How I Met Your Mother - 7x22 - Good Crazy

If you love someone, change them. At least that's what everyone is trying to do this week. Ted keeps turning his dates into Robin (who steals the episode as a hallucination. Again.) Barney tries to get Quinn to quit stripping. Marshall tries to turn Lily into the annoying hyperactive parent he's training himself to be, and Lily tries to get Marshall to chill the fuck out. Meanwhile, I try to force this show to god damn do something, by sheer force of will, and all of a sudden, I succeed!

How I Met Your Mother - 7x21 - Now We're Even

Ted is enjoying the new found freedom that comes from finally living alone for the first time in his adult life. And because it's Ted, "new found freedom" means sad, depressing, and occasionally flat out dangerous things he can do without anybody pointing out how stupid they are.

How I Met Your Mother - 7x20 - Trilogy Time

Speaking of padding...

Every three years Marshall and Ted (and eventually Barney) get together to watch all three original Star Wars movies back to back, reflect on how shitty their lives are, and imagine how much better they'll be in the next three years.

So that means we spend the entire episode swide-swooping through real and imagined versions of the guys lives between 2003 and today, accomplishing little and learning nothing we didn't already know. Well except for one bonus flash forward to 2015...

How I Met Your Mother - 7x19 - The Broath

Let's get the first disappointment of the night out of the way: Ted did not, in fact, go all Bill Bixby after leaving the apartment last week. We are not getting an episode of him hitchhiking through the village, helping widowed mothers keep the ranch, and fighting off road bandits. Instead he manages to do something stupider.

Also, now that things are getting serious with Quinn, Barney makes Ted swear that he won't tell everyone she's a stripper. So he immediately tells everyone she's a stripper.

How I Met Your Mother - 7x18 - Karma

The episode starts with Ted summarizing the last few episodes in like six thousand less words than I did. Which just makes me wonder, why the hell am I doing this again?

Fine, let's try this in bullet points:

Robin's moved out and is crashing at Marshall and Lily's. Ted's trying to cope with his heartbreak by filling the now-empty room with anything other than a constant reminder of who's no longer there. Barney gets taken pretty hilariously, though unbelievably, by a stripper named Karma, who's probably going to end up being the woman he ends up maybe-marrying in that flash-forward-back that's framing the season. Marshall and Lily reveal they've been existing in a living death of old people and shuffleboard out in the suburbs, and try to rope/shanghai Robin into joining them.