HIMYM 8x17: The Ashtray

Ted gets a message from The Captain, which leads to he, Robin, and Lily telling the story of what happened the last time they met him, like a crappy sitcom version of Rashomon.

The Douchebag's Story
Ted recalls that at the time of the meeting, he had recently taken back up with Robin's co-host on "Come On, Get Up New York!", Becky.

If this scene isn't a gif already, I'll be very surprised.

Lily had invited Ted and Robin to an art gallery opening, and who should they run into, but The Captain himself. Ted recalls that The Captain was incredibly rude to them in the gallery, but invited them all up to his apartment to show off a new painting he had just acquired. While they're up there, The Captain calls a picture of something in a frame on his desk his "one true love", and then pulls a harpoon gun on Ted when he wants to clear the air about Zoey. Ted talks him down, and in truth, The Captain is in love with someone else, so all is forgiven. But, Ted wonders who that someone else might be, so when everyone else is out of the room, he snatches the frame from the desk to see who's in the picture: It's a magazine cover, featuring Becky!

The girl really loves boats.

Ted thinks that The Captain wants to kill him for stealing yet another woman from him. However, when he calls Ted again, all he wants is Robin's phone number. The guys debate giving it to him for a moment, but then decide that she won't mind, and it might help Marshall get a ride on his boat. Robin minds.

The Anchor's Story
Things were much the way Ted described them, except Ted had smoked a fat sandwich with Becky before the art gallery opening and was making an ass of himself. Rather than being angry and rude to Ted, The Captain was merely trying to help him finish his sentences as the sandwich smoke had turned his brain to pudding. In actuality, The Captain was hitting on Robin the whole time they were together. The harpoon gun was really the remote control for his DVR, and his "one true love" wasn't Becky... It was Robin!

Hey, Sailor!

Robin told him that since he was on the rebound, he should take some time to get his head together and give her a call in 18 months. Which would be right about now. However, when she calls him back, she finds that she had their names confused, and he really wanted to talk to Lily. The gang debates whether or not they should give him her number, but Marshall thinks she won't mind, and it might get him four million dollars in a kind of Indecent Proposal thing. She minds.

The Wife's Story
The story went more or less the way Robin told it, except she was drunk off her ass, and she was hitting on The Captain, not the other way around. Also, his "one true love" was the yacht on the cover of the magazine, not Becky, who was actually in a small, inset photo. And, while he was showing Lily his new painting, he insulted her by saying she was just a kindergarten teacher and no one cares what she thinks about art. So, later, she stole an expensive crystal ashtray while Robin was passed out on top of him.

You do something bad, she takes away one of your toys.

Climax
Marshall and Lily fight about returning the ashtray. He hopes The Captain will take it back without pressing charges, but she's really upset and doesn't want to do it. What he said to her really cut deeply: She is just a kindergarten teacher, and even though she has a degree in art history, she never got around to doing anything with it, and now it's probably too late. Marshall tries to reassure her that she still has time and her best days are ahead of her, but she doesn't believe him.

When she returns the ashtray the next day, she finds out that it wasn't what The Captain wanted to talk to her about because he didn't even realize it was gone. Instead, he takes her to his room to show her something. After she, Robin, and Ted left that night, he slipped back down to the art gallery to buy a painting she said she liked. In the year and a half since then, the artist has become a major phenom in the art world, and no one saw it coming, except Lily. The Captain is selling the painting for $4 million, and he wants to get back into the art game, so he offers her a job as his new art consultant. She accepts.

Also, there was a thing about how Barney wanted to be a part of the wacky story because that's his thing, and if he doesn't make their lives crazy, then he doesn't know who he is. It wasn't important, though.

Although, it did give us this image of Barney playing the guitar with some bikini girls.

What I Liked
-Single-barrelled, no-scope harpoon gun. I'm pretty sure that's a kill type in one of the Modern Warfare games.
-Marshall's happy that Boats Boats Boats girl and The Captain got together, but he thinks Ted sucks for stealing her from him. Yeah, Ted does suck.
-In Barney's mind, "Nothing happened" means hand stuff. If I were the kind of guy who messed around on my lady friends, I would totally use that in the future. If I were that kind of guy. IF.

What I Hated
-Lily is upset that she's just a kindergarten teacher. Back in the season two episode 'Aldrin Justice' (which was the episode where Lily stole something from Ted's boss to punish him for being mean), she realized that being a teacher was her true calling. It was a whole big thing.
-The Royal Archduke of Grand Fenwick. I thought and hoped we had seen the last of The Playbook.

I was wrong.

Final Thoughts
This was a really lazy episode. How I Met Your Mother likes to do episodes where they retell part of the story from a different perspective. While that sort of thing *can* be done well, I don't think HIMYM has ever done it. Not that the execution would matter anyway, because it plain doesn't make sense narratively. I feel like I'm repeating myself, but it comes up a lot: The conceit of the show is that Future Ted is telling his kids the story of how he met their mother, hence the name of the show. Now, it's been established that Ted is the worst, most meandering storyteller in the world, but even he shouldn't be telling the story of how he and two of his friends told three different versions of the story of how they went to an art show one time and ran into The Captain. It's a structural nightmare.

As for the aforementioned laziness, multiple perspectives can be good, but the variations in this episode were pretty minor and were based on drug and alcohol jokes, which can be funny, but are often incredibly lazy. In this case, weed made Ted slow and turned Robin into the female equivalent of a horndog. That seems pretty lazy to me.

Which is weird, because they often work hard in a few other areas. They brought back The Captain, and even got Laura Bell Bundy for like 30 seconds of screen time, despite the fact that neither of them has been on the show in two years. And they at least partially stuck to the established continuity vis-a-vis Lily taking things away when people misbehave, which hasn't come up in more than six years. Maybe all of that other stuff burns them out and they don't have the energy for writing. I can understand that.

Ultimately, this episode wasn't terribly funny, but nor was it offensively awful, and it had some good bits.