Future Ted talks about how smart phones have removed the mystery from life, with the ability to be able to look up anything or anyone…except for finding out the sex of Lily and Marshall’s baby. Marshall, Lily, Barney, Robin and Kevin are sitting in the bar, and Marshall and Lily have an envelope with the sex of their baby inside, but they refuse to open it and say they want to be surprised. The group talks about gender roles but Lily and Marshall say those roles don’t matter to them.
—
Ted comes over and says he picked up a girl, named Janet, and Robin and Barney say there’s something wrong with her and jump to get on their phones to research her. Flashback to Barney and Robin running background checks on several other girls. Ted tells them if it’s a difference between mystery and history, he chooses mystery. He then goes back up to Janet and asks her to agree that neither of them will do internet research on each other the way people used to do because they couldn’t. Barney and Robin then agree that she must be hiding something if she agreed to not do research.
—
Ted is about to leave for his date with Janet, while Robin and Barney try to investigate. He asks them to stop looking and leaves, but they don’t stop. Kevin tries to get them to go to Marshall and Lily’s to help paint the baby room like they promised, but they don’t listen…
They get over to Marshall and Lily’s but are still on their laptops, and Barney tries to convince them to open the envelope as Lily starts painting the room yellow. Barney tells them that they need to know the gender so they don’t end up getting generic genderless gifts. Lily tells him he only cares because he hates not knowing something. Robin finally comes up with results on Janet, and finds that she’s been widowed three times. Kevin shouts at them that they are the most co-dependent, incestuous, controlling people he had ever met.
Ted and Janet are on their date, but they can’t find anything to talk about.
Kevin goes on to list other issues he’s known with the group…separation anxiety (Ted up at the bar is on the phone with Marshall), inappropriate social behavior (texting each other symbols to say what their bowel movements looked like), survivor guilt (Lily crying that she got lonely and watched Survivor without Marshal) and denial (Barney asks if they are ok). Kevin apologizes for yelling and analyzing them and says he’ll paint the room by himself.
Barney finds the real Janet online, and sends Ted a link. Marshall agrees to let Barney and Robin look at the baby’s gender if they promise not to tell what it is…they look, and then Lily says’s she’s got to know because the gender neutral thing isn’t working. Barney won’t let her see it though, until they look at the link for Janet online.
Marshall then texts Ted, and thinks Janet’s secret must be bad for Marshall to tell him to open the link. Ted thinks about all the possibilities for what she could be hiding, and gives in. He looks and then grabs a drink to spit out.
—
Janet comes back to the table, and Ted stares at her with his mouth hanging open. He found out that she graduated from Princeton at 15, climbed Everest, had a billion dollars, and many other things.
Barney gives Marshall and Lily the card with the gender on it, but they can’t decide if they want to look, and Marshall throws it out the window, and Lily agrees with his choice.
Ted can’t help but feel intimidated, and Janet knows he looked her up, and she leaves because he broke his promise.
The group apologizes to Ted for looking, and he says it was his fault. Then on the bottom of Ted’s shoe, he brought back up the gender of the baby, and Marshall and Lily find out they are having a boy!
Thoughts:
One of the better episodes of the season in my opinion. Though still not hilarious, it has more potential then some of the other episodes this season to be a classic, because it hit on a topic that a lot of people can relate too. However it is a topic that could become dated eventually.
This episode made me not like Kevin…while it was somewhat funny how he analyzed them, he just doesn’t fit in the group, and I can’t help but wait for the inevitable break up between he and Robin. Maybe if he was a funnier character, but he’s just doesn’t seem very well developed. It feels like the writers decided they wanted Robin to have a boyfriend, and this character was the first they came up with, without putting too much thought into how he can be used to tell a good story. I just don’t feel that he has anything going for him that the audience is going to miss once he gone (I don’t know anything spoiler-wise, but I’m just guessing that he isn’t going to become a regular character).
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