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.
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?
Speaking of hockey, the girls run onto the bridge with their hockey sticks, revealing they just used long division (and hockey sticks, I guess) to foil some space pirates. Jessica Glitter really does look like a porn star, or maybe a sexy teacher from a Van Halen video, but not a teen. At all. A Canadian-accented Omnibot 2000 rolls onto the bridge and says they're entering an asteroid field, and the girls start bouncing up and down in slow-motion because of the "turbulence." Lily is now on board the porn train along with all of the guys, but Robin feels sorry for them for not enjoying it for the innocent entertainment it is. Just then, an Alan Thicke hologram materializes, and sends the girls to a dildo-shaped joystick, where he quizzes them on their times tables from a TV screen as they wrestle with the joystick, and an actual game of Asteroids plays out on the monitor behind them. Man, this is really a 1980s-heavy show.
Just as Alan is about to reach the climax of his math quiz, Barney stops the tape, saying they have to ration it out, like a hot chick on a desert island. (Just go with it.) Lily asks Robin about BFF Jessica, and Robin says she still gets Christmas cards from her, but they really aren't close anymore. Lily points out that BFFS are, by definition, forever, and when Marshall expresses his doubts on that point, Ted proves it by calling up his high school BFF Punchy in Cleveland. Their phone conversation goes like this: "Punchy!" "Mosby!" "PUNCHY!" "MOSBY!" "PAHNCHAY!" "Good talkin' to you, bro!" "time you're in New York..." "Bye!" Ted submits this as proof of BFF-itude, and I can find no flaw in his argument.
Lily presses Robin on the BFF front, and Robin basically says they stopped talking five years ago, that she doesn't want to talk about it and leaves. Man, she's been given a lot of mopey storylines of late. Lily asks everyone what the deal could be, and Ted decides to solve the mystery using math. Last year's Christmas card shows Jessica with a 4-year-3-month-old kid (exact age courtesy of Lily), which means five years ago Jessica got pregnant, and since Robin hates kids, she must have broken up with Jessica. Lily is, of course, devastated, but Ted continues to try to express his findings in poetry, because he is a tool.
After the commercials, Robin enters the apartment to find Ted and Barney waiting for her, because two dudes watching porn alone is weird. Wait, they were waiting for her to get there to watch the video, but not Marshall and Lily? I bet those two'll be pissed. Robin promises to sit with them if they cut it out with the porn talk, but the first thing they see is Robin and Jessica wearing beaver puppets, talking about their pet beavers. (Present-day Robin: "It's the official animal of Canada.") Alan Thicke whips out some wood, and asks how much wood he'll need to keep these beavers satisfied all weekend long, if one consumes six inches per half hour, and the other consumes eight inches every 45 minutes, and it's the dirtiest thing ever. Just as the girls are about to sing a song about their beavers (with Jessica on keytar), present-day Robin stops the DVD, saying the guys don't deserve to hear it. Booo!
Just then, a knock at the door! It's Punchy, who's like a slightly taller, more frat-boyish Morgan Grimes. After calling Robin and Barney "turds," he reveals that he's crashing on the couch, and manages to seamlessly weave in an Inception reference. "Feels like you're dreaming? Check your totem, brah -- Punchy's here in the flesh!" With that, he starts a series of rapid-fire arm punches that don't let up even when they cut to MacLaren's, where he's telling the gang about Ted crapping his pants once. Robin wants him gone, but Ted's worried about him, with his dead-end car rental job and his life in Cleveland. Oh, poor Punchy! Sorry, Ted, not everyone can be a practicing architect and college professor in Manhattan.
Lily and Marshall walk in, but Robin is on the way to get a massage on her own, pretty harshly dissing Lily as being too busy reading What to Expect When You're Expecting to Expect. Lily tells the guys she's worried Robin is going to dump her, but I dunno, that was some pretty dump-worthy behavior from Robin, there. Marshall doubts Ted's mathematical solution, and says that maybe Lily should simply try not talking about babies. So Lily stops by the apartment to do just that, but as soon as Robin innocently says "crib" and "rattled," Lily is off and running, saying that she's gonna keep talking about babies and she needs Robin's support. Robin flips, pointing out that Lily isn't even pregnant yet, and that she's sick of it. Lily calls off the friendship to spare Robin having to even see the baby, and Robin agrees. Well, that went well. Back in DOWISETREPLA, Marshall is incredulous, and a little angry at Lily. He even refuses to comfort his weeping wife... for like five seconds.
