How I Met Your Mother: Field Trip

     This week's episode has me a bit torn.  It didn't offend me, but it wasn't the funniest episode either.  I got a few good laughs, but at the same time it left a bad taste in my mouth.  Since I don't think it was bad enough to warrant a loss, nor good enough to reward it with a win, "Field Trip" is going down in the record book as a tie giving the HIMYM's writers a record of 2-2-1 on the season.
     What bothered me about the episode was a sense of having been there before.  We're getting to a point in the history of the show where it's going to get tough keeping the storylines fresh.  I couldn't help thinking of Ted and Stella as I was introduced to a forbidden relationship between Robin and her psychologist.  Although it wasn't exactly the same, they way they non-dated every week at the dinner felt a lot like Ted's two minute date with Stella.  That's not even mentioning that both Stella and Kevin refuse to date Ted and Robin at first because they are their patients.  Barney's fear of dating Nora after finding out she didn't like the Ewoks also ran familiar and at first felt like an insult to the continuity of the show.  The HIMYM writer's have already mined the problems of dating someone who doesn't like Star Wars when Ted first started dating Robin.  Which also made it odd why Barney had a problem with Nora, he'd already dated someone who didn't like Ewoks.  If I didn't find his actually reasons for fearing Nora so funny, I'd have a problem with him not realizing the real reason Nora didn't like them due to his past experiences.
     But I did find it funny, funny because it's true.  There is defiantly a line that differentiates Ewok fans from non-fans and it almost certainly has to do with date of birth.  The fact that Barney would use this to assume that Nora was older then she said she was had me in stitches.  It was this kind of thing that made me fall in love with HIMYM, this use of pop culture to run the characters everyday lives.  It's something that has been sorely missed the last few seasons.  If you were listening there was also an Ewok reference during Marshal's law firm scenes.  They were playing the Ewok celebration song in the background while the lawyers were partying.
     Another thing that made me laugh and reminded me of HIMYM when it was still great was the use of Ted's students.  The idea of having them vote to solve all of Ted and Barney's arguments was genius.  "Pollstered" is sure to become yet another classic HIMYM catchphrase.