“How I Met Your Mother” — dowisetrepla
Nick Andopolis?
The moment I had been waiting for all season happened about two-thirds of the way through Monday’s episode as Ted, Barney and Robin sat on the kitchen floor debating who would get whom in a possible divorce of Marshall and Lily. Robin seemed to think she would end up with Lily and Ted and Barney would get Marshall. This lead to the following exchange:
TED: We used to be together and still hang out. It’s not weird.
ROBIN: It’s a little weird.
TED: Yeah, it is a little weird.
I loved that, and as far as I’m concerned the sentiment really corrected a lot of the problems I had been having with this season. More after the jump…
Hey! Let’s play the continuity nitpick game! In this edition a completely meaningless line proves to rewrite a bit of the show’s history. Normally I’m not one to dwell on such flubs, but How I Met Your Mother has always been a show that has taken its own history very seriously. While Lily and Marshall were looking at the new apartment in dowisetrepla Marshall said they lived on the Upper West Side to prove that they were, in fact, hip New Yorkers, but for those of us paying attention the gang’s apartment has always been in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Right? Eighth Avenue and Eighth Street. I know this because my friend lives basically right there and we all found it kind of cool that these characters were suppose to live right down the block.
How does something like this slip through the cracks? Is it too “in joke”? Did someone, somewhere feel that people wouldn’t know what Park Slope is and thus insist on changing the location to the upper west side because that’s where Seinfeld and the Friends lived and more Americans throughout the rest of the country are familiar with it and plus the ratio of people-to-strollers is more or less the same on the UWS as in Park Slope (though the lesbian/stroller ratio is considerably less)? Is that why? Or did they just screw up? So odd.
The rest of the episode was pretty solid with the exception of Barney’s storyline involving him, the empty apartment and the commitment girl. Typically anything Barney does is gold, but this week I found his actions to be wavering on the cusp of creepy — at the very least cruel. I don’t mind the character’s somewhat shady-leanings, but at least make it funny. His pursuit of that woman was frighteningly calculated and completely void of a punchline. It was also oddly paced in the episode as the story wrapped itself up by the halfway point and then kind of disappeared. Had she come back at the end and delivered some sort of comeuppance I would have been completely on board, but as it stood it was just odd, unfunny and maybe a little perverse. I read it as an idea that never made it past the first draft.
Still, Ned the detective was funny, as was Robin’s description of Mount Waddington (meters?).
Tags: CBS, How I Met Your Mother
November 7th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
Robin lives at 8th and 8th in Park Slope.
In the first season episode “Nothing Good Happens after 2AM,” Ted goes over to Robin’s to “juice as friends.” Ted’s first cab driver is drinking and driving. Ted tells the second cab driver “Park Slope, 8th and 8th” when he gets in.
November 8th, 2007 at 12:31 am
THANK YOU. I knew it involved a cab, and I was certain I wasn’t completely making this up. Just had the wrong apartment. Now I can sleep again.