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!

Robin liked her too.

Ted's still a little mopey about Robin, so Barney arranges a three course menu of "palate cleansers" to help Ted finally move on. They're all perfectly nice, interesting ladies (especially the one who called Ted a weirdo and instantly became my favorite), but Ted can't stop thinking about Robin in the middle of the dates. Even when he finally manages to suppress the hallucinations long enough to score with a lovely young woman in a similar situation, it doesn't take long before Robin's visage is talking to him again from beer bottles and old, tired bartenders (which reminds me, where the hell is Carl??). Eventually he realizes that he's been kind of a self-absorbed dick (or to the extent that he can realize such a thing), and that whatever he does have with Robin is worth preserving. Aw.

Now one thing I liked about this was that if you squint, Barney's whole palate-cleanser plan is a natural extension of the "b-peg replacement" philosophy he introduced back when Lily and Marshall broke up. It's a nice bit of logical continuity, and it also gives us permission to assume that Ted's uncharacteristic Lusty Leopard visits back in Karma were mandatory boob-memory overwrites that just didn't take, necessitating this week's escalation. In a season where Barney's motivations seem to be slip-sliding all over the place, it's nice to see some kind of consistent characterization written for him.

"So the amount of bpegs you can store is directly proportional to 
the size of your hard drive. Conversely, that's why I'm able to 
get over women so quickly."

Along those lines, Barney is obviously still using Ted as a project to distract himself from Quinn's stripping, because apparently that's going to be their entire dynamic now. Because why try to actually challenge Barney to grow as a person with someone who can call him on his unhealthy attitudes and behaviors, when you can just toss Madonnas and whores at him and see him squirm in rote, tired ways that include insinuating stripping is equivalent to prostitution.

"Really, dude?"

When they run into some of Quinn's regulars on the street, Barney just loses any semblance of even faking an appropriate behavior and offers Quinn a bullshit job at GNC at exactly the same pay she's making at the Lusty Leopard. He doesn't even pretend it's a real job when he's trying to sell it to her (which is either more disrespectful or less, I'm not sure), so it's no surprise when she doesn't buy it even a little and leaves to do some thinking.

And all without ever really dropping that smile. Seriously, is it just her Cumberbatchian cheekbones causing an optical illusion, or is she Jimmy Fallon's long lost sister?

This is her angry face. And her sad face. And her disappointed face.
She's the patron saint of smiling, is what I'm saying.

While Ted and Barney are busy sabotaging their love lives, Marshall is being his usual baby-crazy self and taking his prepping too far. Simulated feedings at three in the morning and soothing diapered watermelons are just a little more stress than a ready-to-pop Lily can take. When confronting him about it only leads to a huge fight, Lily arranges for Barney to kidnap Marshall for a weekend in Atlantic City, so they can both forget their troubles (what no Ted? What am I saying, of course no Ted, good call).

"Wait, don't you have a pretty serious gambling problem?"

At AC Barney soothes a fussy Marshal with a fair compromise: If Marshall agrees to turn both their phones off for an hour and get "so drunk you need subtitles to talk", Barney will wear the Ducky Tie. Oh, the Ducky Tie. What a complete dead end plot thread you turned out to be. Now here's the thing: When Barney is that calm and reasonable about an idea, you know it's going to end horribly.

And it does, because as anyone who watched any sitcom ever can predict, Lily goes into labor the second those phones are turned off. Uh-oh, cliffhanger!

Forward motion!

Random Thoughts

• "...fifty laps a day..." Listen, show, if you're going to do these "misheard" Three's Company type jokes, even for minute, you have to be better.

• "What do you expect to meet a cute travel agent while you're reading a newspaper at a bookstore?", Awesome. Hurtful, but awesome.

• "...my own personal logarithms..." -- Foul, geek flag on the play!

• Barney really didn't filter that out a girl named Robin he was picking out girls for Ted?

• "...and that's the story of my only lesbian experience. ... I'll never tell that story again." Cockpunch, Ted. Why do you keep asking for one every week?

• That waiter was a pimp.

• It took every ounce of will power I had not to make a "palate dirtying" joke. Please know, I did it for you.

• "...offer his stripper girlfriend half a million dollars of government bailout money not to rub up on other guys' junk."---wait, Quinn's making half a million dollars stripping?? Jesus, no wonder that apartment was so great. Why did they move into Barney's apartment again?

• Was Barney dressed up as classic science fiction author Issac Asimov?