Just an OK episode of How I Met Your Mother last night—for me, dawg—but I’m glad they made it. Last season, I was concerned that HIMYM was copping out on the question of Marshall selling out to the big firm for money to support himself and kindergarten teacher Lily. (You’ll recall, there was a jokey resolution in which John Cho persuaded Marshall that he only had to work for the firm to represent an amusement park–though it turned out to be an evil amusement park.) Normally on a sitcom, that’s what you do; your character needs some way to make a lot of money to have a credible life in Manhattan, so you come up with some B.S. way for him to have a lot of money, and then you forget it ever happened.
This is why HIMYM is better than the average sitcom: generally, it doesn’t just forget things.
From everything we knew about Marshall, this was the wrong job for him, and “Chain of Screaming” addressed this in a real way: not just his dislike of the job, but his recognizing that he’s given up his dream and is now trapped by his big slanty mortgage. On a character level, actually, this episode worked really well—I like that the show allows Marshall to be idealistic and a little soft, and while it makes fun of him for it (e.g., the crying in the office) it doesn’t humiliate him for it. On HIMYM, men can be girls, in the sitcom sense—Marshall can be a beta male, Ted can want to settle down and get married—and it’s OK.
I just wish the episode were a little funnier, though I did enjoy
* Robin’s trigger-happy revenge suggestion (“OK, gun violence might be the answer to everything up in Canada, Robin, but…”), as well as Ted realizing that “fundamentally paramount” is a contradiction in terms
* Barney’s co-worker quitting dramatically, only to develop pee-shyness when delivering the coup de grace
* The ever-larger messy food items in Ted’s car
Also, the ending was again a bit of a copout, with Lily apparently just realizing that Marshall hates his soul-killing job, and Ted writing Marshall a check and vaguely telling us that he and Lily managed to “scrape by” some unspecified way. But if you think I’m being too harsh, feel free to scream at me. I’ll just pass it down the chain/circle/pyramid.