Legen...wait for it...darily Bad Idea
I love How I Met Your Mother. I rarely miss a new episode when it airs on Monday nights, and it’s one of my favorite series of all time. But, this week’s episode was bad. Very very bad. So bad, in fact, I almost didn’t want to review it! The 150th episode of the series, and yet it felt very far from a milestone. The 100th had glitz, glamor, a big clue of the Mother, and a musical storyline. What did this one have? An end of an era that’s so numbing to the senses, the pathetic attempt to mask the character’s own feelings of sadness are unfunny, hard to watch, and just simply one of the worst episodes of the season. Let’s see the good, the bad, and the really ugly…
THE GOOD: Marshall and Lily’s New House Adventure – Where the title is derived from this week happens to be Lily and Marshall’s moving day. The couple official moved to Long Island, to Lily’s grandparents house that is now there’s. Their plot dealt with having to deal with Lily’s father Mickey and the matter of kicking him out, as he’s overstaying his welcome. In a fit, the fuse box goes out, which gives Mickey the hilarious upperhand, as he knows the house like the back of his hand, thus providing a bond to form between the three, very reluctantly I may add. The odd adventure definitely brought a good amount of laughs, and definitely outshined the NYC outings of the night. But, to see the three in an incredibly funny situation that delivered plenty of comedy in the suburbs was truly refreshing.
Chris Elliott – The reason why the above storyline worked so damn well boiled down to one person: Chris Elliott as Mickey. Elliott’s character is usually one of the hardest to connect with, as it’s almost as if we hit the reset button every new episode we see him. Here, we see a good amount of heart enfused into the episode, and I loved that part. It sucks that it didn’t exactly continue the emotion we saw from last time when Mickey showed up on Lily’s doorstep, but there were still plenty of father/daughter moments to fall in love with. It seems that Elliott will be sticking around for awhile, so perhaps he’ll have time to grow on us.
Drunk Ted – Though I didn’t love most of the city plot, Drunk Ted gave the storyline a great amount of much needed laughs. I think that hardest I laughed of the entire night is when Ted, drunk, naive, and winning during poker, started singing “We Builty Chip City” to mock the Russian thugs around him. Any moment where he was naive afterwards was a true laugh, and Josh Radnor easily nailed that side of the character.
THE BAD: The entire “Barney Rules the Gang” Storyline – Somehow, Barney becomes the new leader of the gang after self appointing himself, and it’s almost as if Ted and Robin have no tounges. How many times have they put him in his place? I mean, really. Everyone was mute for the entire episode, basically thanks to the recurring “just say yes and go with it” gag. It was like, “Hey Stripper Lily! Let’s set what crazy shenanigans we could get into next!” Every next step became more and more discomforting, and it just wasn’t funny at all.
THE UGLY: Recurring Gags Not Working After One Hit - I laughed very much at the “How I Met Your Barney” opening, because it was unexpected, funny, different, and was a good one-time joke. When they ended up repeating that later on, and made us sit through the entire theme song all over again, it felt misplaced, unfunny, and just unnecessary. Robin and Kevin’s “SOOOOOOOO” recurring gag got old by the time they hit the strip club, and continued from there at least two or three more times. Despite Kal Penn’s alright performance as Kevin, which again paled in comparison to how he usually comes forth as the character, the gag was just awful.
Neglecting to Diagnose A Crisis - The most idiotic move of the night is that a trained f–king therapist in the form of Kevin can’t even acknowledge that the three people he’s hanging out with are going through an identity crisis without Lily and Marshall. It’s obvious all three are hurting, and instead of tackling this situation head on, diagnosing the problem, and taking the story in a potentially different way, his response is more or less, “Just f–k it, you guys!” It’s disgusting how he never said a word to a problem that was clear to even the audience.
FINAL VERDICT: Very lackluster, easily forgettable, my least favorite episode of the season, and one that was depressing enough to not even provide much of a comic relief. Lily and Marshall’s storyline gets points, as did Drunk Ted, Chris Elliott, and the depth of the writing in terms of the overarching element, but other than that, let’s just say I can’t wait for the next episode to wipe this one away from my thoughts.
2 out of 5
