How I Met Your Mother: "Good Crazy" Review

Note: Full spoilers for the episode follow.

"Good Crazy" caught us up to a flash forward from earlier this season (in "The Naked Truth"), showing us how Marshall and Barney ended up in Atlantic City while Lily was going into labor. It's been nice to have these connections being made, but at the same time the results have been a bit bland. Ted's green dress in "Now We're Even" was just an exercise for the writers who had purposely backed themselves into a corner. It felt the same way here, and the episode as a whole fell short of being great.

There were a number of laughs to be found in the initial segments with Marshall and Lily as they both took different approaches to the approaching due date of their little one. Having recently been in their position, I could relate to Marshall's anxiety and the resulting sleep training and watermelon test baby. Too bad Jason Segel appeared to literally be sleepwalking through the episode. There are times when the actor seems to have his mind somewhere else, and "Good Crazy" was one of those times.

But the result of the couple's argument seemed to exist for the sole purpose of explaining the flash forward scene from the earlier episode. Sneaking Marshall to Atlantic City had a nice flow to it, but the sudden T-Shirt, Ducky Tie and drunkenness felt weirdly unnatural and only made me think "writing exercise" instead of getting lost in real storytelling. Things weren't helped by the stereotypical going-into-labor-while-my-husband-is-far-away storyline. Hopefully the series can put a nice How I Met Your Mother spin on it in the next episode.

- CBS

Also hurting the episode was the continuing saga of sad-sack Ted dealing with his Robin issues. This has dragged on for far too long, and watching Ted imagine conversations with Robin wasn't worth another episode. At first, it seemed like there might have been a smarter purpose to what Barney was doing, setting Ted up on the blind dates, when the first turned out to be a cute Canadian named Robyn. But there was no master plan, and Barney's involvement in this storyline waned as the episode went on. Ted's whining felt all too familiar and the result was unsurprising.

Barney's growing insecurity also took an unsurprising turn, as he tried to get Quinn to get stripping, even creating a fake job at the bank to pay her bills. There were a few laughs to be had-- like the great Condolence Five-- but overall, too much of "Good Crazy" felt generic and/or done before. I've got no problem with familiar storylines as long as a series adds a little something new to the proceedings, but Monday's episode didn't add any unique flavor to the mix.

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