The gang flashes back to Hurricane Irene! And yes, that is a very apt metaphor for a confusing and disappointing anticlimax! Ted wants to leave the city for Westchester and bring everyone with him, but no one believes the storm will be that bad! Robin keeps talking about weird shit Canadians do outside in hurricanes in various states of undress! Soon enough it's not up to them anymore and, boom, trapped! Marshall wil be without health insurance for a whole two weeks! For some reason, he believes staying near Lily at ALL times until then will protect him from bear attacks! I don't know why I'm yelling everthing! And finally, most importantly, the Ducky Tie is challenged, and the Slap Bet returns!
Now THAT's what I'm talking about! Callback references with meaningful follow-through! Interesting story lines Guest starts that aren't dead weight! A bit of a fumble towards the end there and followed by a cliffhanger that makes my cliche-hairs stand on end (don't ask where they are), but at least means we're moving things forward! I loved this ep. Well, I liked this ep. More lowered expectations? I don't care! I'm in again!
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| Killer prom chaperons? |
We cold open on a daring chase through the
dark city streets! Barney rounds a corner and dodges all manners of store front proprietors, running as fast as he can from two...well i'm not sure what they are. They're kind of blurry even on my HD feed. Really well dressed mobsters? Hasidic ninjas? I like Hasidic ninjas, we'll go with that. He manages to find safety in a dark alley with a swarthy Persian man straight out of Casablanca, but he too betrays him and demands the amulet. A quick headbutt and a wistful "why?" later, Barney's made his second escape. But he hears a voice calling out for help! It's The Kid! Barney climbs up a fire escape and somehow finds himself on the roof of the GNB building. The adorable little boy is hanging off the ledge,
seconds minutes away from certain doom! The only way to reach him is to use his tie to bridge the gap! Grab the tie, son! Grab the tie! He does! The boy is saved! But no sooner are they enjoying a well deserved rest, than a bird
swoops down and absconds with the same very tie!
And that's why Barney doesn't have the Ducky Tie anymore.
Or so he claims. Lily finds it in a dumpster out back.
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| To be fair, he poses like that fairly regularly. |
After nearly 8 episodes, Barney is finally rebelling against the Ducky Tie. When his swashbuckling tale of do-gooding is exposed for the lie it is, Barney just tries straight up bribing Marshall and Lily to get out of his obligation. When
twenty thousand dollars fails (for some goddamned inexplicable reason), Barney finally digs down deep and starts offering
slaps. If you recall (and if you don't, an awesome montage reminds us), after
Slapsgiving II, Marshall is down to ONE slap. I kind of assumed that meant the end of that storyline. I thought they'd save that final slap for the finale or some far future event. But apparently, Ducky Tie is out, slaps are back in! Gotta go with what sells, kids. Also I'd put money (but not slaps!) on the idea that Barney having that tie and losing it are going to be important visual indicators in future flashbacks. Anyway, Barney, ever the
skillful negotiator finally manages to get Marshall to agree to a
fair trade, but not before Kevin helpfully (read: non-creepily) figures out why Barney is so desperate to get rid of the tie now: he's finally going to meet Nora's parents and he wants to make a good impression. With this extra leverage Marshall is able to extract a windfall price of
three extra slaps. That's four slaps total. Like any good happy slapper Marshall decides to trade in his first two
immediately, leaving Barney to seriously question his life choices.
In the midst of all this, and in grand Ducky Tie episode tradition (two episodes is a tradition right?), Ted is trying to recount the long-winded A-plot of the episode to Kevin, who innocently (and -holy shit- completely non-creepily or Mr.Rogers-beclothed-ily) wondered why there's a sign outside MacLaren's forbidding boogie boarding. Being new to this group, he made the mistake of asking Ted, and in true SagetTed fashion, we end up hearing about almost everything else in the universe before we even come close to the actual boogie boarding in question.
You know, it really should annoy my sense of logic when we end up having an episode that's a flashback to a flashback in an entire show that's essentially one GIANT FLASHBACK, but I've learned to kind of dig it. SagetTed lays one of the undeniable truths of life on us: You haven't lived until someone puts up a sign explicitly prohbiting something you've done. (
Don't punch the llama was me, guys. Sorry.)
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Even though no one ever comes here, I have enough beer
for everyone! |
So there was this thing back in August, you guys? Hurricane Irene? Was supposed to completely devastate the city and leave us without power or water for days? It was kind of a big thing that turned out to not be a big thing and shut up size doesn't matter? Well Ted decided to prepare. He ordered a safety-orange backpack, rented a car, prepped that house he stupidly bought in Westchester, and for some reason waited until the last possible moment to inform the gang that he planned on taking them with him. Said gang doesn't seem to share Ted's sense of Boy Scout-inspired Fear of Act of God, and keeps dragging their heels and insisting on staying in the city. This is mostly exacerbated/led by Barney, who tricks them all into detouring to his apartment and then declares he's not leaving and everyone should ride out the storm in his high rise building and giant wall-sized tv.
You know, in hindsight, I obviously agree with him, but I know I'd be scared shitless to sit next to so much glass at altitudes where the wind whips by at 60mph on a clear day. Speaking of which, quick aside: the only people that really had to evacuate were the folks in the Evacuation Zone A, which were mostly a few blocks from the southern coasts. I wonder what that means in terms of pinning down where every one lives. Even if we assume that Ted's apartment in the Village was in Zone A, is the implication that Dowisetrepla and Barney's building were too? Barney's definately a midtown kind of guy, and I always assumed Dowistetrepla was up by West Harlem/Morningside Heights.
