The Wedding Crusade (Review)

Series: How I Met Your Mother
Episode Title: "Knight Vision"
Episode Grade: C+

A full season of network comedy is going to have some valleys. It's exceedingly difficult to come up with 20+ compelling, funny stories, especially in your ninth season. The best you can hope for is that these episodes are more valleys than canyons; a few solid jokes, some good work from the actors, etc.

"Knight Vision" is a pedestrian, lightweight episode. It doesn't advance the story of How I Met Your Mother's final season, and it doesn't address the show's significant themes in any but the most cursory of fashions. There's enough mildly entertaining comedy here to keep "Knight Vision" from becoming anything truly dire, but not enough to really justify detailed analysis.

We have a pretty standard A-B-C plot structure here. In the A-plot, Ted eyes a lovely young woman (Anna Camp) for your standard wedding weekend hook-up. How I Met Your Mother has gone to the "Ted latches on with a crazy chick" well often enough that it's a little uncomfortable, so it's not a lot of fun to see the show hit that note again.

There's at least a nod here to a slightly different form of crazy; Camp's character is not so much psychotic as caught in the middle of what seems like the worst week ever. She loses her job, her car is stolen, her boyfriend breaks up with her...it's just a bad scene. As even Camp's parents point out, "Our daughter's kind of a drag."

Camp's energetic, if not particularly nuanced. There's a lot of shrieking and loud sobbing, and Ted's immediate discomfort is at least moderately interesting. The episode's insistence on making a running joke out of frequent appearances from the "he chose poorly" knight from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade is almost enthusiastic enough to make the gag work, but not quite.

The B-plot is better, as it focuses on Barney and Robin and gives us the always-welcome Edward Herrmann as a judgmental minister. Again, there's some fairly pedestrian writing here that's salvaged by the great chemistry between Neil Patrick-Harris and Cobie Smoulders.

Ultimately it's just fun watching these two play perverts. Robin and Barney stealing Lily and Marshall's rom-com meet cute is pleasant enough, and I laughed out loud at seeing a flashback of Robin dressed as college-aged Lily, with college-aged Lily's hair.

This ends in kind of a weird place, with Robin and Barney accidentally killing Hermann's character with tales of their debauchery. But the scene leading up to that moment is funny and sweet in a really odd sort of way.

The C-story, which once again features Marshall (who is probably permanently demoted to c-story status this season), is mainly just an excuse to put Sherri Shepherd's sassy black woman voice in Alyson Hannigan's tiny, adorable little girl face, which, again, I'm not above that. It's fair enough to have Marshall play out his "I accepted a judgeship" conversation in advance, but it's not a particularly weighty plot.

And perhaps that's the best description of "Knight Vision" as a whole: fair enough, but not particularly weighty.

Notes

• The episode begins with Barney putting himself and Ted in The Last Crusade. Ted's not happy with his role."Really, I'm the one working with the Nazis?" 
• "Ted and I are happy." "Are we?"
• Barney has the right idea when the minister dies. "Wedding at Bernie's!" "We're not doing Wedding at Bernie's."
• "By my third date with Robin I hit more bases than Bob Hope in wartime." "Real topical."