HIMYM 8x16: Bad Crazy

Two plots this week. They're mostly unrelated, and they seem to be more or less split up by gender, so I shall name them accordingly.

Dudes' Plot
Ted's still dating Jeanette; the very last girl he dated before he finally met the mother. Which is not to say that he won't have several one-night stands between the end of that relationship and the Scherbatsky-Stinson wedding, but he won't take them out for brunch afterwards. Anyway, Jeanette is crazy. And not in the way that all women are crazy, but in the way that crazy women are crazy. In the future, she's going to do something that winds up with a good portion of Ted's possessions exploding.

But, we're not there yet.

So far, all she's really done is break his TV with a beer bottle, but the guys still think Ted needs to dump her before she gets all stabby. He thinks they just want him to be single again so they can all hang out at his apartment when they want to play video games. However, after she freaks out at the ref while they're at a basketball game, he decides to end things.

The next day, the guys are at his apartment playing video games, and Ted has to step out for a moment. He warns them not to let Jeanette in if she comes by, but she does, and they do. When Ted returns, she's barricaded herself in his room and refuses to leave. The guys think that she'll have to come out eventually to eat/drink/pee, but Ted has a disaster kit in his room and she can survive in there for months. They call the cops to remove her, however, it turns out that she's a police lieutenant, and she uses her radio to say she'll check things out herself. With no way to get her out, Ted makes a decision:

He's going in!

The guys wonder aloud why he has to go to such extreme measures and she won't just come out, and Ted is forced to explain that they didn't actually, technically break up. Instead, she freaked out when he said they needed to talk, and then things got weird and they got kicked out of the Barclays Center. Anyway, he steels his courage, slaps on Barney's Boba Fett helmet, and charges into his room.

Five minutes later, he's falling down the stars. The guys stepped out to get sandwiches, so they didn't hear him screaming for help, but the girls did, so now they're there, too. The combined power of all his friends gets the real story out of him. Ted's been kinda sending Jeanette some mixed signals. Whenever the time came to end things, he looked into her eyes and wound up making out with her. Rather than advising him to break up with her, Lily says that the two of them are both crazy, and they should be crazy together for a while.

He's in full agreement.

Chicks' Plot
The ladies have significantly less to do on their own, and it's pretty dull and repetitive. Basically, Robin is afraid of babies and has never held Marvin, so when Lily accidentally leaves his pacifier on the bus and has to chase after it, Robin's left to watch over him. In a series of flashforwards, over the course of several years, Robin relates the story of how a kindly old woman held Marvin to calm him down... and then his stroller rolled into the street... and then Robin was freaked out, so they went to a strip club so she could sit down... and then Robin went to the bathroom and left Marvin alone with a woman who she just met... and then it turns out the kindly old woman wasn't really a kindly old woman, but actually Senator Mike Tyson.

It's a cool story, but I think a lot of people can say they've been to a strip club with Mike Tyson.

Lily's actually all right with that, and more upset that it took Robin so long to tell her the whole story.

Back in 2013, Lily hands Marvin to Robin when she's not looking, and that's how she winds up holding him for the first time. Afterwards, she finds that she enjoys holding him so much that she sits in a rocking chair at Marshall and Lily's place until 3am and doesn't want to let him go... until he poops.

What I Liked
-Future Ted had a brief moment of self-awareness at the beginning when he realized that the story he'd been telling his kids was mainly about all the chicks he banged when he was a single guy in New York.
-They remembered baby Marvin exists and sort of managed to work him into the show in a legitimate way, rather than just using him as a prop. Robin's fear of babies is well-established, but we know that in the future she's a big part of Ted's kid's lives, so this served as a good jumping off point in her transition from fear to understanding.

What I Hated
-When they found out she was a cop, Ted and Marshall did the 'Departed' thing again. Seriously, that movie came out in 2006. It's like making jokes about Bill Clinton.
-Robin waited 17 years to tell the story of how Mike Tyson held Marvin. That's not something you keep to yourself. He may have punched a lot of guys in the face, but he seems to be pretty good with children.

Final Thoughts
They were pretty good about not showing Robin's left hand during the "flashforwards" but, I managed to grab a single clear frame of it.

Note the lack of a ring.

In 2023, Robin is not wearing a wedding ring, which means either her relationship with Barney is over, or the producers forgot to get her to wear a ring. It's probably the latter, but watching Fringe this season has made me more observant of this sort of thing, and it's quite possible that it was done intentionally on this show, just as it was on that one.

As for the flashforwards themselves, I don't think they were a good idea or a good narrative device. As I've mentioned many times in the past, the show is framed as Future Ted telling a story to his children. But, rather than telling them the real story, he told them the fake story that Robin told Lily and also the story of how Robin spent 17 years gradually doling out the truth, none of which has anything to do with how he met their mother. In fact the final flashforward takes place in 2030, which means it happened at most a few months before Future Ted sat his kids down and started telling them about all the chicks he used to bang.

It may come up later, but there was a 30-second segment where Marshall and Barney brought all their fancy single guy stuff over to Ted's apartment, and then they never mentioned it again. That was weird.

Overall, this was a pretty dull episode. The ladies did the same thing over and over and over, and even the guys had a repetitive flashback or two. That makes for easy writing and filming, but it's not terribly interesting to watch.