Mickey turns out to be a surprisingly capable caregiver.
Marshall and Lily’s baby-sitter woes were the subject of “Nannies,” this week’s episode of How I Met Your Mother. With Lily’s impending return to work hanging over their heads, the Ericksons need to find a capable but also fiscally viable baby-sitter to take care of baby Marvin. The couple is willing to interview hundreds of unqualified candidates rather than fall back on Lily’s unreliable father, Mickey, who has shown up unannounced after blowing up his garage and burning down his house with foreign firecrackers he had intended to give as Christmas gifts.
Although it was somewhat refreshing to allow some of the characters to take the front seat over Ted and have an episode not entirely devoted to finding love, the plot was not particularly exciting, even when complicated by Barney’s quest to take advantage of all the local available nannies through the website Marshall and Lily were using called heynannynanny.com. (The website actually works and links to past websites that the show has made, another example of the attention to weird or extraneous detail that drew me to the show in the first place.)
At the same time, focusing so entirely on Marshall and Lily loses the idea of the show – which is that Ted is telling his kids about how he met their mother. While by this point in the show we care enough about Marshall and Lily to be interested in how this part of their lives turns out, this plotline does not really do anything to further Ted’s story. Not to be unnecessarily critical, but someone as self-centered as Ted would probably not spend so much time and attention talking about a series of events that he had no part in. It would have been nice to at least incorporate him into that storyline in some way.
It was great to see Barney return to his old girl-stealing ways. Though I loved Quinn and Barney together, part of what made Barney so interesting was his casual detachment and crafty schemes to pick up women. With the creation of “Bangtoberfest,” Barney as we once knew him was back in almost full force. Though it is clear that this scheme is part of his way of coping with his break-up (If Barney’s parting words in the bar are any indication: “stop me don’t stop me I’m fine being single’s great!”) and though he’s struggling with some of his old-hat lines, Barney has not entirely lost his game, as evidenced by the way he snags a worthy babysitter from Marshall and Lily by declaring himself a billionaire single dad who killed his last wife accidentally by multiple orgasm (no comment on that).
Lily realizes somewhat belatedly that she’s not actually ready to let go of Marvin, a sentiment that would have been better expressed in her actions throughout the entire episode rather than at the last minute, when the Erickson’s first choice of nanny, charmingly British but deliriously expensive nanny Mrs. Buckminster, shows up to take care of the baby at Barney’s expense.
It would have been better developed, in my opinion, if we found out that the Ericksons had had such a hard time finding nannies because Lily was being too picky. Maybe the candidates were actually worthy and their horrifyingly under-qualified persona were simply a figment of Lily’s imagination running wild to prevent the moment when she’d have to leave Marvin with a stranger. HIMYM has effectively employed this type of plot device before, as in season 3, episode 8, when Ted introduces his new girlfriend Cathy to his friends without realizing how incredibly chatty she is. Without any sort of build-up to Lily’s moment of reluctance to hand over her child, it came across more as an attempt to just throw in any and every problem new parents face rather than a way to continue the characterization that they writers have been building of Lily as a concerned and mildly clingy new mom.
The plot is resolved in a touching moment when Mickey proves himself a worthy grandfather and babysitter for baby Marvin, along the way revealing to Lily that he wasn’t always a bad father to her. In fact, in Lily’s earliest years, he was incredibly devoted. One of the ending scenes, showing photos of Mickey being heavily involved in Marvin’s life as Marvin progresses through childhood, was heartfelt and sentimental in a way that really redeemed Mickey in my eyes.
As for Barney? He is attacked by a horde of the nannies he scammed, inspiring him to write off his old ways with the help of good old Mrs. Buckminster – and resulting in a truly uncomfortable romantic escapade between the two of them that I really do not want to think about ever again.
Meanwhile, Robin and Ted are locked in a competition over who has the better relationship, comparing everything from long-term vacation plans, to who’s met the parents, to how long it’s been since their significant others got keys to the apartment. But in their competition they soon point out that they both are finding flaws with their partners. For masculine and tough Robin, it’s Nick’s extreme sensitivity over even the most trivial matters, like the Giants’ bad football play (“Robin, I don’t need you to fix this, I just need to be heard!”). For Ted, it’s Victoria’s uber-sloppiness. And though they both try to rationalize their concerns, Ted foreshadows that their relationships will not make it out of the month.
There were certainly very funny moments in the episode. I think Marshall was particularly amusing, especially with his childhood regression seemingly spurred by the appearance of motherly Mrs. Buckminster (at the end of her interview, Marshall proclaims, “I wanna bury my head in the safety of your bosom!”). And Barney’s attempt to return to his old self was not something to be missed. However, this episode lacked the overall cohesion that makes the show work. How I Met Your Mother is not about the individual lives of the five characters but instead about the way they all come together in Ted’s story, and that did not shine through in this episode.
diversions@umdbk.com
