Hey guys, How I Met Your Mother is back! In the words of a character from another beloved sitcom about single life in New York, “Could I be any more excited?!” How have I known how to live my life as a twenty-something in New York without this show? How can I have witty comebacks against my friends without Barney to rip off lines from? Well now all my worries are over! And I think this inaugural, St. Patrick's Day-themed episode can be summed up with five objects and/or concepts. No, just go with me here.
1. A green suit. Barney, though never one to be sentimental about holidays, of course wants to take advantage of the one holiday where people drink to excess-- well, where girls drink to excess at least. Lily, Marshall and Ted rightly make fun of him for wearing a suit that Eddie Murphy would have considered garish in 1993-- is he Gumby? An NBA player sidelined by an injury? The Riddler? What he really is is a guy who is convinced, for whatever reason, that the world is ending that night. “Bropocalypse Now,” he tells Ted. “Bromageddon.” He asks Ted if he wants to spend his last night on earth with Marshall and Lily, and of course, the answer is no. Ted is off to da club.
2. A slanted floor. In the meantime, Marshall and Lily are finally ready to start moving into their apartment in Dowisetrepla (in case you've forgotten over the long hiatus, that's the lovely neighborhood DownWindfromtheSewageTreatmentPlant). Robin helps them move, and while Lily is excitedly checking to see what the previous neighbors left for them, she and Marshall make a horrible discovery-- the floors in their new, super-nice apartment are crooked. Like you can't set a water bottle on its side without it rolling toward the door. Now, as a New York City resident, I have to say-- you are not going to find an apartment in this city without crooked floors. Still, Marshall knows it will break Lily's heart, so he and Robin make up a story about seeing a ghost-- a Confederate general who died in the army hospital “that was once on this very site!” Marshall eventually fesses up that it's actually the floors, and Robin, correctly, wonders why crooked floors are a bigger deal than a racist ghost. Clearly this is a woman who has never put down a down payment on an apartment!
3. A skateboard. But Robin is a woman with a solution, however childish it may be. Picking up the skateboard that Lily discovered in the apartment, Robin invents “apartment roller luge,” which involves wearing a salad spinner on your head and rolling that skateboard right out of the apartment. It looks mad fun, and entertains them before they realize they will have to move in with Ted again before the apartment gets fixed. Hmmm, conveniently allowing Lily and Marshall to shack up with Ted a few more episodes to keep the funny coming? I'd accuse them of it, but I feel like that would spoil the fun.
4. Ted's cell phone. At the club, Ted and Barney continue doing bad things to people-- ditching two girls in order to get in, mooching off another guy's bar tab, making out with a married woman-- with zero consequences. This leads them to decide that the universe is telling them there are no consequences, so do whatever you want! Ted proceeds to make out with married woman Ashlee (played by Vanessa Minillo, who is famous for something or another), which actually works out OK for him. What doesn't actually work out is when the guy whose tab he's been mooching off of finds Ted and punches him. Nursing his black eye the next morning and recounting the story to Marshall, Marshall chastises Ted for all the usual Marshall reasons-- “You made out with a married woman! You're turning into Barney!”-- before pulling out the ultimate trump card. Turns out Ted's phone, in his pocket, had been calling Marshall all night. We see all the night's events from Marshall's point of view via the cell phone, and it ain't pretty; instead of being the suave, Barney-esque guy he thought he was, Ted was being, well, the Barney-esque tool we should have seen him for. And ladies and gentlemen, this is how both Ted and I are reminded that the guy is almost 30, and these fun, debaucherous times might be replaced by board game night in Marshall and Lily's slanted apartment sometime soon.
5. The yellow umbrella. Remember the yellow umbrella from the beginning of this season? It's been suggested over and over that the umbrella belongs to Ted's future wife, and in this episode before Ted gets to the club, we see the yellow umbrella going inside. Ted tells his kids, “Funny story... your mother was there.” But do we meet the mother? Of course not, because I would obviously be too excited to write this recap if that had happened. Instead, Ted treks back to the club the next day to look for his cell phone; while he doesn't find that, he picks up a certain yellow umbrella to protect himself from the sudden downpour. And he tells the kids in voiceover, “See, I didn't know it yet, but my luck was about to change."
And our luck, fellow viewers, is about to change too, though who knows if its for better or for worse. As you probably know, next week Britney Spears will be guest-starring! But, don't worry, it's a one-episode thing, and we can be pretty sure she won't be playing the mother. Will Britney be any good, or will she simply distract from the awesomeness that is the other characters? Honestly, I'm too excited that I have something to watch on Mondays to even care.
