How I Met Your Mother - Recap: No Questions Asked

Of course, if there's one drawback, it's that this is yet another episode that feels as if it's failing to move the overall story of the season forward. We don't get much development on the Robin (Cobie Smulders) and Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) front, and we don't really address Ted (Josh Radnor) and The Mother (Cristin Milioti), who continues to be a virtual non-issue this month. The only really storyline that gets any advancement is the one that's gotten the least attention in the past several weeks: the potential turmoil between Marshall (Jason Segel) and Lily (Alyson Hannigan). Marshall hasn't told Lily that he's accepted the judge position in New York, yet Daphne (Sherri Shepherd) took it upon herself to break the ice on Marshall's behalf by texting the news to Lily. This prompts a mortified Marshall to begin calling each of his friends, calling in a "No Questions Asked" favor in which he asks them to retrieve Lily's phone and delete the text before she can read it.

Credit: Michael Desmond/CBS

That's the setup, and what follows is an escalating series of gags in which we see flashbacks to each of the "No Questions Asked" favors Marshall performed for each member of the gang in the past, so that we understand why they owe him now. And it's all terrific stuff, from Ted needing to be rescued from the inside of a mailbox (Marshall's "priority male" pun is a highlight) to Robin needing to be caught rescued from a band of roving acrobats, or Barney needing a change of trousers because he swallowed real versions of the marshmallow objects in the Lucky Charms cereal. Just patently absurd gags that totally work, thanks to their inherent absurdity. We even get flashbacks to how other members of the gang helped each other out, no questions asked, such as Ted delivering cupcakes to Lily's classroom as ransom payment to the hostile children who'd taken her hostage. It's silly, but not harmfully so. And really, how harmful could such silliness be in an episode that already has a ghost story to keep the comedy moving?

Credit: Michael Desmond/CBS

Yes, it turns out that Marshall requested a special room at the Farhampton Inn that is famously considered haunted. We get the full, drawn-out tail of the ghostly, hook-handed serial killer Captain Dearduff, who haunts Room 13. Apparently, the Captain froze to death in the room after getting his hook caught in the wall while near the open window. Of course, an alternate theory was that, since it was 1843, he was simply a male prostitute who succumbed to syphilis. The ghost comedy is pretty effective, even though it doesn't employ the use of an actual ghost like last week's episode, since so much of Lily's terror about being kept in the haunted room is made worse by the gang's individual attempts at breaking in to retrieve the phone for Marshall. Ted comes through the window, Barney through the air ducts, and Robin via a room service cart. It's all pretty amusing stuff, and it escalates as the trio decides to distract Lily by breaking a vase while Barney sends a trained dove to retrieve her phone. But Ted comes up with an elegantly straightforward solution to the problem -- by simply calling in his "no questions asked" favor from Lily and ordering her to smash her phone. And like that, Marshall's problem is solved.

Credit: Michael Desmond/CBS

Except it isn't, really. Marshall comes to the realization that he doesn't want to hide anything from Lily. “She’s the love of my life,” he says, and so he decides to call her and explain the situation, confessing that he accepted the judging position without consulting her first, a decision that throws a wrench in Lily's dream of going to Rome for a year. In a bit of a surprising turnaround, given how schmaltzy the show can frequently become, Lily doesn't take the news very well at all. Naturally, this is the progression of the kind of genuine conflict this show needs for this season, as we're lacking individual, long-form story arcs to carry us through from one episode to the next, especially given the condensed, insular nature of this season's storyline, confined as it is to one wedding weekend. Having Lily and Marshall on the outs, while also separating them by a considerable distance, is a natural direction for the storyline to take, since it gives both characters a real storyline, with real stakes. At this rate, I wish the other couples could get around to having storylines of such weight, although I suppose it would be hard to do something like this with Ted and The Mother without flashforwarding. But the show hasn't necessarily been shy about that before. Hopefully, the series can find some sort of middle ground between having major storylines take entire weeks off, and having one storyline be the sole focus.

Credit: Michael Desmond/CBS

"No Questions Asked" is funnier than it is substantive, but the comedy goes a long way in recommending this. How I Met Your Mother is arguably funnier and more self-assured in its comedy now than it's been in years. It's the freedom of knowing you're in the home stretch, I suppose.