Quick spoilers for How I Met Your Mother coming up after the jump:
Largely self-contained episode of HIMYM this week, and a fairly crisp, funny if not spectacular one. So I’ll skip the deep analysis. I won’t ask what happened, say, to the implication that Robin was going to get in a serious relationship with her co-host Don (namely, how they get from this episode’s uncomfortable tighty-whities moments to dating), or gripe that the return of Marshall’s nemesis Arthur kind of fizzled out. Because I already did. The hail of bullets, then:
* Yes, Lily’s Harvey Fierstein voice was Harvey Fierstein. And quite an accurate choice, since Lily hails from my Brooklyn neighborhood, and Fierstein does, in fact, sound like many of the local elderly ladies after a lifetime of chain smoking.
* Whatever comes, or doesn’t, of Robin and Don’s relationship, I was a little surprised they managed to get laughs out of the age-old premise of the blowhard local anchor, especially his spellbinding story of working a network job with real dressing rooms: “No changing in the KFC bathrooms across the street.”
* So teenagers of the future are not shocked by, say, Barney’s lying to get women into bed, but they’re scandalized by smoking. Good to know.
* Enjoyed the last flashforward to the last time each of the characters smoked—damn, Future Ted really knows his friends—but I half expected it to take a Six Feet Under finale turn and tell us Marshall took his last smoke… the day he died!
