HIMYM 8x24: Something New

Marshall has apparently neglected to tell his mother that he, Lily, and Marvin are moving to Rome for a year. So, when Judy calls and Lily accidentally spills the beans, Marshall and Marvin fly out to Minnesota for a week to calm her down.

With her two favourite guys away, Lily has time to get blotto down at the bar with Ted. However, Ted's heading up to Westchester to put the finishing touches on that house he's been remodelling for three years. Lily's really excited to see the place, but when they get there, she quickly finds out that Ted's selling it.

Using the cheapest sign he could find.

When she asks him why he's giving the house up so soon after finishing it, Ted tells her that he's giving up on New York and moving to Chicago. Marshall and Lily are going to Rome, Robin and Barney are getting married, and after eight years of looking, he hasn't been able to find a woman he can love in New York; he's leaving right after the wedding. Lily wonders why he's in such a rush, and quickly realizes that it's because he thinks the love of his life is about to marry his best friend. Ted tells the story of the end of last week's episode and how he spent hours digging up Central Park, looking for the locket, just for the chance to see Robin smile. That's kind of a douchey way to feel about your best friend's fiancee. Unfortunately, Lily knows exactly where the locket is.

Four seasons ago when Ted was engaged to Stella, Robin got super drunk and dragged Lily out to Central Park in the middle of the night to dig up the locket... and rebury the box it was in, apparently. Afterwards, they went back to the apartment where Robin tried to get Lily to help her conceal the locket in her butt. Instead, they put it in a race car pencil box(which, incidentally is visible behind the son in 2030).

Then Robin asked her to help hide the pencil box in her butt.

After that, Lily thinks she took the pencil box to Japan. However, Ted knows that it's actually been on his desk for the past five years. Lily warns him to be careful, but he's elated and thinks that the locket will be the best wedding present ever.

In Minnesota, Judy is jokingly threatening to either stop them from going to Rome altogether or to tag along. That's not the biggest threat to their trip, though. Marshall gets a call from the New York Judiciary Committee, and they want him to be a judge.

Meanwhile, Robin and Barney go to dinner, where they meet a pretentious, bitchy couple while they're waiting at the bar.

Hi!

After having an annoying disagreement with the couple over the sight and smell of a couple cigars they plan to smoke after dinner, Barney and Robin decide that they've just met their arch-nemeses, and must destroy them. This becomes doubly urgent when the couple steals their favourite table. Some astute observation shows that the guy's not quite as into the relationship as the girl, so Robin sticks her engagement ring in some Champagne and has it delivered to them, mirroring what happened to her and Ted back in season two. Only this time the woman's way into, and they man tries to back out.

And their enemies are vanquished.

In the end, things actually work out for the annoying couple and they realize they really do want to get married.

A few days later it's the Friday before the wedding. Robin and Barney hop in Ranjeev's limo, Ted and Lily drive a wood-panelled station wagon for some reason, Marshall and the baby grab a flight back from Minnesota, a woman carrying a guitar and a yellow umbrella takes the train to Farhampton.

But the producers dick us around and don't show her face.

Oh wait, never mind.

Finally. Meet Cristin Milioti, the girl with the yellow umbrella, and presumably the mother.

What I Liked
-Barney and Robin saw two bums making love over a sandwich. Why pay for theatre tickets when you can watch that kind of show for free?
-Marshall's older brother Marcus has returned from Carnalism II to make puns about hitting his baby brother in the balls.

"Do you like crushed nuts?"

"Do you want me to grab your bag?"

-Drunk Robin keeps asking Lily to help her put things in her butt. Sometimes the simplest jokes are the best jokes.
-They actually showed the mother's face. Now, I'm going to assume that the girl with the umbrella is actually the mother. The credits listed her as 'the girl with the yellow umbrella' but I don't think the producers would be dumb enough to pull a fake out like that. It's not like they need the money, but their careers would take a pretty serious hit after the massive public backlash that would ensue. So, credit goes to them for not making us wait until next season.

What I Hated
-The annoying couple. Congratulations, HIMYM writers, you managed to create someone even worse than Ted. Casey Wilson and Keegan-Michael Key were listed as 'Special Guest Stars', which is weird because their resumes aren't that impressive.

Final Thoughts
Despite a complete lack of carpentry skills and the fact that he hasn't actually spoken about it in three years, Ted somehow managed to fix up the house. Then he immediately decided to put it on the market. Why did they even bother with that? We know that he can't sell the place because it's the house where Future Ted is telling the story of how he met his kids' mother. Heck, they mentioned that in this very episode. It's just another example of the writers trying to build drama, but failing miserably because we already know what happens.

Speaking of which, apparently the faux drama at the end of last week's episode ended five seconds later when Ted buggered off.

I'm not going to watch this show next season. We know who the mother is, and that's all I needed. It's not nearly good enough anymore to justify watching it. The plots are illogical, the lead character is a douche, and at least a few episodes next season will be spent just on Barney and Robin's wedding, which we first found out about in the first episode of season seven. Two years is a long-ass time to tease something that, quite frankly, isn't that interesting or important in the context of the show. Of course, the producers of HIMYM are masters at drawing things out, having taken eight seasons and 184 episodes to show the mother, who Ted hasn't even actually met yet.

There's one thing that would've made me keep watching, and quite frankly, I would've followed the producers to the ends of the Earth if it were true. If they had actually cast Cristin Milioti several seasons ago and used her for all the brief glimpses of the mother we've seen over the years, I would sing this show's praises until the day I died. They didn't, though. I don't even think they used the same actress in the season premiere.

As for this episode specifically, it wasn't insultingly awful, but it was a bit disconnected and Robin and Barney's plot was both aggravating and completely superfluous. It also had one really stupid and annoying plot point regarding the locket. So, Robin was so drunk that she forgot she dug it up; I can believe that. What I cannot believe is that there was a strange locket in a box on Ted's desk, and he didn't ask Robin or Lily about it for five years. It's not like it was hidden in a back storage room somewhere or in the bottom of a file cabinet, it was on his desk, holding pencils that he presumably uses every day for work. But apparently he didn't open it for half a decade because when Robin told him about the locket in the park, he didn't immediately say "Oh, it's in a box on my desk. It has been for years." The whole thing makes absolutely no sense and is just more "My, aren't we clever" masturbatory writing. No, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, you're not all that clever. It would be clever if the locket actually had been in that box for the previous five years, but until a week ago, the locket didn't even exist. On the show, Robin got drunk five years ago and put the locket in a box on Ted's desk. In reality, the writers came up with that idea like two months ago. It's not clever, it's just dumb. Which is an apt description of the show as a whole these days.