This episode was made for blogging. Per Ted’s V-O explanation, this story was told room by room, rather than chronologically, which was an interesting gimmick, but I thought I’d take a different tack and give you the recap by story instead. As I mentioned in my Sound-Off, this episode didn’t move us anywhere, except for maybe closer to Ted and Robin’s 5-year reassessment and Marshall and Lily’s return to Manhattan.
The Scene: Marshall and Lily’s Long Island house for their housewarming party.
The Background: Lily is majorly stressed out, Marshall has been working his ass off, Ted and Robin are pissed at each other, Mickey is keeping 10,000 bees in the basement (which are supposed to keep the mice at bay) and Barney is being Barney. Ted and Robin bring a kugel (which they pronounce koogel (a la Seinfeld, see the title of this post) and set it for 5 minutes (in my experience, kugel is a dense food which requires more than 5 minutes to heat through), which sets the scene for the five minutes per room.
Marshall and Lily (and Barney): Marshall is working constantly and Lily is getting nervous about having the baby and being a mom without Marshall being around. Mr. Cootes (the awesome Martin Short) attends the party and almost winds up in a fight with Ted because Mr. Cootes thinks (because Barney told him) that Ted has eaten all of the vegan spring rolls. Ted is ready to fight because Robin told him that he’s a wimp. As they are about to get into fisticuffs, Lily directs Mr. Cootes to the hummus and veggies in the dining room, where Barney (in CIA super agent mode) is chatting up the “hot divorcee”, one of Marshall and Lily’s neighbors and after he agrees to meet her in the guest bedroom upstairs, he learns from Lily (in the kitchen, after watching mice run at the wheel of gouda, that she ordered off the internet, that fall on the floor) that the last time she slept with someone who didn’t call her afterwards, she cut off his mini-me with a cheese knife, leading to Barney running out of the kitchen, drinking everyone’s wine and exclaiming that he loves his penis. Realizing how upset Lily is, Marshall goes to talk to Mr. Cootes in the kitchen and asks for at least that night off. When he gets turned down, because Mother Nature is a demanding mistress, Marshall quits. Feeling the need to do something else, Mr. Cootes dons Mickey’s bee keeping suit, which has been doused with kerosene (although Barney quips that that’s not true). But as he opens the door to the basement, the kugel buzzer goes off and when he reaches in to take out the kugel, he bursts into flames, runs through the house, douses the flames in the snow (there has been no snow in NY in the winter of 2011-12) outside, and declares that he feels alive and now knows that he needs to do something else other than work and then asks Marshall if he’ll come back to work.
Remember the door to the basement, well, when Marshall goes to the door to go back in the house, the house is filled with bees. Marshall closes the door. But not everyone ran out of the house after Mr. Cootes. Barney, despite the cheese knife warnings, is upstairs with the hot divorcee. When she starts to talk about their future, he starts to sneak away. When faced with the choice of staying in the room, or running naked through a house of bees, Barney chooses bees.
Sorry for the blah post. It was a blah episode. Here’s hoping tonight’s fresh epi is a good one!
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