How I Met Your Mother: The Rehearsal Dinner (9x12)

Okay, How I Met Your Mother. I think we need to have a talk. Stop. Doing. Fake-out. Plots. Robin and Barney's relationship has already had a fake-out proposal, a fake-out bachelor party, and now a fake-out rehearsal dinner? Really? Tacking on a "surprise!" to the end of your episodes does not automatically make them good.

Argh. As you might be able to tell, the premise of this episode pissed me off. That being said, I thought the execution was actually rather good. In know, confusing, right? I'm having a hard time deciding what to rate this episode. As a self-contained plot, it had a lot of fun surprises, good jokes, and a few genuinely sweet moments. But having watched the rest of this show, I was just annoyed at the recycling of this plot line. Let's take a look...

The episode is told in flashback (a flashback within the larger flashback of the show, I suppose). Barney is handcuffed in a laser tag security office, with an angry Robin nearby lamenting that their rehearsal dinner was supposed to have started ten minutes ago. We then go back and see how the two of them got there. Barney narrates the story to an increasingly irate Robin and a disgruntled security guard.

Flash back to a few months before, where Barney gets the idea to have a laser tag rehearsal dinner. Robin vetoes this, citing the fact that she made sacrifices as well - she initially wanted to have the wedding in Canada, so the fact that it's in New York is her sacrifice. Barney agrees to have a normal rehearsal dinner... but clearly he's not done with his awesome idea. Barney tells the rest of the group that he's convinced Robin is indeed throwing him a surprise laser tag rehearsal dinner.

All the way up to the night of, Barney remains convinced. He even goes out to get some ice, and ends up at the laser tag place, where he expects everyone to jump out and surprise him. But alas... that is not the case! Robin really didn't plan any surprise. Barney did! Turns out, the laser tag arena is actually an ice rink, and Barney set up a whole surprise Canada-themed rehearsal dinner for Robin.

Over the course of the episode, Ted says he'll dress up as Liberace and play piano at the rehearsal dinner. He never learns how to play though, so he can't perform. However, in the very last moments of the episode, we see Ted sliding by on the ice with a piano, which he is playing skillfully. There's also a minor subplot with Lily feeling annoyed because no one trusts her with secrets, but in the end Ted tells her about Barney's surprise just before it happens, which makes her happy.

Okay, The Good: Lily's stuff was hilarious, and the Canada jokes in the ice rink were top notch. I loved the moment when Barney casually breaks out of the handcuffs. That had me chuckling.

The So-So: Ted's stuff was sorta cute, but I always get nervous when the protagonist's plot feels completely secondary and does nothing to compel his character. At this point, it seems like they're just making up random crap for Ted to do while we wait for The Mother to arrive. It would be more interesting if they had kept up the resentment angle between Barney and Ted, thus adding more texture to Ted's character in these final episodes.

The Bad: The setup. I get it, Barney pulls elaborate pranks and surprises. We've seen it a thousand times. If anything, these just keep making me nervous about Barney and Robin's marriage. If Robin gets this upset whenever Barney does something like this, and Barney always pulls it off with some extravagant surprise, how are the two of them going to handle fights after their wedding? Ugh, I think I'm just dreading whatever contrived drama they have for us down the road.

So, yeah. A lot of the jokes were funny, but the setup tanked for me on this one.

 5/10