2x07 Swarley

6.5/10. It's funny, rewatching the show, I remembered Marshall and Lily breaking up, and I remembered the S2 finale, but I didn't really remember how they got back together. In retrospect, it might be because it's not the show's finest hour. Something so important in the scheme of the series gets basically tacked on to a half-baked story of Marshall worrying his new date is kind of crazy, with her outlandish stories ending up being true tales of Lily's weirdly stalking her. The concept behind it--that Marshall and Lily are both so nuts that they fit together perfectly--is a solid one, but the crazy eyes/jealousy stuff with Lily went a little too broad and a little too far on what the show would later dub the Dobbler-Dahmer scale. The conversation before they reconcile is still kind of sweet, and Segel and Hannigan have great, believable chemistry that makes it work, but the story to get them there is half-baked and not done especially well.

But then, you have an all-time great B-story of Barney being called Swarley, that is another instance of the show perfectly capturing the way that friends needle each other, and then taking it to delightfully cartoony extremes. NPH is at his finest pretending to be cool with it and then betraying his palpable frustration. It boosts the overall rating for the episode by sheer force of will, but it's a small-if-significant bright spot in an episode whose balance didn't work nearly as well as it needed to given the story it was telling.