How I Met Your Mother: “The Over-Correction” (Episode 8.10)

This week’s How I Met Your Mother was an episode for the fans. It called back to jokes dating as early as the third season and kept them coming. That doesn’t mean “The Over-Correction” rehashed old storylines. In fact, the episode playfully referred to fan-favorite episodes throughout the entire half hour.

Now that Barney is dating Robin’s clingy and plain coworker Patrice (what she calls an over-correction from Barney’s previous stripper fiance), Robin is determined to prove it’s a farce. Only all signs point to Barney’s sincerity. Robin’s craziness really brings out a different side of the usually calm, cool and collected Canadian, and I love it. It’s just over-the-top enough to work on a show eight seasons in. If her schoolgirl yelling was a constant trait, we’d all hate her by now, but since we’ve built up a love for all of the characters, these new quirks are just funny aspects added to them.

While she is stuck in Barney’s bedroom closet looking for his legendary Playbook, he and Patrice are setting up a Christmas tree in his living room. Somehow Robin gets her favorite, good-looking, well-endowed architect friend to come distract the two, but he gets stuck in his own closet. There he finds a slew of items he lent out/Barney stole. It was a running gag this episode that he always lends belongings to his friends, but they never return them. While I hate that the show has put Ted on the back-burner of late, I do love that they constantly make fun of how pathetic he is. The show has come to the point where it needs to make fun of itself or risk losing what relevancy it has left.

The other half of the episode deals with Marshall and Lily discovering Marshall’s mom and Lily’s dad are, as Marshall puts it, “humping” and that grosses the couple out. While it was a somewhat funny filler, it just served as a way for Barney to make a touching speech at the end of the episode.

Patrice finds Barney’s Playbook thanks to Robin’s dirty work, and the two get in a fight, but he ends up burning it because she makes him want to be a better man. While I’m still not buying the two as a couple, I do like that Barney is changing and really think that he and Patrice are up to something. In the end he gives a speech about how it’s beautiful that Marshall and Lily’s parents found each other (even though they’re just in it for the sex) because finding someone you’d least expect is beautiful. He looks right at Robin as if to say, “I know you’ve been trying to sabotage my relationship,” but she still thinks he is crazy.

The episode ends with Robin demanding Barney receive an intervention. The callback to the intervention episode was hilarious, and I really loved the little moments the characters shared. It turns out Ted, Marshall and Lily agreed to Robin’s intervention, but instead of giving it to Barney, the event is for her craziness over Barney.

In a sense, this episode was to just enough to make us laugh and tide us over until next week’s one-hour fall finale that will most likely end on a cliffhanger involving Barney and Robin. I wouldn’t be surprised if the writers throw in a flash-forward to Ted’s love story to give viewers a bone to chew on for a few weeks.