A review of last night’s “How I Met Your Mother” coming up just as soon as I discover our mutual hatred of the Boston Bruins…
The enthusiasm I felt after the premiere is dwindling pretty quickly. This is now two episodes in a row without the Mother and two episodes set almost entirely in the claustrophobic environs of the wedding weekend. And where last week’s episode at least offered us a good Ted/Lily moment at the end that reminded me why I used to really like that friendship, “The Broken Code” was mostly filled with the regulars(*) acting in ways that reminded me of how much I’d grown to dislike them.
(*) Do we even count Jason Segel as a regular right now? I don’t know if Marshall’s road trip wa designed just to allow Segel to shoot a movie, or if the writers thought it would be genuinely funnier if he didn’t get to Farhampton for a while, but occasionally appeared via FaceTime, but it’s really strange and distracting.
So we got more of Patrice making Robin seem like the worst human on the planet, and then Lily one-upping her by chasing away the hockey fan – and Robin (and the show) weirdly treating this as another reason to love Lily. We got more of the Ted/Robin/Barney triangle that we know has to end before he meets the Mother in the present, but which makes me grind my teeth every time it’s brought up again, and we got more Bro Code silliness, which was amusing once upon a time but has long since outlived its usefulness. (Though if the goal was just to pimp the book, which is still in print, well done, folks.)
I got to the end of the episode and found myself wondering whose fictional company I enjoyed being in, and the answers this week were Ranjit and Billy Zabka. And that’s a problem.
I remain hopeful that as we get deeper into the season, we’ll spend more time away from the Inn, and/or with the Mother, because if the bulk of the year is going to be like “The Broken Code,” this really will be the longest (and most difficult) wedding weekend ever.
What did everybody else think?