HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER’s Therapy Crisis

Sometimes sitcoms make mistakes. It happens. The important thing to do is to just accept it and enjoy what it does right. How I Met Your Mother started off this season just right, and now four episodes in I’m prepared to cut it a little slack on a small misstep. This isn’t the first time HIMYM has sat down with one of its characters while he/she recounted the episode’s main events. Barney got two of these types of episodes in Season 5. But this time around it didn’t click. It had nothing to do with Cobie Smulders. She played Robin to the best of her ability. But even just cutting back to that therapy session for a second killed the momentum of the episode.

That session was a little too tongue in cheek to work properly. It was pretty obvious the show was yet again poking fun at its narrative structure, as Robin assured her therapist (guest star Kal Penn) that all of the different stories will tie together. It was a bit much. Not too mention Penn was just so unconvincing as the therapist. He stuck out in a bad way, as most stunt casting does. I was hoping the show would have tried harder to make him feel like he belonged, but there was no way that was happening.

But besides the therapy business, this was a solid episode. Robin and Barney’s story yielded some truly satisfying laughs thanks to Barney’s Bimbo Delivery Systems (autonomous schemes designed to lure potential hotties to Barney’s vicinity, e.g., free breast reduction consultations). I also thoroughly enjoyed Robin’s increasingly rage-filled responses to Nora receiving Barney’s gifts. This episode was much needed given how little Robin had to do last season. Seeing Robin diabolically plotting to sabotage a relationship is a change of pace for her character and really shows how far she has fallen. Who among us can say we haven’t thought at one time or another about breaking someone up just to be with them? Especially when you’re going through a time in your life where nothing seems to pan out the way you expected it to. That’s where Robin is right now. Her storyline is building quite nicely, and I’m excited to see where Bays and Thomas and the rest of the writers take her from here.

Marshal and Lily find themselves in a more bizarre situation as Ted inserts himself into their baby plans (he even has a “Team Baby” t-shirt made). As creepy as it is, Ted makes a valid point that their doctor is allowing Lily to consume alcohol and other harmful products as long as it’s “just a leetle beet.” Marshal takes Ted’s side while Lily is blind to Dr. Sonya’s crazy, but a flash-forward reveals the ugly insane side to Dr. Sonya (and apparently Marshal isn’t present for the birth! Gasp!). This leads to Marshal and Ted taking a birthing class together. The bit is awkward in that perfectly laughable way. How weird is it to have two grown men pretending to be pregnant? Weird enough that Ted and Marshal decide to leave and apologize to Lily. Here is where the show sloppily ties both stories together, but it’s a purposeful choice to set up a joke in the therapist office.

After a successful string a great HIMYM episodes, we get our first slip downhill. But don’t let it get you down. At most we lost a couple inches, hardly enough to send the series snowballing downwards without stopping. Things are still going strong. I even chuckled at seeing the ducky tie on Barney. The show made the right choice of not drawing too much attention to it yet, and while that’s just a minor thing, it makes me believe the writers really know what they’re doing this year.