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.
Everyone fails.
I'm serious about the nothing but pictures of her thing... |
"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, 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." |
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? |
The |
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.
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