How I Met Your Mother

I feel that How I Met Your Mother has suffered a steady decline in both writing and acting since the Christmas break. Tonight's episode was an all-time low in what once was one of the most entertaining shows on TV.



First off, the characters/actors. Marshall seemed tired and almost ashamed to be delivering such god-awful lines. Ted has totally lost what little comic timing he ever had and seems to now rely on pulling weird faces and repetition to get the laughs.

Lily is being reduced to a series of strange over-reactions. Last night obsessively repeating "mugged by a monkey" and "I'm getting a gun" long after the joke had originally fallen flat.

Robin doesn't even do the job of providing decent eye-candy any more. Never a particularly great character, last night saw the writers scrape a hole in the bottom of the barrel by not giving her a single funny line.

And then Barney. For a while he's been the only redeeming part of this show. Last night? Last night he was utterly dire. He seemed totally bereft of his usual charisma, the lines he was given lacking Neil Patrick Harris' usual excellent delivery.



And now the story. You can tell you're in dire straights when you resort to a monkey to get your laughs...and this monkey didn't even get a smile in my house! Nothing worked. Not a single laugh. Although, judging from the laugh-track being used, the canned-people had been given some particularly good drugs.



Shockingly bad.

So in this episode Marshall gets mugged my a monkey - or does he? And Robin would like to put it on her show! If this is not a terrible storyline, I don't know what is. A monkey? Really? Is this what a show that produced 'Mary the Paralegal' and 'Ted Mosby: Architect' has come down to?



I'm not sure what the actors were doing in this episode - but acting wasn't really a part of it. The scene in the bar where Marshall reveals the monkey mugging was so fake, it made me cringe. Lily's laugh especially was over the top and sounded so totally unrealistic; it looked like she had to force herself to laugh, and just barely made it. Which is understandable, seeing as the plot was NOT FUNNY. And it became even less funny as the characters repeated their lines over and over again. Just because you say it a lot doesn't mean we'll laugh at it.



I usually rely on Barney to save the show - which, let's face it - he usually does, but this time something was off. His lines weren't good and the punchlines didn't really have any punch. And when Barney can't even save the episode, you know you're screwed. A shame, because this show used to be one of my absolute favorites.

Not the most humorous episode of How I Met Your Mother. The writing and plots on this series have been sub par for a little while now. You have to start wondering what's going on!



Marshall gets mugged. OK, so Lily overreacts and wants to get a gun even though she claims she would never have one. Robin carries around this cannon in her purse and after Lily gets a feel for it she wants one as well. All of a sudden the mugging story starts changing when Marshall realizes Lily is serious about the gun. We hear some pretty strange versions until the whopper comes out that he was mugged by a monkey. Robin's been looking for a great story/person to interview and she jumps on this story. The network is even talking about taking it national.



Barney is using his friends experiences to get girls. He actually tells one girl he's Neal Armstrong. When she asks why he's so young he makes up a story about passing through a space anomaly making him reverse his age! She buys it! Eventually we learn some truths, but it's becoming more difficult to tell where the truth starts and lies begin.



Not a great episode, but entertaining and passable. They could and have done much better. Here's hoping they get the spark back. Maybe they could actually show Ted's wife soon! Thanks for reading...

: Let me start off with the only highlight of this episode was in which Marshall recalls every time he accidentally hit Lilly. That is the only time I truly laughed in this episode, and it wasn't even clever humor. It was "haha monkey, hit head bo bo" humor. This episode had childish humor, and the worst part is it was the most unrealistic plot ever. Mugged by a monkey? Whether Marshall truly got mugged by a monkey or not, who the hell cares? This episode was a huge waste of time, and the only person that would enjoy this episode is someone with an attention span of a 5 year old. I don't even want to explain the plot so I'm just going to stop my review here. Bottom line: Worst episode of How I Met Your Mother to date.

This was another episode which highly disappointed me. Apart from a few odd episodes here and there, this season has not been a good one, and this episode is a great indicator of that!



The episode started out interesting, when we heard that Marshall got mugged. That was a great start to an episode, but they drove it into that ground and killed it. I did however enjoyed the secene where Lily is shooting madly in one of those shooting ranges or placeds!



The monkey storyline was awful. The monkey was adorable and cute, but the storyline was just stupid and meaningless.



I reckon 8.0 is quite a generous score, and I would even go as far as saying that this is one of the worst in this show's history. I'm really disappointed by it.

Spoilers ahead

I read some of the other reviews for this episode and I can't figure out why people gave it such a low score. I think people don't realize when a show has been on as long as HIMYM has, they can have filler episodes. Not every episode has to have something to do with meeting the episode. And even if it was a filler episode, I never stopped laughing during this episode!

The plot is Marshall was mugged by a man in the park and he changes his story to that he was mugged by a monkey at the zoo when Lily decides she wants to get a gun. Then throughout the episode he continually changes his story back forth (personally I believe he was mugged by a person because he only came up with the monkey story when Lily expressed interest in getting "a cute pink gun to match her strappy sandals" yes the plot is silly but it was hilarious to watch! The cast is truly gifted at pulling it off and I still watched it with rapt attention as I would for an episode with a better plot. The subplot was funny also, which was Ted had built a large model of the empire state building and wanted Robin to show it on her show. Again, not that important but the scene of Ted reenacting Sleepless in Seattle using tiny dolls on his model I could not stop laughing.

Not the most important of episodes but still I think everyone should watch it, especially when you need a laugh.

"Zoo or False" is an awful How I Met Your Mother episode, but the ending was great. In this episode, Marshall lies about getting mugged by a monkey. It was annoying how he keeps changing his story to being mugged by a monkey or mugged by a person. I don't care if he was mugged my monkey. And I didn't care for Barney's plot because he was a complete hypocrite. He lies to women all the time and he gets upset when they lie to him. But I did enjoy when Barney said that "a lie is just a great story that someone ruined with the truth". Now I did love the end of this episode where they bring in the monkey from the zoo on Robin's show and the monkey goes crazy. I give this episode a 5/10.