MacLaren's: Ted returns from Times Square with Punchy, who seems to only be interested in taking pictures of billboards. As Punchy goes to pee in a jar in the alley for some reason, Barney says he has got to go, rattling off the farewell lines from every reality competition show known to man, including The Weakest Link, Survivor, Top Chef, Work of Art, The Bachelor, Rock of Love, Big Brother, The Chopping Block, Top Chef: Just Desserts, Drag Race, Hell's Kitchen, The Amazing Race, America's Top Model, The Apprentice and Project Runway. It's impressive in its comprehensiveness, but not funny enough to warrant the time and effort involved. But, when Punchy tricks Ted into looking at his scrotum, Ted finally agrees.
Marshall takes Lily to Madison Square Garden to meet the organist for the New York Rangers... Jessica Glitter! Marshall tries to play it off like he did a lot of keytar-based research, but Barney actually did it all, so he could offer to buy her Space Teens costume. As she plays the Chicken Dance, the "Charge!" music and other familiar ice rink riffs, with Lily and Marshall helping out on the vocals and the claps, Jessica explains to Lily that Robin didn't break up with her, she broke up with Robin. She simply didn't have the time to give to the relationship after she had a baby, and she allowed Robin to drift away. Lily thinks that's cold, but Jessica points out that Lily did the same thing without even being pregnant. At this point, realization sets in. Finally. Naturally, that's why Robin is mad about all the baby talk. She thinks she's about to get dumped again. Lily vows to let her know how important she is to her.
Ted comes home to the apartment to find Punchy on the couch watching TV, looking for Big Chuck and Lil' John. Ted tells him he has to go, and Punchy says he would love to go back to Cleveland, but he worries about Ted, who is baffled by this. We flash back to Punchy and his girlfriend in bed after the phone call, talking about Ted, and how he got left at the altar, and is now living in a tiny apartment (not really) with no yard that's not even near Times Square. It's the girlfriend who suggested he go visit Ted to cheer him up, maybe even show him his nutsack. Ted says she sounds great, and Punchy says she's his angel. They're actually engaged, and Ted manages to be happy for him, even as his heart breaks. Of course, when Punchy asks Ted to be his best man -- his other reason for visiting -- Ted gets choked up and accepts before punching Punchy like crazy.
Now, I know we needed a wedding that Ted could be best man at, and I know we all wanted it to be Barney and Robin, but this just seems a little forced -- they may be "BFFs," but doesn't Punchy have friends he sees on a regular basis in Cleveland? Oh, well. Robin and Barney would have been too forced (and too soon), anyway.
At Robin's Canadian ex-pat watering hole, the Hoser Hut, Lily tracks her down at the bar to apologize. Robin apologizes first, for pulling away, but Lily insists that things will be different this time, even though Robin hates babies. Robin says she hates most babies, but she'll love Lily's baby, and pick it up and everything. The guys arrive to see them make up, just as familiar music kicks in at the bar. Robin recognizes the Beaver Song, and they turn to see Jessica Glitter on the karaoke stage, holding out a second microphone. Robin gets up on stage, and they sing about licking ice cream cones, and it's a little dirty, but it must be a popular song north of the border, because the Canadian clientele start singing along when the chorus kicks in, saying that "two beavers are better than one." A Canadian flag drops and confetti falls from the ceiling as the episode ends, but we rejoin them for the end tag, with Robin and Jessica having been joined on stage by a Mountie, a hockey player, a Queen Elizabeth impersonator, a guy in a bear suit and Omnibot 2000. Alan Thicke is behind the bar, a beaver on each hand. Aaaaand scene.
In summary: the fleshing out of the Robin Sparkles mythos is great, but Lily's not-yet-pregnant mania and Robin's continuing inability to open up to her own friends can get a little frustrating. And the out-of-left-field wedding is both a blessing and a cop-out. I like Punchy so far, but hopefully he won't get on my nerves before the big day. Shouldn't be too hard, since he lives in Cleveland. So, will the wedding be in Cleveland? Curiouser and curiouser.
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