This was clearly an episode meant to play with structure and tell a simply story in a structurally complex and interesting way. And in that regard, it succeeded. I'm a sucker for these kinds of episodes, and HIMYM has a history of doing them, and doing them well. The only problem is that this episode wasn't very funny. It elicited a few laughs, but I'm an easy mark. For the most part, any reactions I had to the episode were to the reveals created to the unique structure ("oh, that's why Ted was so eager to fight Martin Short", "that's why Lily stomped the Gouda") instead of to any of the jokes. And while HIMYM has certainly had episodes intentionally light on the laughs before, in most of those cases the laughs were replaced with significant character development; here, we didn't get much of that aside from Lily's realization about being a parent, and even that seemed less important that the structural wackiness. Like I said, I like these kinds of episodes that manipulate the traditional time/space elements within a show, but it only works if that manipulation is done in service of big laughs, good character moments, or both. Here, it did neither, and we're left with nothing more than an episode with a unique structure.
