Tuned In

HIMYM Watch: I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter

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CBS

When you have a  comedy involving five friends, two of whom are married, and the other three of whom have already hooked up and broken up, there’s not much you can do to introduce relationship tension within the group. In “Twin Beds,” HIMYM tried to do that, not by bringing Robin back together either with Ted or Barney but instead by threatening their friendship.

I’m not sure it entirely worked for me, simply because, while we were told that seeing Don awoke feelings for Robin in both Ted and Barney, the episode didn’t really take those feelings seriously. So it was hard to buy that Robin took their actions seriously.

Since HIMYM broke Robin and Barney up, it’s been skittish about acting like the relationship had any real emotional effect on them, and here he seems to be simply reacting to another guy’s attention to Robin, rather than acting out of any real feeling. Ted’s desire comes out of a relationship we saw play out and were invested in. But if you have to remember you’re in love with someone by getting drunk and reading a letter from yourself–how in love are you? So when Robin moved out and left the blue French horn, it was more moving as a reminder of the past than as a sign of any real stakes now; this didn’t seem like a new wrinkle for the characters so much as a contrivance.

On the other hand, I loved everything about Marshall, Lily and the twin beds, from their vacation epiphany to their idea to separate sex and sleep by getting a third bed: “A sex bed! A dirty, dirty sex bed!” It was one of those brilliant Lily-Marshall subplots that played off how they work as a marriage and a team, and how something that would seem weird or a bad sign in another marriage—like Don’s—works in the logic of their own marriage. Though unlike George Costanza, Marshall will still have to have sex and eat his pastrami sandwich in separate beds.

Hail of bullets:

* Marshall and Lily’s reasons not to share a bed included too many quotable lines to count, but my favorite: “It’s like spooning with the Hindu deity Ganesh!”

* If I didn’t find Ted and Barney’s changes of heart convincing, I did like the conceit of “the letter,” above all because it allowed us to see Ted’s “For My Biographer” box.

* John Swansburg at Slate thought that the cues that made Don think Ted was gay were lazy and stereotypical. I agree to a point, but I thought the sequence was funny because its point was that Don was drawing a stereotypical inference from Ted’s creme brulée cooking and references to football “costumes.” I appreciated it, as a guy who cooks, enjoys a girly drink now and again and does not get sports—yet who is fond of both women and pastrami sandwiches.

* Not in bed, though. That’s disgusting. The sandwiches, I mean. Stop jumping to stereotypical conclusions!