Episode Report Card Zach Oat: B+ | 25 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Two Beavers Are Better Than One
By Zach Oat | Season 6 | Episode 9 | Aired on 11.16.2010
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.When Robin insults his boutonniere, Barney responds by whipping out yet another video of Robin Sparkles, Robin's Canadian teen starlet alter ego. Except this isn't another music video, this is an episode of her kids' TV show, Space Teens, which features her and her keytarist co-star Jessica Glitter (Nicole Scherzinger) bouncing in slow-motion, talking about their pet beavers and wrestling with a suggestively shaped joystick to solve math problems, all under Alan Thicke's command. It's basically porn, and the only thing keeping Barney from dealing Marshall a well-deserved slap is Robin's insistence that it's decent family fare.
However, when the gang wonders if Robin ditched her former BFF Jessica because she got pregnant, Lily -- who can't stop talking about her impending pregnancy -- gets a sad. Is their relationship doomed? Robin won't get into it, but when Lily keeps up the preggo talk, Robin points out she's not even pregnant yet, and the friendship is cancelled. But once Marshall tracks down Jessica playing the organ for the New York Rangers, they find out that she was the one who grew apart from Robin. Lily and Robin make up, with Lily promising not to forget about Robin and Robin promising to love Lily's baby, and even pick it up sometimes. Robin and Jessica also reconcile, and sing a duet of "The Beaver Song" to an appreciative crowd at the Hoser Hut.
Meanwhile, in an attempt to prove that BFFs can be forever, Ted calls up his underachieving high school friend Punchy in Cleveland, with whom he is in intermittent contact, and inadvertently invites him to crash on his couch, which he does. When Punchy's incessant punching, scrotum-flashing and tourist's love of Times Square prompt Ted to ask him to leave, Punchy reveals that he's worried about Ted, and that it was his fiancée who suggested he visit Ted to try to cheer him up. Ted is humbled, and then moved to tears when Punchy asks him to be his best man. Mystery wedding from the season premiere: solved.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!In the distant future, Saget!Ted talks to his kids about how, in the Fall of 2010, Aunt Lily could only talk about one thing: babies. MacLaren's: Lily and Robin sit at the usual booth, but as Robin is about to bite into a much-anticipated burger, Lily reads aloud from her baby book about cervical mucus. Cue gag reflex, Robin's and mine. Apartment: As Lily loads the DVD player, Robin says she's been looking forward to this scary movie, but Lily passed on the violent imagery (which would affect her unconceived fetus... how?) in favor of a far-more-scary video of a live water birth. Cue shriek, Robin's and mine. Kitchen: When Robin is grimly telling Lily about something that showed up on her mom's X-ray, Lily shows her a cute crib in a catalog. Cue growing hatred of Lily, mostly mine. Saget!Ted says it wasn't a problem (I'd beg to differ) until the night Barney wore... a boutonniere!
MacLaren's: Barney takes all incredulous comments on the flower on his lapel as compliments, pointing out that there's an 83% correlation between the times men wear boutonnieres and the times they get laid. Whether that means 83% of the times people get laid, they're wearing boutonnieres, or 83% of the time you wear a boutonniere, you get laid, I have no idea. Probably the latter. Barney rattles off examples: Proms, weddings, grandmas' funerals... Barney thanks his dead nana for the redhead, and I have to pause, because who wears a boutonniere to a funeral, and how many hot non-relatives were at Barney's nana's memorial service? Maybe he met her afterwards and played the sympathy card? God, I hope so. Robin says no woman would go home with a guy wearing a flower, unless a clown was kidnapping them, and they trade barbs until Robin calls suits "boring," at which point Barney plays his trump card and whips out a DVD. "Robin Sparkles 3, y'all!" The gang goes wild.
Apartment: Saget!Ted tells us about the Robin Sparkles phenomenon, and explains that her Robin's Canadian music career was spun out of a TV show they had never seen... until now. Barney pops the disk -- which he hasn't watched yet out of respect to the gang -- in to the DVD player, and Lily takes this opportunity to invite Robin to go get massages, adding that once she's pregnant, she can't get them anymore. Robin is of course annoyed, as am I for that ham-fisted non sequitur. The show immediately starts, and we zoom out on a flag-patterned Canada to show the title "Space Teens." Seeing the word "Teen" automatically makes Barney think it's a porno, so he lunges to slap Marshall, only to stop at the last moment when Robin insists that it's a kids' show. But as Robin Sparkles slides down a fireman's pole and her co-host Jessica Glitter cartwheels into a split, one has to wonder. Barney asks about Jessica, played by former Pussycat Doll and reigning Dancing With the Stars champion Nicole Scherzinger, and Robin says she was her BFF on the show and in real life. Apparently, they're just two average Canadian teens solving crimes in space using math, and their ship is shaped like a giant curling stone. I guess a hockey puck would have gotten lost in the blackness of space?