Monkey Business

How I Met Your Mother was weaving quite the tangled web this week.  From Barney's constant lies to women he hopes to sleep with to Marshall's mugging/non-mugging/mugging? tale it was hard to know what to believe on this week's episode.  As a general rule, I tend not to believe Barney especially when he's talking about "conquests."  But Marshall is a different story which made the constant back and forth a constant guessing game.  So, what exactly happened on Marshall's way home from work? It all boiled down to a very important question: Are you on Team Monkey or Team Mugger?


First, Marshall claimed that a man held him at gunpoint and stole his wallet.  This frightened Lily.  Then, he claimed the mugger was naked.  This did nothing to assuage Lily's fears and soon enough she was hanging out at the firing range with Robin and telling Marshall that she wanted to get "a cute little pink gun" to match her new strappy sandals.  Then, Marshall said that he had been lying because the truth was too embarrassing.  So he claimed that a monkey at the zoo had stolen his wallet.  Of course, this made Lily calm down and the entire gang shared a huge laugh at Marshall's expense.  He got defensive and everyone else got laughing so hard they couldn't stop.  Then, Robin found out and she wanted to interview Marshall for her very early newscast.  Marshall went along until he found out that his story was going to go on the national news.  This is when he "came clean" and claimed that he made up the monkey story to keep Lily from freaking out.  No one was sure what to believe, but Barney decided that he'd rather believe the lie because it was a better story.  By the end of the episode, no one knew the truth and everyone was left to believe whichever story they chose.

Meanwhile, Barney was busy telling girls that he was Neil Armstrong, the cyclist astronaut.  As is usually the case with Barney, hijinks ensued and he wound up with two drinks in his face and the realization that the girl he slept with the night before was not 28 years old.  And then there was Ted and his rather large-sized model of the Empire State Building.  This would have been an otherwise unremarkable side story except for the fact that Robin caught Ted acting out the final scene from Sleepless in Seattle (just the final scene -- wink, wink) on the top of it.  Good stuff.  In the end, Ted got his model on TV, the monkey stole a doll and climbed the model while dodging paper planes.  Yeah, it was that awesome.

How I Met Your Mother airs Mondays on CBS. If you missed last night's episode, watch it for free at cbs.com.