HIMYM 8x09: Lobster Crawl

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Barney spills ketchup on his tie, leading him to his latest billion-dollar idea: Bro Bibs. At the same time, Robin starts fawning over him like a drunk cheerleader, and Lily wonders what's up. After a quick bar-side confab, she figures out that Robin just wants what she can't have, like the time she found out she was allergic to lobster and then ate a bunch of lobster.

Lobster: So good your face will swell up with joy.

Eventually, Robin has a revelation: The only way to get Barney off her mind is to bang him one last time. So, she runs a bunch of scams reminiscent of Barney's plays from the Season 5 episode 'The Playbook' including 'The Damsel in Distress', 'The Center of Attention', and my personal favourite: 'The "Is That Angelina Jolie?!"'. None of them work, though, and she's finally forced to bring in her friend the weather girl to try to inflame Barney's passions with a little girl-on-girl action.

Just dancing, no making out.

It works, but Barney sticks to his guns and ignores Robin in favour of Brandi. He doesn't sleep with her, though. Instead, he runs into Robin's nemesis, Patrice, while Brandi's unlocking the TV studio so they can do it in front of the weather map. Patrice thinks he looks sad and gives him a cookie. They talk all night, and Barney realizes he has no idea what he wants out of life. Also, he asks her on a date, which makes absolutely no sense, and really puts a damper on Robin's last-ditch effort to seduce him.

She's cute when she's angry... and wearing lingerie.

Meanwhile, Mickey is sick, so Ted takes over as Marvin's nanny. On his first day on the job, the baby crawls for the very first time. After that, Lily becomes somewhat obsessed with seeing her son crawl, and Ted becomes somewhat obsessed with Marvin, to the point where he makes a scrapbook and takes him to see Santa for the first time... without his parents. Eventually, Lily and Marshall figure out that Ted's just bored because the GNB building is finished and the semester's over so he doesn't have to teach anymore. So, they reschedule a meeting with a headhunter that he had cancelled, and everyone is happy. Except me, because this plot was boring.

What I Liked
-Robin's Angelina Jolie outfit. Usually Colbie Smulders doesn't really do it for me, but that was a pretty hot look.

I think it's the hair.

What I Hated
-Barney tries to resuscitate his tie. It's just a little bit too much, as if this episode were written by someone who'd heard of the show, but never actually watched it.
-I know it's a bit cliche to say that The Simpsons did something first, but they pretty much plagiarized the end of this segment. Having a conflict with your internal monologue is one thing, but having your brain say "That's it, I'm outta here" and slam a door is a straight-up rip-off.
-They showed the gang back in their college days again. The first time they showed Lily as a goth chick, she was reasonably cute, but that was two kids ago. Nowadays she just looks like an angry biker chick.

Alyson still looks good, but she's 38. Don't do this to her.

-Ted's entire plot. He somehow made Lily and Marshall's baby's first crawl all about himself. That's some Grade-A douchery.

Final Thoughts
I was wrong, and I'm willing to admit that. I thought the short Robin-Barney relationship snippets that they've been tacking onto the end of episodes were bad. Now I see that it was clearly the right way to go, because when they give them ten minutes spread throughout an episode, it's so much worse.

Before I get to that, a few words about Ted's plot. It was bad, and as I said, it showed off what a huge douche Ted is... again. However, at least it made some reference to his jobs at GNB and Columbia. They don't really show a lot of Ted's work life these days. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the last time was when Ted took his class on a field trip to see the construction of the GNB tower early last season. For all the hullabaloo about tearing down the Arcadian in season six, they sure didn't put a lot of emphasis on the aftermath. It was a year of nothing and then 'Oh, hey, the building's done.' Weird.

Now, on to the Barney-Robin disaster. To start with, showing a sort of female version of The Playbook had real potential, but the execution was terrible. Barney's plays were funny or at least innovative, while Robin's seemed to be mainly focused on wearing tiny skirts and batting her eyes. In reality, that would probably work pretty well, but it wasn't terribly interesting to watch, and it made Robin seem kinda stupid. It's not strictly necessary, but there can be more to seduction than just taking your clothes off and hopping on the dude's junk. In fact, it was so obvious that it makes Barney seem kinda stupid, too. The only way she could've been clearer about her intentions was if she'd sat in his lap, and he didn't say anything about it to her at all.

Hopefully, Barney was just playing dumb and the date with Patrice is really a way to get Robin to leave him alone because he's actually trying to get over her. Except we know that he's not over her and that they get back together, so I don't have any idea what they're doing. Barney's trying to figure out what he wants, but he seemed pretty clear that he wasn't going to go after Robin anymore since she kept turning him down, and now he's gone out of his way to avoid sleeping with her. Robin shoved Barney away when he kissed her and only wants to bang him one last time to get it out of her system. That's not a recipe for a healthy relationship, yet somehow the two of them wind up together. It's like a bad soap opera.

Had there been more laughs, this episode might've been redeemed, but it only made it to eight on the "Next week, I swear... maybe" Laugh-O-Meter. It was stupid, derivative, and worst of all, unfunny.