Quick thoughts on tonight's "How I Met Your Mother" coming up just as soon as I figure out why any non-TV critic would bother buying a DVD/VCR combo... How I feel about "The Rough Patch" long-term is going to depend on whether Barney and Robin's break-up takes or not.
It's not that I'm a 'shipper whose enjoyment of the show is going to rest on whether or not a specific couple stays together. It's that I feel like there's a lot of comic mileage to be traveled in a Stinson/Scherbatzky relationship, and the show hasn't covered very much of it yet - and at times has had to bend either Robin or Barney into unrecognizable characters in order to make the stories work. Now, I'm not in the writers room, and maybe writing these two as a couple is a lot harder than I'd think, but if it's just a handful of episodes and out, that seems like a waste.
But in the short-term, "The Rough Patch" was a pretty funny episode of the show. It took advantage of the occasional device of showing us the present from the skewed perspective of Future Ted (hence Barney in a fat suit and Robin looking like a hag). It had Marshall and Lily trying to steal from the porn collection. It had some good callbacks to past episodes (not just Alan Thicke having been in "Sandcastles in the Sand," but the use of "Murder Train" over the quick glimpse of Barney and Robin strangling each other). It had that great overlapping argument scene in the surveillance station wagon between Ted, Marshall, Lily, Thicke, the robot and Badger from "Breaking Bad" as the pizza delivery guy. And it gave us the promise of one day showing us a glimpse of the Sparkles/Thicke failed Canadian variety show.
Not a great episode, and, again, one that will be annoying if it brings us a permanent end to this duo, but I laughed a bunch. And some nights, that's all that matters.
What did everybody else think?
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