CBS
Spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother coming up after the jump:
A confession: I watched last night’s HIMYM on the couch through a fog of sinus pain—blogs are for oversharing, right?—and didn’t take any notes. But “Rabbit or Duck” eased my suffering enough that I’m going to count it a success.
I’ll attribute that to two things, besides garden-variety funniness. First, unlike last week’s episode, it managed to use Barney well in an over-the-top story without letting him overwhelm everything else in the episode. His basic dilemma—how to handle too much choice—worked with, rather than competed against, both Robin’s and Ted’s stories.
Second, this episode did one of the things I liked best about HIMYM: took an offbeat observation—in this case, involving those optical-illusion pictures that look like two things at once—and used it as an extended metaphor through the episode. (As it has with concepts like The Sexless Innkeeper.) When HIMYM does this and it works, as it did here, it’s as much like a really good essay as it is a sitcom episode. And the gang’s impassioned, furious argument over whether the rabbit or the duck is the desirable one, had me gasping.
Of course, that may have been the cold medication talking. Your thoughts? And did anyone try calling the phone number when it was active on Sunday?