How I Met Your Mother: Unpause (9x15)

Plot happened! Yay! This week, the story actually advanced, and I enjoyed it quite a lot.

So. The title of the episode refers to Marshall and Lily's fight. Throughout the course of the episode, Marshall continually dreads the moment when they will unpause their fight, so he keeps making up excuses to put it off. First, he keeps the gang up really, really late. Then, he takes a long time having sex with Lily, and this causes her to fall asleep. However, when he accidentally wakes her up, they start their fight. Lily says that Marshall was really selfish in accepting the job without talking to her, and Marshall brings up the fact that Lily once broke up with him and moved away. He then says some pretty awful things, asking Lily if she only came back to him because her career didn't take off in San Francisco. He asks her if their marriage and their kid are just consolation prizes. Upset by this, Lily leaves, calling some as yet unknown person to pick her up and take her away.

Wow. Talk about stuff happening. It's sort of silly to think that Marshall and Lily won't make it up and be okay, but they've actually been drawing out this conflict between them for much of the season so far, and it just came to a pretty nasty climax. Has Marshall been carrying around these resentments all these years? And does he have a point? Who did Lily call at the end of the episode to come pick her up? Does anyone else think it could be The Mother? All of these questions, all of this drama... wow. I really enjoyed this plot thread a lot, and I'm honestly not sure how they're going to untangle this mess.

The other major plot of the night had its moments, but it wasn't nearly as good as Lily and Marshall's stuff. Barney reaches a level of drunkenness that Robin and Ted call the "truth serum" stage, and he becomes incapable of telling a lie. So, of course they can't give up a good opportunity like that, so Robin and Ted start asking him all sorts of questions. For example: what did Barney do to Ted's mom? Answer: he kissed her, but never got further. He reveals how much he spends on suits, and that Robin's family is secretly very wealthy. The biggest reveal is what he does for a living: "P.L.E.A.S.E. - Provide Legal Exculpation and Sign Everything." Basically, Barney is the company's eternal scapegoat. However, Barney reveals that he has a plan to take down the company as revenge for what the boss did to him many years ago: see, Barney's boss is the very same man who stole his girlfriend back in his hippie days. One more truth is told: Barney assures Robin that he has a ring "bearer," not a "bear," but a scene in which we see a man leading a chained creature into a cage leaves that uncertain. Ted asks Barney how he really feels about getting married, and Barney says he loves Robin and wants to make her happy.

So, this plot had a few laughs. I'm still amused by the whole bear/bearer thing, and I love the reveal that Robin's family is loaded. However, there were other things that I didn't like so much. For one, the whole story about Barney's job. I don't know exactly what it is that I don't like about this, but... I think the joke about Barney's job was always more funny to me when it was unanswered. Now that we know what he does, it takes all the fun out of the mystery. It wrapped the joke up a bit too neatly, if you know what I mean. Also, Neil Patrick Harris used this sort of droning, deadened voice when Barney was in the "truth serum" phase of drunkenness, and I just found it sort of annoying and distracting.

One last thing to mention - at the beginning and the end of the episode, we see flash-forwards of Ted and The Mother, who is about to give birth. Future Ted, in narrating to his children, remarks that nothing good is supposed to happen after 2 am, but that the birth of their son, Luke, was the exception to that rule. We also learn that Ted's daughter's name is Penny. It's funny, because it had never occurred to me that we didn't already know their names. However, I liked this reveal. It's always good to see The Mother, although I do wish that they'd get a move on and put her in more of the episodes.

So there you have it! Even if I wasn't totally enamored of Barney's plot this week, Lily and Marshall's stuff definitely made up for it.

7.5/10