Episode 15 - The Stinsons
14 September 2009
Review
Synopsis: The gang follow Barney to a house outside of Manhattan because he was behaving strangely. They discover that he has hired two actors to play his wife and son to fool his mother. Barney’s cover is blown when Ted gets on too well with his “wife.” Robin bonds with Grant, the boy playing Barney’s son and Lily tells Marshall she hates his mother. In the end Barney’s mother is relieved to know the truth and tells Barney to go for it if he falls for someone real.
The Good: If you don’t think at all about this episode, then it is pretty enjoyable. Barney is such a consistently maverick character that for a second you question whether maybe, just maybe he does have a secret family. That is a credit to how he has been written over the years. His support for the bad guys in movies is one of those nice, unexpected but just plausible enough jokes.
The episode flows nicely toward Barney’s mother discovering the truth about him and seeing that happen is a decent enough hook to keep viewers intrigued. The consistent part of Barney’s back-story is his mother’s shady past which has been mentioned before (220 for example). The extreme nature of her sexual exploration does make it easier to believe that she could be so forgiving of the motive behind his lies.
His motive is the other key to making this ridiculous scenario play out. The producers are preparing the ground pretty thoroughly for Barney and Robin to become a couple. Here Barney only lied to his mother to make her happy in her dying moments. Now even though she has recovered he doesn’t want to disappoint her with his own life. It all makes Barney that bit more likeable and of course his mother’s parting words nudge him another step closer to telling Robin how he feels.
Speaking of Robin, it’s nice to hear that the job she got (so conveniently in the previous episode) is for the very early morning shift of a television station. That at least offers an explanation of why she wasn’t even interviewed before being offered the job.
The Bad: On the flip side this episode is filled with the usual terrible attempts at humour and painfully forced interactions.
Sit coms ask us to accept silly scenarios all the time, so I don’t have a problem with Barney’s ridiculous deceit. But the fact that it has been going on for seven years seems excessive. It’s such a long time that it forces you to consider awkward questions about how he has kept the lie going for so long. The least believable part is of course that the others have only just noticed. They comment that he has been acting weird lately, but apparently for the past six years it slipped their attentions. Seeing Barney and Margaret looking exactly the same in their flashback to seven years ago is irritating too.
Elsewhere the show continues to delight in the inappropriate and implausible. I don’t have a problem with Barney’s mother being both polite and sweet and then reminiscing about her days of sexual promiscuity. In fact she acts the balance pretty well. But what is implausible is her referring to herself as a “Dirty whore” which just isn’t an expression people use except for comic effect in bad television shows. It’s just too extreme a term to be believable. Just as a mother telling her son that she was once “passed around like a bong” is deeply implausible and inappropriate for the sake of a laugh.
Grant plays his role pretty well too which helps make his interactions with Robin less obnoxious. But just like a dirty talking Grandma we have to have a child acting like an adult for comic effect. It’s ok as a story but it’s such obvious and unfunny humour.
Which brings me to Ted getting into his acting and coming up with a ludicrous back-story to explain why he was kissing Margaret. It just felt so needlessly silly and unbelievable. Worse was that Margaret, supposedly a good actress, liked his stupid attempt. I wonder if the writers thought this would be one of those moments where a character mocks another by taking their lies and making them even more ridiculous (see Friends 212 or Frasier 401) but it didn’t really go there.
Marshall and Lily’s argument was such an afterthought I don’t really know why it was included.
Comic Highlight: Barney is in the middle of his scripted affectionate interplay with Margaret at the dinner table.
M: “I really thought Barney had forgotten our anniversary. So I storm out into the back yard and there’s smoke coming out of my ears.”
B: “Nostrils flaring, her nostrils flare when she gets mad, I love it. Oh! There they are right now! They’re here right now!”
M: “You better stop mister.”
B: “Ok ok sorry sorry blue bird, continue (then aside to Ted) this is what you‘re actually like in a relationship!”
How I rate your episode: For How I Met Your Mother this is pretty adequate. Barney is the only character who is furnished with jokes that sound believable and he carries the story very nicely. Amongst the implausible nonsense this is a pleasant tale and is leading somewhere intriguing. Seeing Barney in a relationship will be really strange.
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