6x17 Garbage Island

Again, Kyle MacLachlan is a delight in every scene he's in, but Ted being "friends" with The Captain only to reveal that he's the one sleeping with Zoe is such a sitcom cliche. There's something interesting about the idea of looking at these events from different perspectives, and wondering if you've become "the bad guy" (which fits nicely with Marshall's story), and the whole bit about Wendy the Waitress finding her husband is a nice thematic touch that dovetails nicely with the "it's too early to decide what's good and who's bad" idea, but everything that leads up to that point is fairly weak.

The same goes for Marshall's story, where the idea that Marshall is smarting from the fact that his dad will never see him be the kind of lawyer Marshall told him he'd become, and that starting a family would mean essentially that Marshall couldn't go to the NRDC and would be trapped at GNB for the long haul is an interesting one. But the way it's manifested, with Lily's cartoonish come-ons and Marshall's environmental obsessions as a way to deflect were broad and not very effective.

Plus Barney and Nora and blah blah blah. The show's very hit-or-miss when trying to develop a more human side of Barney, and doing it through romance is not his strong suit. The whole phone smash thing and "she already met a guy" fake out is more sitcom B.S.

As I seem to say a lot with respect to this season, there's some good ideas floating around here, but the execution is definitely off. You can see the show lurching into middle age here, where it still has good intentions and solid stories, but the comedy and the characters get much broader and feel less real.