Spoilers for the "How I Met Your Mother" season premiere coming up just as soon as I experiment with my sideburns...Ahhh... "HIMYM" is back and all is right with the comedy world. Bays, Thomas and company once again prove themselves to be continuity nerds of the best kind by opening the new season by letting Barney finish the sentence he was in the middle of when last season ended, then close the episode with Barney opening up the Slap Countdown website. (Conveniently, Slap #3 should come sometime late in November sweeps, if others have done the math correctly. Me, I'm too lazy for math.)
In the meantime, they found a mechanism for introducing The Mom -- sort of -- that doesn't paint them into a corner at all. All we need to know is that The Mom carries a yellow umbrella and on occasion has reason to walk through Ted's neighborhood. Easy. Million scenarios for that, whenever they want to use one. (Then again, given the news that Danica McKellar will be coming back even though her last episode ended with that annoying Future Ted claiming he never heard from her again, maybe they're getting better at unpainting those corners.)
Speaking of the Slap Countdown, I feel as if I need to write a macro for "While this one wasn't as brilliant as 'Slap Bet,' it was still pretty damn funny," because that now tired but accurate sentiment applies. For me, the two big comic highlights came from one of the show's best humor veins: the gang's love of coming up with creative ways to mock each other. The various nicknames for Mutton-Chop Ted ("Olde-Timey Inventor") and Mustache Ted ("Persian Night Club Owner") were great, but my favorite moment of the night may have been Lily's anticipation of Ted, oblivious to his tramp stamp, saying the word "butterfly." (Alyson Hannigan can cut her hair any frumpy way she wants to if she's going to give us more line deliveries like, "He's gonna say it!")
I thought both of our Very Special Guest Stars were respectable, though Mandy Moore was funnier on "Scrubs." The writers very wisely didn't ask her or Enrique Iglesias to do too much comic heavy lifting, instead making the characters funny only through other characters' reactions to them: Barney's resentment of Amy, or Marshall's developing man-crush on Gael.
If they hadn't definitively established Ted as a non-Jew last year -- the disappointing explanation I've been given is that Ted is based on the decidedly non-Semitic Carter Bays -- I would start speculating about what Ted would have to do about the tattoo to avoid getting the Special Section treatment, but I'll be curious to see if the tat comes up again in the future. Maybe he can be on his way to get it removed when he bumps into The Mom, I don't know.
What did everybody else think?
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