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 one’s. It all starts here.

With this weeks’ repeat, I thought this would be a good time to go back and get caught up with the Season vs. Seasons.

Season 1: Pilot

When Ted’s best friend Marshall proposes to his girlfriend, Lily, Ted realizes he’d better get a move on if he hopes to find true love. Ted soon meets Robin in a neighborhood bar, immediately becomes smitten and scores a first date. But when Ted can hardly wait to see her again, his eagerness threatens to scare her away.

I have an affinity for this episode since it’s where it all began, it’s really hard to compare anything else because without this, there’d be no show. When viewed with the series as a whole however, it is arguably different in tone. All pilots suffer from this since we don’t know the characters yet. Marshall was a little more naive and kind of a lovable loser vs. the awesomeness man-child he is now. We met Robin, at the same time Ted was, and the blue French Horn was stolen. I think the episode has some great moments:

• Robin’s seduction of Ted in her apartment
• The Olive theory
• Lily’s eye-patch
• Ranjit!

Season 2: Where Were We?

The gang tries to help Marshall get over Lily, especially when he finds a credit card bill that leads to a hotel in New York City where some of her charges are listed.

This episode is important to me because of how eagerly I anticipated it. I so had looked forward to seeing Ted and Robin as a couple finally, and this didn’t disappoint. The image of Ted laying Robin across his drafting table made me wish I didn’t work at a computer (there’s no real estate here for that type of thing, and it’d end up turning out more like Gael when he wiped Robin’s laptop). I liked the scene with Ted and Robin in the shower too. Good Marshall moment. In fact, I love the hilarity of an off-the-tracks Marshall trying to find himself as an individual throughout the episode. The ending fell apart a little bit for me, but at least we saw George Clinton.

Season 3: Wait for It…

Robin shows up with a date and this motivates Ted to ‘get back out there’. We also learn/learned something major about ‘the Mother’.

Again, I was in eager anticipation for this episode. The premieres are always very emotional, we’ve been kept waiting for so long. This episode was great (we saw it again this past week, or so I’m told, I was hard-at-work Monday night). The Mandy Moore/Enrique Iglesias cameos were good, and not over-the-top. We saw bearded Ted, old-timey inventor Ted, Persian nightclub owner Ted, and tramp-stamp Ted. Overall, a good episode. It also had one of my favorite quotes: “that dark path is my driveway.”

Advantage

I have to give the nod to season one. It’s nostalgic, it’s innocent, it’s the show before it became the show it is today. What do you guys think?

Scorecard

Season 1: 1-0-0
Season 2: 0-1-0
Season 3: 0-1-0

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