CBS
Spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother following:
The moment that “Oh Honey” indicated it would focus on Zoey, I actually exclaimed aloud, “I do not give a crap* about Zoey!” (*Quotation bowdlerized for MSM-website standards.) So you probably have a sense of where I stand on the Zoey-Ted relationship. It’s not that I particularly care about the quest for the Mother at this point (Alan Sepinwall has a quick explanation of the reasons that, without serious retconning, she is not She); I just don’t feel that the show has established the chemistry between the characters the way it has with some of Ted’s previous girlfriends. (As far as I’m concerned, Victoria will always be the one that got away.)
But as an individual episode, “Oh Honey” was a pretty solid piece of How I Met Your Mother engineering, so I’m happy with that.
Structurally, the highlight of the show was Marshall’s involvement in the plot at a distance from Minnesota, where he’s bouncing off the walls in boredom while he helps his mother after his father’s death. First he serves as a sounding board and narrative device, through whom we get the backstory on “Honey”‘s visit and Ted’s breaking things off with Zoey. Then—his detective instincts no dobut honed by endless games of Clue against himself—he sleuths out the truth about Zoey’s divorce and Ted and Zoey’s feelings for each other, while imparting valuable lessons about the importance of phone etiquette. (“Manners are what separates us from elbows-on-the-table Wisconsinites!”) By the time he was going over his extremely simple bulletin-board-and-yarn schematic with his family, what seemed like a device to separate Jason Segel from the action (was he shooting a movie that limited his availability?, I first wondered) became another nicely executed HIMYM origami fold of storytelling.
And bonus points: the episode actually managed to use the stunt-casting of Katy Perry well! I’m still not convinced of her acting ability—Sesame Street and SNL notwithstanding—but she is gifted as a performer, and her role in the episode fit perfectly with the persona she’s created for herself: the hyperstylized, cotton-candy-sexual, innocent-but-actually-totally-not girl next door. And the switcheroo, in which Barney went from seducing her to breaking down over his search for his father, deftly nudged that storyline forward an inch or two. (Also enjoyed the Wire reference in Barney’s going “up on burners,” if the reference was actually intended.)
I’m not particularly dying to see what comes of the Zoey story, but if it brings us more episodes at the level of “Oh Honey,” I won’t particularly mind it, either.