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How I Met Your Mother: No Tomorrow

Posted Mar 17th 2008 10:12PM by Joel Keller
Filed under: OpEd, How I Met Your Mother, Episode Reviews, Casting

How I Met Your Mother: No Tomorrow
(S03E12) How I Met Your Mother has been making a lot of news lately, with its timeslot change, its constant bubble status, the hiring of Alicia Silverstone, the subsequent hiring of a certain young woman named Britney, and the resulting departure of Silverstone and arrival of Sarah Chalke.

But what we haven't seen were actual episodes, thanks to the writers' strike. Thankfully, the strike is over and Bays and Thomas managed to be one of the first to get new episodes on the air, just in time for St. Patrick's Day. And, while HIMYM's returned with only a slightly-above-average episode, we inched ever so closer to finding out the solution to the show's main mystery. That's the least the guys could do after three months off.

Gallery: How I Met Your Mother

Cobie SmuldersAlyson Hannigan and Cobie Smulders at the GrammysAlyson HanniganNeil Patrick Harris and Cobie Smulders as karaoke judgesJosh Radnor

You knew that St. Paddy's Day would bring out the best in ol' Barney. Green pimp suit ("Hello, NBA player rehabbing an injury," is how Ted greets him), entreaties to Ted to leave the old folks -- Marshall and Lily -- at home, and deep belly buttons meant that he was in his element. His whole "no tomorrow" thread didn't quite ring right to me, mainly because everyone knew that he wasn't serious about the end of the world. Yet, at least in the way Ted remembered the night, he managed to convince Ted to act as if there was no tomorrow. Maybe Carter and Craig realized that Wild Ted wasn't quite as wild as we thought he'd be, and were giving him this reverse karma night in order to get the wildness out of the way.

Thank God for pocket dialing. I thought that went away with the advent of clamshell-shaped phones. But I guess you can pocket dial BlackBerries and iPhones; Ted apparently never locks his keypad. Just as well; it was a convenient way for Marshall to show Ted just how silly he sounded all night. He still managed to order Dom and put it on Gredo's tab, and he still managed to convince a married Vanessa Minnillo to sleep with him, he just didn't do it as suavely as he thought.

What he did do was lose his cell phone. And then he grabbed the yellow umbrella. Yes, that yellow umbrella; the one belonging to (dum da dummmm!) the mother. More on that later.

Now we know why a) M&L spend all that money on their stinky Dowisetrepla condo and b) how they get to stay living with Ted for a while longer. It's that old sitcom saw: the crooked apartment! "It's like the last 20 minutes of Titanic in here," cracks Robin. Actually, the angle used to shoot the apartment scenes reminded me of how every villain's lair was shot during the old 1960s Batman series. Anyway, the ghost story Marshall made up about the Confederate general was funny, but the entire crooked apartment plot was a bit on the thin side (except for Robin... her flat line reading about the ghost going through her... asking "How is a racist ghost better than 'crooked'?"... Scherbatsky was a font of comedy tonight).

Other stuff:

  • The Best Barneyism: a tie between "Bropocalypse Now" and his recitation on personality types sorted by area code. "She may think she's a 212 or a 718, but she's definitely a 516." Though I think he vaguely insulted the 973 area code. Sigh. Par for the course on this show, I guess.
  • In one of the party scenes, Ted and a young woman briefly encounter each other and say "excuse me." Wonder if that's the infamous mother...?
  • It was very clever how the yellow umbrella was on line for the party, but by the time we got back from the break, the rain had stopped and we had no idea who was who. That's why some extraneous encounter at the party would make me think that's the mother. Why put it in if it didn't mean anything?
  • Having Lily keep winning at Hungry Hungry Hippos was a funny way to demonstrate the slant in the apartment.
  • So wonderful of Robin to create Apartment Roller Luge just to help Lily feel better. Such a friend. Wonder what they did after the floor was fixed.
  • Oh, and I can't wait to hear what kind of a money pit M&L have gotten themselves into.

So the guys were a little rusty, and next week we get what I'm sure will be an extremely overhyped guest spot from Brit Brit. Jeez. Hopefully, we'll get classic HIMYM back by episode 14. Maybe by then the show will actually be renewed for season four. Yeah, right.

Do you think the woman Ted ran into at the party is the mother?

Tags: alicia silverstone, AliciaSilverstone, alyson hannigan, AlysonHannigan, britney spears, BritneySpears, carter bays, CarterBays, cobie smulders, CobieSmulders, craig thomas, CraigThomas, jason segel, JasonSegel, josh radnor, JoshRadnor, neil patrick harris, NeilPatrickHarris, sarah chalke, SarahChalke, vanessa minnillo, VanessaMinnillo

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