs this show has hit in the past ("Slap Bet", "Slapsgiving", "Okay Awesome"), but it also wasn't as utterly forgettable as the majority of the eps from the past few years (seriously, off the top of your heads, who can remember what the hell "Unfinished" was about? "Twin Beds"?)

This is probably because Barney's wedding was a surprisingly effective way to grab my attention. I really shouldn't be giving credit to the ol' "Who's s/he gonna marry??" cliffhanger (that was the point at which I more-or-less-officially ditched Desperate Housewives), but it's a nice gimmick to hang the tired ol "two girls to choose from/Julie or Rachel" subplot we're gonna be following this season. I think it's because the fact that this wedding is taking place in the "future" means they don't neccessarily HAVE to make it Robin/Rachel, just because they can't make the actress that plays Nora girl a regular. So there's some decent actual suspense.

Speaking of which, I actually did like the touch that Barney had actually called her a gagillion times, but she just hadn't called him back. I think we all expected Barney's "eh I'm not calling her" schtick to be bravado, but the delivery of the "are you kidding me, I've called her a million times and left eighty six hundred messages" rang kind of true and aw, sad.

Random thought: Did Punchy lose weight?

Oh! Robin's hair. I really want to like it, but after two episodes, it's actually not doing it for me. Is it the highlights? Is it her weird tan? Or her "I've been on a successful sitcom for over 4 seasons" sudden bout of uber skinniness (see Helen Hunt)? I don't know. But I wasn't in Robin Lusting mood until the next ep, when she wore it completely differently.

Barney field-testing techniques seems like it should've either killed or bombed, but I have no reaction to it whatsoever.

Also, I will be conducting the rest of my interactions IRL in Robin's "truth-voice".