Spoilers for last night's "How I Met Your Mother" coming up just as soon as I tell my sister Lisa that I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda... After last night's mega-epic "Chuck" finale, I was reluctant to watch any other television, worrying that everything else would suffer badly in comparison. Eventually, I put on "HIMYM," and while it didn't feature anything to remotely compare to Sam Kinison and an Indian lesbian performing "Mr. Roboto," it was still a very funny episode -- albeit one that, as my friend Rich points out, didn't quite know how to end.
As I've mentioned, the season finale was shot in advance so Alyson Hannigan could be in it before she and Cobie Smulders got too big, and so the show feels like it's in treading-water mode between now and when the finale airs. I'm not expecting anything particularly earth-shaking on any story arc fronts, just good jokes, which "The Three Days Rule" provided, early and often.
Barney's explanation of how Jesus invented the Three Days Rule (which CBS has kindly posted in its entirety to YouTube) was as hilarious as it was blasphemous, elevated, as always, by the boyish enthusiasm of Neil Patrick Harris, and then by the look of delight on Cobie Smulders' face as Barney kept going, and going, and going...
When we found out that Barney and Marshall were texting Ted as Holli-with-an-i, I started to worry that this would be a repeat of "Old King Clancy" where those two came up with some lamely convoluted scheme to trick Ted for his own good. But the combination of good intentions and malicious glee (Barney: "Or..."), coupled with the arrival of the always-delightful Kevin Michael Richardson(*) as poetry-quoting Barry White soundalike Stan, made it a vast improvement on the earlier take on this kind of story. Barney and Marshall's continuing subconscious desire to have text-sex with Ted was especially well-played by NPH and Jason Segel.
(*) Quoting Fienberg's Twitter feed: "I'd welcome Kevin Michael Richardson as a "How I Met Your Mother" cast regular. And not just for a little diversity."
Again, I don't think the ending was that great, and I also needed Robin to point out that Ted's "naked lady noise" sounds exactly like Butt-Head's laugh, but beyond that, good stuff.
What did everybody else think?
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