Next week I'm going to do an experiment. I'm going to give the episode a grade based on the cold open before the titles. Because sixty seconds into "How I Met Everyone Else," after the open that featured freeze-frames, a flashback to one hour earlier, and Barney drawing a chart in the air backwards for our benefit, I knew this was going to be a quality episode.
And the cold open did not lie, my friends. Unlike all the characters, who were lying or engaging in willful self-deception from the get-go. The theme of "How I Met Everyone Else" was the series in miniature: what should have happened (to make a good story that makes sense of the present moment) versus what really did happen. And its two recurring gags — sandwiches standing in for joints, and Blah Blah standing in for Ted's short-term squeeze's forgotten name — both reinforce the point that no story is going to contain the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Although almost everyone got a funny moment — I was worried that Robin would be left out until she stammered that she was the problem in her and Ted's sex life: "I'd just lie there" — the flashbacks to 1996 and 2001 create frameworks in which Ted gets the friendliest spotlight. We've seen Ted in college before, but I don't remember him looking quite this much like John Cusack, or being so goofily social. His 2007 creation of a 1996 tearful answering machine message to long-distance-girlfriend Karen after making out with a girl at the freshman mixer ("I'm going down to the computer lab now to send you an electronic mail!") is full-on funny, not just character work. And Young Professional Ted, the one with the goatee (aka Ted's Evil Twin), takes grumpy chubbiness (grubbiness?) to a deeper level of not-giving-a-shit. Barney never changes — that's his shtick — but the rapid-fire reversals of the dueling versions of their meeting, with Ted whipping out sign language to pose as Barney's deaf brother and then advising the hot chick via sign to give Barney a fake number, were a giddy implementation of the show's best can-you-top-this attitude, and it wouldn't work if Ted, the show's increasingly solid center, weren't more than holding his own.
But back to my proposed experiment. I suppose it's possible that a given HIMYM cold open that prominently features the series' single-camera virtues might be deceptive. One might mistake its zippy timeshifts and juxtaposed contradictions for artful construction and comic innovation. And I'm a bit flummoxed by the failure of my initial hypothesis — that writer Kourtney Kang or director Pamela Fryman might be the leaven that makes the loaf rise. (The team was responsible for some of the best episodes of the first and second seasons, but also for last week's limp, tin-eared "Little Boys".) All any of us can do is cross our fingers and hope for all the cylinders to fire, like they did tonight.