After last week’s serious, emotionally-driven premiere, I was hoping that How I Met Your Mother would take a bit of a lighter route in episode 2, leaning more towards the humorous side than the serious, plot-developing side, and it somewhat did. “The Pre-Nup” was nowhere near as heavy as last week’s episode, and there is no major reveal in terms of Ted’s love life, but we still do get another major plot development.
We knew a ton would happen this season in everyone’s relationships, but I had no idea that the writers were going to dive into the first breakup so soon.
This episode begins in this show’s traditional fashion, letting you know that something would be happening at the end, and then tracing the story that led to the already revealed result.
Ted skips through the summer, telling us that everyone was happy and thus there weren’t any good stories to tell. I like that the writers threw that in. It again brings to consciousness that we’re getting the story from Ted’s perspective, and just like stories anyone tells, there’ll be long periods of time with nothing notable happening. Great reminder by the writers.
It was nice to have Arthur back too. Bob Odenkirk is one of my favorite guest stars, having shown great range and depth while playing Artillery Arthur, and although his appearances have been limited, he’s always provided some solid laughs. Arthur was a perfect vessel to instigate all the various relationship problems. Plus, his hitting on Lily, and again forgetting who Marshall is, was hilarious.
In terms of the relationship problems, I’ll tackle them from the least to the most significant.
Robin and Nick are faced with the oh-so weird problem of Robin getting turned on by watching herself do the news. This felt a bit out of the blue, considering we’ve seen Robin do the news many times, and she’s never winked at her future self, but I’ll let that slide here and focus on my bigger issue which is that it was clearly a problem just thrown in so all four couples had something to fight about.
We learned last episode that Robin is absolutely enamored with Nick and his phenomenal abs, so I’m confused as to why she needed to see herself doing the news to get turned on. However, I did like Quinn and Lily’s complete horror at Robin’s confessions, contrasted with Nick’s immediate dismissal of the same thing. They also didn’t spend too much time dwelling on this couple, so I don’t have a huge issue with the problems here.
I originally thought Nick and Robin would break-up well before Barney and Quinn, but now that they’re together for at least another episode, I’d like to see more Nick. In his extremely brief screen-time so far, he’s been subtly very funny. Hopefully we get more of that next week.
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