HIMYM 7.08

You'd rather watch this slutty pumpkin, right?

I'm pretty sure this week's How I Met Your Mother episode, with the return of the Slutty Pumpkin, perfectly explains the decline of the show: the lead can't carry the show, despite the best efforts of his supporting quartet. Our main storyline has Ted reunited with the Slutty Pumpkin, A.K.A. Katie Holmes. The two of them find themselves trying to make their long-awaited reunion work to no avail. Eventually, Pumpkin is forced to admit that she doesn't think it'll work, mainly because Ted is a fun-vampire. It's amazing how little I care about how Ted meets his kids' mother. Whatever quantity that is only diminishes when they bring back Hippie Younger Ted, and it asymptotically approaches zero each time he uses the word 'boink'. As JFK said, "Just get it over with."*



*Quote based on hearsay.


The B- and C-plots were of course better that Ted's, with Barney finding out about his heritage and Lilly being gifted her grandparents' house. Through some investigation by the career-driven Robin (putting those journalism skills to work!), we learn that Barney is a quarter Canadian. Robin tries to use this information to blackmail him into dressing as a Mountie for Halloween, but Barney chooses to be awesome rather than come to grips with reality. Besides Barney's Real American moment, Lilly's baby hormones suddenly have her wanting to move to the suburbs. Of coure, hormones = women are crazy = she doesn't know what she wants. Thanks 14th century psychology. Still, Alyson Hannigan's silliness is her best quality, and when you combine that with Jason Segel's similar talents, we all swoon.

So here's our major problem: Ted isn't worth watching**, everyone else is. Since this show is focused on an eventual end (provided they actually intend to get there), it hurts that we're waiting for Josh Radnor to get to that end instead of Segel or NPH. The plot isn't going anywhere, and the sad part is that the show can't make any changes to the current "stall and enjoy our ratings" approach it's been taking. Robin still needs to find someone, sure, but it seems Barney, Lilly, and Marshall are all headed in predictable directions. This brings us back to Ted, and, well, I don't care about him anymore. HIMYM may have held on a season too long.

**It doesn't help when the main love interests are completely uninteresting, I guess the casting squad was emotionally crippled after Stella left them at the altar.

Some other stuff:

-Was Kal Penn was on the show only to plug the new Harold and Kumar, or am I crazy? Not that those options are mutually exclusive.

-The Katie Holmes cameo: it must have been extremely easy to play that role. I mean, SHE'S MARRIED TO TOM CRUISE, so this was just Katie recreating her life at home. Even the lines they wrote for her seemed genuine: "We are terrible together," "I've been trying but it just won't work." Poor Katie Holmes.

-I get that television is to some degree a form of wish fulfillment, but it's weird that they don't even try to establish a rapport between Ted and his ladies anymore. They're always more attractive than he is, his characteristically lame pickup attempts aren't even endearing anymore, and.. fine you get it, I don't like him.

-Canada gimmicks always work for HIMYM, and it was nice to see Robin get the upper hand in the "who can dig the most dirt" battle. Miss Smulders is often quite, uh, smoldering, but she actually has some comedic timing now. I'm a big fan of the chemistry that everyone besides Mosby seems to have.

-NPH as a mountie was not funny. NPH as a topless American hero was not funny. Nuanced Barney is the best Barney.

Quick "I kind of watched 2 Broke Girls" postscript: Kat Denning has her show creator's talent for shouting lines. What the hell happened to you? They did pick well with the old black man over Ranjit as "non-white who drops culturally appropriate one-liners." CBS cares... about catering to white people.