Spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother coming up after the jump:
Just a very, very, very enjoyable episode of HIMYM last night. The beauty of setting up the Barney-Marshall text prank was that it turned what was looking like a weak storyline about Ted’s premature texting into a brilliant one.
Further, it took a show that has always been as much about bromance as romance and took it to the next level. Especially after Ted turned the tables with the sex-dream text. Because, you know, there was absolutely no homoerotic subtext to the series before that. (It’s beautiful, incidentally, that one of the parties to the sex-dream competition is played by Neil Patrick Harris, a gay man playing perhaps the most cartoonishly heterosexual male on television.)
Mrs. Tuned In pointed out last night that, as much as Alyson Hannigan has been missed, her absence has set up a great partnership between NPH and Jason Segal, who play off each other just magically. As soon as Ted sent his own prank text, you had to know that Marshall and Barney would have to fight over who was the “best friend” Ted was having sex dreams about. But the way they both sparred and worked together to try to get the truth out of Ted was just balletic—the way, for instance, Marshall spun the last-men-on-an-Earth-run-by-machines, and when Ted asked why he would need to “get with” either of his friends, Barney immediately jumped in: ”The machines are forcing you. They want to watch. That’s just how they get down.”
A final note, for those of you who couldn’t quite place him: the velvet-tongued Stan was Kevin Michael Richardson, a.k.a. Rockefeller Butts from The Knights of Prosperity. I was briefly saddened for him by his bit appearance and the reminder of Knights’ cancellation. But then I looked up his IMDB entry and found that he is pretty much the hardest-working man in show business. Why? Because when the lord gifts you with a voice like that, you are going to be in a couple hundred animated movies / TV shows a decade.
In fact, since we’ve got the excuse, treat yourself for two and a half minutes and watch this again. Those T-shirts ain’t no cotton-poly blend!
