How I Met Your Mother spins back to familiar territory in "Double Date," with Ted in another one of his futile attempts to find love while Barney is still his old Playboy self. After the fifth season opener's big reveal about Robin and Barney officially hooking up, I'm excited to see how the show will pull off such an odd pairing but the second episode tells me that seeing Robin and Barney in a relationship and retaining everything that we love about them individually may be harder than imagined.
When Barney tries to prove that you can have girlfriend and a fully functioning male genitalia at the same time, he tricks Marshall into going to a strip club where they find a stripper who looks exactly like Lily. We also find out that this is the third time the gang has laid their eyes on one of their doppelgangers, after seeing Mustache Marshall and Lesbian Robin previously.
The most interesting part, though, is learning how Marshall kills off Lily in his fantasy by giving her a rare fatal hiccup disease before she gives him her explicit blessing to move on with a busty deliver girl and "plow her like a cornfield" so as not to feel guilty for cheating on her with another woman. Of course, having discovered this, Barney takes it upon himself to be the official wingman of Marshall's mind.
While Barney stayed true to his form, I couldn't say the same for Robin. She's supposed to be this cool somewhat manly character that shouldn't care less if her man had a little fun in a strip joint but all we get is an insecure Robin, who, all of a sudden, wants to have a serious talk with Barney because she doesn't approve of what he's doing --- quite ironic especially after going through drastic measures to avoid defining their relationship in the fifth season premiere. I don't know about you but I didn't like the jealous Robin one bit.
Meanwhile, Ted takes the spotlight by going out with Jen, a girl he met on a blind date that turned sour seven years prior. A bad shellfish joke and a couple of minutes later, they realize that they've been on the exact blind date before so they retrace their steps to evaluate what happened to learn from their mistakes. It turns out that both Ted and Jen have their share of quirky mishaps so, in the end, they decide to just part ways because they'd rather be with someone who doesn't just tolerate their annoying habits but find them amusing.
"Double Date" was a decent episode but it was kind of a letdown compared to
How I Met Your Mother's fifth season premiere. Still, I'm optimistic that the show will be able to pick up and recover in the near future, beginning with this week's episode, "Robin 101."
-Kris De Leon, BuddyTV Staff Columnist(Image courtesy of CBS)