How I Met Your Mother: "The Burning Beekeeper" Review

How I Met Your Mother has given us quite a few gimmick episodes. The series itself is a gimmick, after all. The twist behind "The Burning Beekeeper" was having the story unfold room by room at Lily and Marshall's housewarming party. Was this necessary? Not really, but it add a little extra oomph to storylines that were otherwise very straightforward.

The three acts of the episode were broken into the three main rooms at the party: the living room, the dining room and the kitchen. As Ted retold the story, he started in the living room. As could be expected, there were some unexplained moments given to us in this room (and the dining room) that would set up bits later in the episode. Why was Ted being such a hard ass? Why did Lily knock the cheese to the floor? Why is Barney so worried about his penis? What happened to send a burning beekeeper careening out the front door? Since there was so much set up going on in the living room, the episode got off to a choppy start. There weren't a lot of big laughs because of this, but the tone was being set and it was familiarly How I Met Your Mother.

In the dining room, things were starting to fall into place. Arguments and conversations that had happened in the living room were making a bit more sense in the dining room. The biggest laugh from this set up came when Barney asked to talk to Robin in the living (a conversation we know was entirely about his love for his penis) and Robin casual states, "As long as it's not about your penis." And this was where the majority of the episode got its laughs. After setting things up in the living room, the jokes came from finding out what was really going on or who said what in the dining room and the kitchen. Would the episode have been as entertaining if it was told in a standard order? No, not nearly as much.

The last act in the kitchen provided closure for everything else we had seen so far in the episode, including the mystery of the cheese, Robin and Ted's argument and how Marshall got out of working late that night. We also learned it was Martin Short's Mr. Coots inside that flaming beekeeper suit. It all came together nicely, delivering what we so often expect from How I Met Your Mother: a quirky but warm and funny half hour.

Take away the gimmick, and this would have been an okay episode, but the twist in the storytelling earns "The Burning Beekeeper" a few extra points. Yes, it was ridiculous that Lily's dad would ever think to put 10,000 bees in the basement of a home, and no, the party wasn't exactly the disaster Ted had eluded to at the start of the episode, but overall it would be hard to find a fan of How I Met You Mother that couldn't enjoy the quirk and warmth of an episode like this.

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