HIMYM 8x13: Band or DJ?

Against all odds and logic, Barney and Robin are engaged. This presents two problems.

Problem the first: Robin is apparently some kind of old-fashioned lady, and she needs Barney to ask her father's permission to marry her. Robin's father started off as a distant millionaire who wished Robin had been a boy, but now he's a scary lunatic played by Ray Wise.

Except he met a younger woman, discovered Facebook, and now he's "fun"

Nevertheless, Barney still has trouble getting his permission. Partly because he's blond, and also because Mr. Scherbatsky's still a deranged lunatic. He tells Barney a story about how he murdered a family of bears as tribute for Robin's grandfather before he proposed to her mom, and he gives Barney a gun and tries to get him to kill a rabbit in his apartment.

Instead of shooting him, Barney names him and gives him a back story.

Robin friends her dad on Facebook and discovers that he's married. So, when she goes to see how Barney's doing, she gets rightfully ticked off and tells him that she and Barney are already engaged, and since she wasn't invited to his wedding, he's not invited to hers.

Because he's awesome, Barney manages to convince her dad to apologize. He goes a bit overboard and says he'll get a divorce and drive his ex-wife to suicide. Her counter offer is for a bit of normalcy and for him to smile and dance with her at her wedding. He agrees, but only if his wife gets to sing "Cheeseburger in Paradise."

"Not too particular, not too precise."

Problem the second: Lily and Ted are having an argument about who should help plan the wedding and whether Barney and Robin should have a band or a DJ. Hence the title. Ted thinks they should get a DJ and he does what he can to ensure that's what happens, even going so far as to pre-book the band Lily wants to get so they're unavailable on the day of the wedding.

When Lily confronts him about it, he goes off on a tangent about how bands are unreliable and they cheat and they've slept with half of New York, and Robin really be married to the idea of having one. It's not really about bands. Lily takes him up to the roof to sort him out. Finding out that Robin and Barney got engaged hurt him more than all the beatings and nut-punchings he's taken in his life, but he's not willing to say anything other than that he's happy for them, because saying how he really felt would make him a bad person. Of course, he's already Grand High Supreme Douche of the Land of Douchetania, so I don't see what it's such a big deal. At any rate, Lily spills her guts about how sometimes she wishes she weren't a mother so Ted won't feel so terrible about saying Robin should be with him instead of Barney. But, he realizes he has to give her up and let her get a band for her wedding.

Unfortunately, the band winds up cancelling a week before the big event. However, as luck should have it, Ted bumps into TV's Rachel Bilson and her wife on the subway.

Apparently, Hayden Christensen has changed up his look a bit.

As it turns out, her ex-roommate is the bass player in the best wedding band in the city. Also, she's the mother. How conveeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeenient.

In a side plot, Marvin is constipated. Until he sprays crap all over Marshall.

Confetti is to Poop as Sandwich is to Marijuana. It's true, I took the SATs.

What I Liked
-"I'm a cut you, bitch!" Lily's at her best when she's angry at one of the guys.
-Mr. Scherbatsky kinda wanted to kill the bear. If you're going to be crazy, you should definitely go all the way.
-Fluffernutter peed all over Barney's pants. It's terrible when things like that happen. It's because animals can sense fear and they want to seem sympathetic.

What I Hated
-Cobie Smulders was sick. That's fine. Actresses get sick, and real life people get sick too, so it makes sense for Robin to be sick at some point. The problem is that at some point, Cobie got better, so Robin goes from sounding like her larynx is made of sandpaper to a perfectly normal voice in the middle of a scene. She could've acted sick for that one little bit.
-Robin wants Barney to ask for her father's permission to marry her. It's not 1820 anymore, that's silly.
-Ray Wise. I liked Robin's old father better.
-They made a joke about The Departed. That movie came out in 2006. Sure, it was good, but nobody should be making jokes about it in 2013.
-They make jokes about their parents being on Facebook. It's like the whole episode went through some kind of time warp.

Final Thoughts
So, at last we have a date for when Ted meets the mother: May 25, 2013. That's a Saturday, so the actual episode will probably air on May 20. Unless they screw around and have Barney and Robin delay their wedding, which honestly wouldn't surprise me. Or, it could turn into some non-linear storytelling thing where Future Ted decides he glossed over a few points and goes back to tell his kids more about that Thanksgiving he spent at a strip club. Because that's an appropriate story to tell your children.

In any case, I'm glad it's going to happen this season. Especially since the show was renewed, and I'm not sure I can watch another year of this crap. Robin's so estranged from her father that she didn't know he was married or that he lived in New York, yet it's important for Barney to get his permission to marry her. Barney and Robin haven't dated in three years and yet their engagement is only going to last five months. Incidentally, that five month engagement is actually a month less than their original relationship lasted. This time will be different, though. Not for any logical reasons, but because the plot demands it.

Lily's whole "Being a mom is rough" thing kinda came out of nowhere. However, it also went nowhere, so I guess that's okay.

Overall, this was yet another in this season's long line of "Man, what?" episodes. Barney must go to extremes to get Robin's father's permission to marry her. Man, what?