How I Met Your Mother - 7x23 - The Magician's Code, Part One

Lily's in labor.

Marshall's half a state away and three sheets to the wind, Barney's riding motorcycles inside casinos, and Ted is sending out horrible video announcements inviting everyone to share in lily's widening cervix.

Robin is slightly more useful, showing off her heretofore unseen talents in Canadian animal husbandry. Which, in her defense, turns out to be a mostly transferable skill set. At least until she puts down the tarp and slides on the elbow-length plastic gloves. Actually, that probably still works.


The hospital won't admit Lily until her contractions are four minutes apart, which seems needlessly cruel. Then again, I think pushing a tiny creature headfirst through one's hoohah is an unspeakable crime for all involved, so what do I know? In order to pass the time, she asks Ted and Robin to keep her distracted with stories, because, hell, we've still got nineteen minutes to fill.

So what follows is essentially a much better version of Trilogy Time, with Robin and Ted rapid firing at Lily increasingly ridiculous flashbacks of adventures we never actually saw, but I can't get enough of. Thirty seconds of "Barney Picks Up Chicks As The Terminator" or "Mystery of the Haunted Pants" were easily more charming and entertaining than half the failed digressions we got this season. I found myself wishing that we'd been watching that show instead of the one with Drunk Trains and Ted getting into fights with Martin Short.

Then again, aside from "Where Does That Door Go?" and maybe "The Gang Dresses as the Breakfast Club", the bits were really just that, bits. Stretching them out to a full episode would've probably resulted in the same useless padding that has been so frustrating this year. So maybe, this season was doomed from the start.

Meanwhile, back in Atlantic City, Marshall and Barney are trying their drunkest to get home for the birth. It doesn't go well.

It does however give us some great physical Marshall bits, specifically the drunken-stair climbing above, and the Crazy Zelda ATM. It's enough to make me forgive the show for wasting like ten minutes (half the episode!) on this thin subplot. In the end, the boys manage to get themselves on a senior outing charter bus heading back to New York. When the bus driver refuses to drop them off in the city on their way to Buffalo, the old'uns courageously fake a series of heart attacks and insist on stopping at the hospital Lily's having the baby at. Aww.

Everyone's reunited in short order after that, and Lily gives birth to a beautiful, healthy baby boy named Marvin WaitForIt Ericsson.

Random Thoughts

• "He looked like a little kids imaginary friend." - To be fair, Jason Segel has always looked like that.

• "If you don't push, I will shove that baby up your throat and pull it out your mouth!" - Doctor Sonia is awesome.

• And once again, Robin steals the show:
• Niice legs there, Robin. Rockin some sweet gams the entire episode in that fetching blue dress. I don't know where she was coming from, but I want to go to there.
• "Once you see a baby horse erupting through that birth canal, you stop even touching yourself." -- and now we finally know what happened after that ill-fated hockey game.
• "We're bustin apple bags? I can bust apple bags"
• "Get on all fours and widen your hindquarters"
• "I have delieverd 12 perfectly healthy babies and one of them was even human!"