IMDB RATING: 8.7/10
Our Rating: 7.7/10
Release Date: September 21, 2009
Season: 5 (S05E01)
We all want to know How He Met Their Mother. In fact, sometimes you just wish that that extra Barney is hitting on or has already ‘hit’ was the one. However somehow, the show always manages to suck you back in into the world of a few silly putty romantics and the emotionally scarred superbly awesome Barney. It is in taking a bunch of classic sitcom clichés and making it consistently funny where HIMYM (as it is popularly called in) succeeds.
The new season opens with the classically hilarious ‘Definitions’. Josh Radnor turns in a solid performance on his first day as an architecture professor. This of course means that Ted screws up big time. Whether it is the scene where he cannot spell ‘Professor’, the one where he is deciding what kind of Professor he wants to be (and ends up saying call me T-Dog), the one where he launches into a passionate monologue to try and instill the passion for architecture in a lecture room full of economics students, he pulls it of with élan.
The other parallel thread in the episode is Robin and Barney’s ‘relationship’. They choose to hide the fact that they are sleeping together from everybody and break Lily’s heart. However soon enough they are discovered while they start making out ‘covertly’ in the living room of Ted’s apartment. (It is a sitcom after all.)
Robin being the commitment phobic tomboy she is and Barney being, well Barney, they decide not to have the ‘talk’ and complicate things. However after Barney punches the guy Robin was ‘dating’ and under severe pressure from Momma Lily they attempt the ‘talk’. They still cannot bring themselves to do it. The episode ends on a hunky dory note with Barney and Lily deciding to lie about having the talk and telling the others that they were boyfriend and girlfriend. Of course you see their ‘true’ feelings in their eyes and all that clichéd nonsense. It is in packaging these clichés in a funny and heart warming fashion that the show again succeeds.
And by the way. The Mother was in the class. The wrong one. So we can expect to meet her soon. Nah! Like that’s ever going to happen. But the fun goes on.
