Episode 3 - Third Wheel
12 January 2009
Review
Synopsis: Ted runs into a girl he once slept with. She runs into an old sorority friend and he thinks maybe he has the chance for a threesome. Barney, Lily and Marshall are up in the apartment trying to help him out. Robin doesn’t shave her legs so that she won’t be tempted to sleep with a guy before the third date. But on a date with a handsome surgeon she changes her mind.
The Good: Sexual concept episodes are a reliable formula for entertaining television and this is no exception. Ted’s attempts to bed the girls make you want to find out what will happen. Similarly Robin’s plot sets up her need to shave well and you are interested to see if she can.
There are some good jokes, mostly supplied by Barney. His imagined suggestions for how to seduce the girls are typically inventive and he amuses in the flashbacks to his threesome failure. Ted has a couple of nice jokes about trying to get his hair to look perfect.
The Bad: Robin’s plot is rich with comic potential but it is all squandered. It’s plausible that she would not shave her legs and then change her mind. But the story is given very little time to develop. We get no chance to see her being seduced by the surgeon so we jump straight in to unconvincing flirting. Then she falls slowly backwards in the bathroom which is meant to knock her out. Surely we could have seen several good visual jokes with her trying desperately to shave?
Then she wanders out and faints in the restaurant. That is a pretty serious thing to happen. It is treated like this is a cartoon and people faint in public all the time.
Meanwhile Ted’s threesome plot has, ironically, three things wrong with it. First is the acting. I don’t know if the writing, directing or the actors themselves are to blame but for whatever reason Ted and his girls are all unconvincing throughout. The girls are way too in to Ted and eager and he is so obvious with his eagerness. It’s not the worst acting you will see by any means but it’s just too keen to suck you in and make you believe this could happen.
What adds to this feeling is the second problem which is how the story is told. Rather than let us watch Ted trying to seduce both girls, the narrative is constantly broken up and interrupted. Ted rushes in and out of his bedroom for conversations which subtract from the intrigue of the plot. We get a pointless inclusion of Lily’s boot shopping thrown in and more time wasting with Marshall asking her what would happen if she was dead. Then we get Barney, funny though he is, talking about the championship belt and the fear that comes with trying to win it. None of it really adds much to the story and Ted is gone for such long stretches that the girls might well have thought he was weird.
The final problem is that there is no conclusion. It ends the episode with you thinking that the writers couldn’t make their minds up. Perhaps that’s because Ted is meant to be telling that story to his children! There is no reason he would be, so they chicken out and don’t have an ending. When a TV show ends you shouldn’t be thinking about the writers. Their job is to make you think about the characters and invest emotionally in the show. They really fail here.
Comic Highlight: Back in the bar Barney asks Ted what happened and he won’t say. It drives Barney crazy and he bounces back and forth between saying Ted didn’t do it and asking if he did. Great comic delivery.
How I rate your episode: An episode which would have worked a lot better if there was more Robin and less Marshall and Lily. If we had seen Ted and Robin’s nights panning out opposite each other it would have given both stories a more convincing feel. But all the jumping around detracts from the stories and the acting is not good. It’s a real waste of two good plot ideas.
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