What? This is what I mean by the whole blog explanation up there. These are the
things I think about.
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| Yeah, fuck you, Barney. |
Anyway, Barney drags his feet long enough for Ted to get fed up and decide to leave him behind in favor of a buxom young neighbor that showed up out of nowhere and needs a ride out of the city. We'll ignore the idea of a beautiful woman living in the same building as Barney and him not being aware of her, and skip to Barney expressing pride that Ted would be willing to leave his "best friend" to die in order to make time with her. Of course, when John Lithgow calls Barney to tell him the storm is a big deal he declares "shit's real now, dump the hootchie and wheels up." Of course, by the time he's decided that, the gang has seen live eyewitness footage of the storm bearing down in South Carolina, and have decidedly to switch their affiliation to
cowardly runaways Ted's team. So we've got six passengers and a
life boat car that only seats five.
What follows is about five minutes of musical chairs of an almost British <farcicial> nature (or perhaps Sphinxian nature), as the following mutually exclusive conditions come into play:
- Neighbor girl won't go if Lily's going (because Lily called her a floozy)
- Lily won't go if Marshall goes (because Marshall is smothering the ever living crap out of her)
- Marshall won't stay if Lily's going (because of the aforementioned smothering)
- Barney won't stay if Marshall goes (because he needs the seat)
- Robin won't go if Barney's going (because ... we'll get to that later)
I'd love to work out the graph geometry of an
optimal solution for this, but all the spare braincells I had were spent figuring out where Dowisetrepla was.
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| Yeah, that was the look on every New Yorker's faces. |
In the end it turns out to be too late for everyone, as we get a little file footage of Bloomberg telling everyone "the time for evacuation is over". Ah, nostalgia. I gotta tell you, that weekend was the most relaxing weekend of my life. Just hunkered down with about 20 gallons worth of water and eight cans Chef Boyardee (or eight cans of water and 20 gallons of Chef Boyardee?), watched NY1 and Netflix the entire time, not a single responsiblity to be had. I mean it was technically raining in my room, but aside from that, it was the closest I've had to a vacation in years. Sigh, I miss you Irene, baby. Come back.
Ahem.
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Again, to be fair, they did wake up in that gutter a few
minutes earlier. |
So because the writers apparently had a few ounces of anti-climax left over from last week's fustercluck, they decide to just toss it on the end of this storyline. Before we know what's happened, boom, it's the next morning, still raining, but the danger passed. Listen, I know the the storm didn't exactly live up to apocolyptic expectations, but this was still a ridicoulously sudden jump cut considering the mood progression the rest of the episode had introduced. Have a little emotional continuity here. Instead, the gang is apparently standing in absolutely pouring rain outside MacLaren's cause they're god damn alcoholics who will risk pneumonia to get a damn drink. They start dancing and splashing in the rain because they're also still wildly drunk from the night before (my interpretation), and Marshall decides the best way to show he's over his healthcare-related risk paranoia is to take a dirty garbage lid and go -surprise- boogie boarding in the street with it. Or so Ted tells us. Not only do we not actually get to see Jason Segel boggie board on a cheap flimsy piece of plastic, but we don't even see him fly through the front window of MacLaren's, which is the entire reason the sign was up up
and this story was started. God fucking damn it.
Lost spent more time tying it's plots together. If what happened here is translated to the series as a whole, the wife will be revealed off screen in the last episode by SagetTed going "Oh yeah, and then I met this chick named your Mom about two minutes later. The End."
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| Let's spread the pneumonia! |
Anyway, while all THAT was going on, ANOTHER subplot kind of meanders around in the background, kind of minding it's own business, until bam, gamechanger. Robin's spends the entire Irene situation insisting that a Category 3 Hurricane is really just Canadian bikini weather. Her cockiness is obviously overcompensation for the fact that, unlike everyone else in the group (including Barney), her father never called to check up on her and insist she get to a safe place. So, as Kevin might note, we've got a classic deflection coupled with an unconscious desire to make her Daddy proud by being tougher than all the other guys. Man, how come there aren't women as messed up as you in real life, Robin? At first this false-climaxes in a really cruel way when Barney prank calls, pretending to be her father, only to shove it in her face and basically prove my sociopath diagnosis correct one more time. BUT, later during the pneumonia-thon the next morning, he over apologizes and goes on about how she's so awesome he has no idea how anyone could NOT check up on her (or something) and they come thisssss close to making out in the rain. 'Luckily' her dad calls right there and then, which just makes me think of some weird Elektrical "daddy saving his daughter from the sexy bad boy" vibe, which: shudder.
Anyway, back in the "present", after Kevin leaves, and Barney has recieved two truly epic slaps, she and Barney split a cab and reminisce about how they almost made out and it's basically the usual "
Oh yeah, that totally would've been a horrible, no good, very bad ide-SMOOCHES LICKETY STYLE!". Bam gamechanger. Really don't like the idea of either of them being cheating on Kevin or Nora, but at least we're finally kicking off this ill-fated Love-Quadrilateral-of-Doom, and headed towards that promised Barney wedding. Maybe. They'll probably just put things on cruise control for another 6-7 episodes. Bah!
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| Licky style! |
Oh! How could I forget! Marshall and Lily made up in Barney's bathtub, and that's how she got pregnant! I'm actually sad it's a boy now, as Irene would've been a sweet name for their kid. Not better than Ted's suggested "Hurricane Ericsson" though!
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