How I Met Your Mother Review:
"Robin 101" (Episode 5.03)

How I Met Your Mother's attempts to reintroduce Robin as a girlfriend have been rather unsettling. Five years after we saw her spend Thanksgiving at a strip club, we cringed last week when she told Barney she was "not okay" with him being a regular. Last night's episode, "Robin 101," attempted to explain her jealousy in depth, though without any new information, it failed.

Once Barney acts like an actual boyfriend, Robin (Cobie Smulders) wonders whether he is cheating on her. Turns out, Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) is violating their relationship to a different degree, by taking "Robin 101" from none other than ex-boyfriend Ted. The episode focuses equally on Smulders and Harris, though Harris is more convincing as a bratty pupil than Smulders as a paranoid paramore.

Watch the How I Met Your Mother promo of "Robin 101":



Although the promo gave away the best of Barney's moments, save for a tribute to Dead Poets Society, "Robin 101" as a whole proves that Barney can be a dynamic character. But even with butterscotch newly deemed as the Canadian PMS cure, Robin remained static. Father issues continued to be the bane of her existence, which would not have been the episode's downfall had Smulders not reacted to them more convincingly in "Happily Ever After" (Episode 4.06).

The more his love for Robin developed last season, the more we feared that Barney would become unrecognizable as a boyfriend. But as last night's episode proved, How I Met Your Mother can now stand to take a lesson from Ted about Robin: "If you don't want to lose her, you gotta try a little harder. Be more attentive to where she is emotionally and just be present."