Tuned In

HIMYM Watch: Ménage à Quatre

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Spoilers for How I Met Your Mother coming up after the jump:

HIMYM is a comedy that often does so much time-jumping and cross-cutting and other such fancy dancing that it’s nice to see an episode like “The Sexless Innkeeper,” which simply takes one extended joke—how a too-needy couple can be like a too-needy single—and plays it out successfully for the whole half-hour.

The story of boy-and-girl meet boy-and-girl, boy-and-girl lose boy-and-girl, boy-and-girl get boy-and-girl back seemed like it should run out of steam, but each doubling of an old romance trope, like Barney and Robin sadly eating ice cream in bed, paid off. Add Marshall’s music-and-photo-montage masterpieces and I was roundly satisfied. (By the way, you’ve guessed, I assume, that itwasthebestnightever.com is a working website.) My one quibble: the inexcusably screwed-up calendar in the montage, which included “Oct. 15 14 13 14 15.” That and the fact that the show isn’t finding more ways to feature Lily and Marshall lately.

Oh, and Barney’s “What have I done?” at the end: throwaway line, or foreshadowing of his regretting committing to Robin?