How I Met Your Mother - 1x06 - History vs. Mystery

Ted, decides to try and go stalking-free on his latest date. Only for Marriage-After-the-First-Date-Ted, would that be considered a wacky idea.

Marshall and Lily, meanwhile, struggle with deciding whether to learn about the sex of their baby before it's born. Or, well, they struggle with Barney insisting they're struggling.

Dr.  Kumar  Kutner, on the other hand, struggles not to look like a super creepy, uncomfortable, paternalizing weirdo.

Everyone fails.

I'm serious about the nothing but pictures of her thing...

So, by the grace of a merciful and loving God, manages to get a date with a drop dead gorgeous woman so far out of his league, I'm half tempted to make the rest of the recap nothing but pictures of her. Then he has the brilliant idea to tempt fate, throw away his usual modus operandi, and not do any kind of  Google-stalking  "internet research" on her before they go out. He feels the information age has stolen all the surprise and adventure out of picking up complete strangers at a bar and having sex with them. And yet, somehow, he manages to convince her that this is a good idea, and that she shouldn't look him up either. You know, I'm going to rag on Ted a lot this episode, but I may just have to steal this move.

"I just feel like those offender registries never really capture
the real me, y'know?"

"God, I'm so glad I found a use for these bluetooth sets
that don't make me look like a douchebag. In public."

Barney and Robin think this is a horrible idea. As a series of flashsidewaysbacks shows us, they've kind of evolved into his own personal 24-style tech support team, looking up information on his dates, and feeding it to him in real-time. Because I guess doing all that before he actually leaves for his date would be too reasonable. Their little Veronica Mars act has saved Ted from getting involved with least three potential freak shows. Well two freakshows, and one woman who may or may not regain some weight she lost. Classy, Ted.

Barney and Robin, however, aren't about to let Ted's uninformed and annoyingly polly-anna decision stand in their meddling ways, and proceed to google her anyway. They find some deep, shocking secret, and keep texting the link to Ted, but he's holding to his rule.

For about 20 minutes.

"See, what the second serif on the cross of the F tells us is
that I'm in dire need of a cockpunch."

See, it seems that without xkcd.com/300'ing someone before a date, Ted's ability to make polite conversation with a pretty stranger has completely and utterly atrophied. Not content with cringeful silence, Ted even manages to hit a new low for all dating-kind, lecturing Ridonkulously Pretty Girl on common misconceptions about that particular restaurant's menu font. Somehow, this woman has gone her entire life never looking in a mirror, because she doesn't leave right there and then. Possibly because, she admits, she has absolutely nothing to say either. Or she's a vampire, totally explaining the never-looking-in-a-mirror thing.

Things briefly go well once they decide to ask about each others likes and dislikes. Seriously? It took them roughly 20 minutes to come up with that? Jesus. Anyway, that respite is destroyed when RPG excuses herself to go powder her nose, and Ted chooses then to freak out. He imagines about fifty different horrible scenarios (including either an awesome callback, or an crude retread of Slap Bet's awesome "I used to be a dude"), and clicks on the Barney and Robin's link to find...

...that she's basically the most perfect woman alive. Objectively speaking. Subjectively speaking, for my tastes, she's would probably do well to stop not being Kristen Bell. Anyway, it turns out Ridonkulously Pretty Girl is really Ridonkulously Smart, Selfless, Organ-Generous, Mountain Climbing, Rich Girl. Ted (rightfully) gets intimidated, starts freaking out, and lets his grammatical skills devolve back to his early toddler years. Realizing he broke the one rule they had, which was his own stupid rule in the first place, she leaves him on the spot. Probably for the best. Let's face it Ted, you suck.

As if that sweater-vest-over-shirt-and-tie Mister Rogers
combo wasn't bad enough, can you at least stop making
that  "Young lady, you are grounded!" face?

That little Aesop tale for the 21st Century actually probably took up less than 10 minutes of the entire episode, and the rest was interspersed with a stark, if ultimately boring, and somewhat out of left-field reinterpretation of the group dynamic. Kutner, still creepy and out of place as ever as Robins former-therapist-now boyfriend, spends the entire episode playing witness to Barney and Robin's unwanted intrusion into Ted's love life, and Marshall and Lily's decision to not know the sex of their unborn child, and yet inexplicably, keep carrying around an envelope with said sex *everywhere they go*. Unsurprisingly, seeing this group dynamic, Kutner loses his cool for a split second and basically Dr. Hu's them, calling then co-dependent freaks with dysfunctional group dynamics. Listen, Kutner, you met this girl because a court of law mandated that she explain why she criminally assaulted a woman in the course of trying to break up her ex boyfriend's-now-best-friend's date with her coworker. How was this remotely a surprise?

The cult family don't take kindly to outsiders makin' comments

All seems forgiven when he offers to finish painting the room a gender-neutral shade of mustard-puke yellow all by himself. Ted ends up accidentally spilling the beans about the baby when he, in true HIMYM-fate-rules-all fashion, steps on the ripped up baby-sex note outside, and tracks it into the apartment. The Ericsson's are having a boy. An Ericsson-son? There's a pun somewhere.

Overall, the first signifnicantly disappointing episode of the season. The whole concept of Googling taking the surprise out of dating seems like it has legs, but when actually put to the test, it doesn't. They had to contrive complete social retardation on both their parts in order to make it work, and even then it could only be stretched out for about ten minutes.

This whole new spin on the group dynamic similarly doesn't work. It's old hat in modern sitcoms for an outsider to come in (usually a therapist) and deconstruct how utterly dysfunctional the group dynamic would be in real life. It can either be an amusing meta look at the show, or a catalyst for real change in the show's premise. Unfortunately, HIMYM keeps hinting at the latter, and seem convinced that contrivance is the way to do it. Putting aside the fact that we've had lasting change dangled in front of us before, none of those example scenes rang true to the characters as we've come to know them, unreliable narrator or not. Who really believes Ted and Marshall have a Turk/JD thing going on where they get seperation anxiety if they're away from each other for more than five minutes? And the poop texts thing? The less said about that the better. Now, there is definitely cause for a dysfunction diaganosis in the whole Robin-Barney-Ted situation, as Victoria alluded to a few episodes ago. But Kutner's diagnosis was based on the entire group, which just doesn't ring true. Combine that with generally unfunny jokes (if you can't make a Woody Allen, fourth-wall-breaking joke work on this show, something's gone wrong) and lackluster, meandering plots, and we're left with an episode I'd rather just forget and move on from.