HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER: “The Burning Beekeeper” – RECAP

Over the years How I Met Your Mother has been able to create a number of fun, gimmicky episodes that take advantage of it’s narrator based storytelling to play around with time and show events out of order and it usually does so with great success. Some of the shows best episodes, such as “Brunch,” “Lucky Penny,” and “Three Days of Snow” have done this type of thing marvelously. So far HIMYM has managed to keep these gimmicks spread out and has yet to repeat itself using the exact same format. This Monday’s episode, “The Burning Beekeeper,” was one such episode, with its gimmick being separating the episode into three segments, all taking place within the same five minute time period, but each one is set in a different room of Marshal and Lily’s Long Island home.

It’s the type of set up where we get only get bits and pieces of everyone’s stories as we go from room to room, so when Lily tells Ted not to eat any of Marshall’s gouda while in the living room, we have to wait until we move to the kitchen to find out why. It’s a fun method of storytelling and HIMYM does a stand up job of teasing us and paying off the initial set ups. Where it falters, and this is a big grievance in my eyes, is in the lack of anything meaningful taking place. “The Burning Beekeeper” is funny and well structured but it leads to an ending with no meaning. There’s no big satisfactory moment. What it ends up feeling like is a gimmick episode being made just for the gimmick. It should have been built around something more overarching. Having a shallow episode dressed up in a fun, time-skipping outfit is still a shallow episode.

A minor issue I had was the way the episode held our hands as it took us through the three rooms. Instead of staying put in whichever current room we were in, it would cut away to other rooms to remind us of where we were in time. That was a little unnecessary for me. I’m smart enough to be able to figure out how everything fits together. If it’s going to remind us where we are at least do so in an unobtrusive way. Rather than cutting to the living room when we’re supposed to be in the kitchen, why not simply hear what’s supposed to be happening off screen? When Marshall and Robin are talking in the dining room, wouldn’t it have been funnier to hear Ted and Cootes (Martin Short)  yelling at each other rather than seeing it again? If we’re going to see everything three times, I want to see it from three different perspectives.

It’s a shame I took such offense by the shallow nature of the episode. There are lots of laughs to be had and it really is quite clever. But the cleverness is what got the better of it. HIMYM thought cleverness was enough to make a great episode, but really all it did was make a boring episode watchable. I hope in the future we don’t ever have to experience this type of situation again. Save the gimmicks for when they can be used at their highest potential.