Yeah, we still don’t know anything about the Mother, but who cares? Barney stole the show and I didn’t realize how much I had missed him. And the best news? Being with Robin has not castrated him in the least; we’re not suffering from Dave and Maddie syndrome and we still get the Barneyisms.
This week’s Barneyism was perhaps one of the greatest Barneyisms in the history of How I Met Your Mother. If you were watching movies in the ’80s, then you hold Gremlins in a place nearer and dearer to your heart than it deserves to be, but you adore it nevertheless. You even have a stuffed gremlin. You know you do. That’s why Barney’s list of “Rules for Girls” was precious to you:
1. Never get them wet — don’t let her take a shower at your place
2. Keep them away from sunlight — never see them during the day
3. Never feed them after midnght — she doesn’t sleep over and you don’t have breakfast with her — ever
As if that wasn’t enough Barney, we got Barney as the evil genie in Ted’s class, pointing at the blonde’s breasts. Just what Ted needed to put him at ease on his first day teaching economics … ahem, architecture.
In other stuff tonight, let’s just say any reference to Indiana Jones and / or Batman is OK in my book, so these gems were completely embraced:
What did you think? Did the How I Met Your Mother live up to your expectations? I’m so excited for this season now!
Clacked by Debbie McDuffee
on Sep 21, 2009 @ 21:37 EST5EDT
It sucked. My first laugh was at minute 21, when Ted said “if I had called on her, she would have said that …” until he ran to his real class. Then it went back to sucking. If only Marshall had accidentally whipped Lily in the neck and snapped her head clean off…. I mean that in the nicest possible way! :-)
Was this premiere stronger or weaker than the previous season, as a whole? I’m undecided as to whether to continue with this show, as I’m one of those viewers who is interested in the mother mystery and feels jerked around for too long now.
In my opinion, considerably weaker. This is the best comedy on TV until Thursdays at 9:00, and not just worth hanging in there for, but rather a must.
*POST AUTHOR*
Where I liked last season’s premiere, this year I liked that the gang was the gang and we didn’t have any manufactured Stella crap to deal with. The Barney and Robin stuff was dealt with so perfectly and Barneyisms were ripe, so I really enjoyed it.
Ryan: I agree w/ Deb here. Loved the premiere. But I do look at it from a different perspective than you … To me, the ‘Mother’ story is secondary.
It’s not that I watched the show for the Mother story alone. In the beginning, I loved everything about the show, and the threaded mystery was simply a bonus. The concept was fresh, the humor was sharp, the characters seemed like real, likable people, and we seemed to make concrete progress on the mystery every few episodes. If the show had lasted only two or three seasons, I would have been very happy with the pacing. But due to its success, that storyline stagnated and became more and more drawn out and prone to meaningless detours. Just as on Friends, the humor became more absurd and exaggerated, and I felt the protagonists became self-absorbed caricatures of their former selves to whom I could no longer relate (or in the case of Ted and Lily, stand).
Also, I have very different tastes than Deb and Keith. The episodes that they reviewed positively last season couldn’t draw a laugh from me, save for Barney. The few they felt were poor were the only ones I really enjoyed.
But NPH alone can’t save the entire show, so the Mother story keeps me hanging by a thread that ordinarily would have been severed a year ago. And yes, in the end, I would feel cheated if the mother was just an extra or celebrity cameo in the final scene. I do want to learn about her personality and why she’s a good match for Ted. That should be the final, epic storyline for the last few episodes, Barney and Robin having tied the knot ages previous.
Stuffed mogwai maybe, but gremlin?
I don’t really get people watching for the Mother story. This isn’t Lost, it’s not built around who the Mother is since it’s not that important. It’s just framing device to tell stories. We’ll find out who the Mother is in the last episode probably which is fine by me. Do we really want to watch Ted date the Mother? Not really.