How I Met Your Mother S9/E11 “Bedtime Stories” Review

The way I see it, fans will fall into two categories when it comes to this episode. Either you will think it’s totally lame, or you will applaud the glorious effort. Personally, I found myself more into the latter category. Having been a fan of poetry for many years, I could appreciate the difficult task the writers set for themselves in “Bedtime Stories”, an episode that rhymes from start to finish. As I said, this is no simple task, but for the most part, the gambit pays off as the actors are able to deliver their lines without breaking a sweat.

How I Met Your Mother S9/E10 “Mom and Dad” Review

We are still 25 hours from the wedding, but since this seemed to be more of a one off episode, I can forgive the writers a bit for not pushing the story forward a ton. Basically, Marshall and baby Marvin are now on a bus to the wedding and Marshall is attempting to get baby Marvin to sleep. Unfortunately, Marshall swapped his bag of baby books with some woman on the bus, and this begins the story that Marshall shares with us.

We get three stories in total, one about Ted, one about Robin, and one about Barney. The first story up involves Ted going on a “date/not date” with a pretty young new professor. I thought this episode was the weakest of the three, as we don’t really learn anything new about Ted and we know the date won’t go past this episode. Still, the Yankee guessing game ended up being very funny and well written.

The second story involves Robin tackling an exes stolen wedding cake. Once again, we didn’t get a whole lot of new information about Robin’s character, but we got a very funny story with a pretty epic conclusion. Robin runs into an old boyfriend at a cake shop and ends up stealing the man’s wedding cake. This story also bounces back to the passengers on the bus with Marshall, who get involved in the rhyming storm as well. Of course, after each story, baby Marvin is reawakened somehow and we are led into the next story.

Barney’s story, which is probably my favorite, involves him being called before the High Council of Players, which involves different versions of Barney from different ethnic and social backgrounds. From here, we are told the story of how Barney becomes the “Player King of New York City”. We aren’t treated to anything life shattering or groundbreaking here, but seeing Neil Patrick Harris argue with 5 versions of himself was a pretty fantastic scene.

As the episode ran on, I found myself more and more impressed with how consistent and how witty the dialogue actually was. So much, in fact, that I ended up watching the episode a second time before reviewing it, just to make sure I heard as much as possible. Like anything this ambitious, the whole thing doesn’t work. Some lines are a bit generic or flat but on the whole this was an exceptionally well rounded episode. Perhaps its best feature was the ending, which promised that Marshall may finally be arriving at the wedding next episode. If you like musicals, or poems, you will probably enjoy what the writers have done here more so than others. I know I did!