CBS
Spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother coming up after the jump:
If you watch How I Met Your Mother looking for glimpses into, well, how he met somebody’s mother–or for info on any of the show’s other mysteries, like what was up with the goat–I can see how you’d be disappointed with the show lately. If you’re just looking for tightly crafted yuks, though, last night’s episode was pretty satisfying.
There was the show’s comedy boiled down to its essence: the five characters talking the the bar and laying off each other. There were the interwoven running jokes and callbacks within the episode: the fruit bowl that Marshall was inexplicably eating in the dorm room, for instance, later becomes the punch line to the “lingering” scene. There were reference to both When We Were Kings (“Pants story, bomaye!”) and The Wire (“You gots to get got. The game is the game”). There was the pants story, which, I agree with Robin, was not the funniest thing I had ever heard, but Barney’s delight at telling it was worth the price of admission. There was Marshall’s crowning description of Laura Prepon’s Karen as a douche. (“She was the heiress to the Massengill fortune.”) I don’t expect Karen to be the mother or even necessarily get us closer to her, but I have no objections so far.
Well, one thing: if the episode was portraying Ted as an insufferable foodie, would he really have gone to a restaurant with (French) Chateauneuf-du-Pape on the wine list and ordered (Italian) bruschetta with fresh mozzarell’? Not to be a douche or anything.