The How I Met Your Mother Blog

This is a weekly column where the episodes from seasons one, two, and three will go head to head in a humor cage match. This week, the episode ten’s.

Season 1: The Pineapple Incident

After sucking down a quintet of shots at the bar, Ted blacks out. He wakes up the next morning with a sprained ankle, a burned jacket, a phone number written on his arm, a pineapple on his dresser, and an unknown woman face down in his bed. With the help of his friends, Ted attempts to piece together precisely what happened the night before.

This is in the top three best How I Met Your Mother episodes ever. This is the episode I show people if they’ve never seen the show. It was hilarious (Josh Radnor is excellent at playing drunk) and it had the awesome Danica McKellar as Trudy (who we saw again this season). The basis of the episode, that Ted over thinks and should take a night off from being so cerebral, get wasted and see what happens, was believable and executed with genius using what would become the signature flash-back style of the show. Told from the following morning Ted woke up with a girl in his bed, a pineapple in his bedroom, and a phone number on his arm. Turns out that anytime Marshall, Lily, or Barney put him to bed, Ted ended up back at the bar. From Cheap Trick Karaoke to using the women’s restroom, it was a rough night for Ted and a great episode for us.

My favorite line from this episode, if not the whole show: “How hard is it to sneak into the zoo? I need to see some penguins like right now.”

Season 2: Single Stamina

Barney’s gay black brother is in town, but he doesn’t want to tell Barney that he’s getting married because he’ll be losing his only single sidekick.

This was a fun episode. We got to see Wayne Brady catch-phrase and high-five alongside Barney. The ratio of humor/drama was balanced with Barney’s slow acceptance of marriage. I loved Marshall’s envy of girls getting to order fancy drinks and all the scenarios that Barney and James had for picking up guys and girls. It was one of the first flash-forwards also, showing Lily and Marshall married at James and his husband’s wedding a few years later. This scene, showing Ted and Robin dancing together, opened up the opportunity for the two of them to be together a long time (even though now we know that’s not true). Overall, a fun episode.

Season 3: The Yips

When Barney loses his way with women, he hopes a trip to the Victoria’s Secret Fall Fashion Show will help him regain his form.

I liked this episode. It was Barney-centric and hilarious. I agree that something about it felt a little “blah”, maybe because it didn’t really advance the overall plot so much. Read more on my thoughts from the recap earlier this week.

Advantage

The Pineapple Incident is the clear winner. It’s one of the season one episodes that still stands up. It is also the first episode, for many fans, that really sold them on the show. A rare decisive win for season one.

Scorecard

	W	L	T
Season 1:	2	5	2
Season 2:	3	3	3
Season 3:	1	6	3

Vote

The photos above are of the female guest stars. I’ll put up episode stills later tonight or over the weekend.

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