For the second installment of Google It, we’ll be helping out all those people who came looking for The Goat and Rebound Bro spoilers.
The last big spoiler post I did [back on April 10] included the Barney/Robin hookup, but I’m afraid there’s nothing quite so earth-shattering this time: The show’s being pretty careful about keeping wherever that pairing is headed.
Here’s what we do know.
[Spoiler level: They're fairly detailed summaries of the basic plots of the episodes, but I've got nothing about how the episodes are resolved. If these were spoilers for Swarley, you'd know all about Marshall and Chloe and the Crazy Eyes and Barney's nickname and how uncomfortable Lily was with Marshall dating again, but not that Marshall and Lily got back together.]
Episode 317, The Goat: The Bro Code dictates that because Barney and Ted are bros, and because Barney hooked up with his bro’s ex, Barney has to tell Ted about it. [The Bro Code, mentioned here previously, dates back to colonial times, when Ben Franklin and George Washington realized that brohavior needed to be regulated - it fell to Barnabas Stinson to write the document.] Problem: Not only does Barney not want to tell Ted, but Ted’s thirtieth birthday is coming up, so the timing couldn’t be worse. Barney, willing to do anything to get out of telling Ted, but bound by the Code, goes to Marshall for his legal expertise. Marshall’s conclusion: The Code is very clear and does not give Barney any choice but to tell Ted, and there is no instance in which Ted has violated the code [including the time that Article 87, "a bro shall at all times say yes," required Ted to corroborate an outlandish and embarassing story that Barney made up for a hot girl]. So, either Barney tells Ted, or Barney breaks the code. Barney’s solution is to hire a fake girlfriend and try to trick Ted into sleeping with her, thereby stealing his girl and violating the code. Barney’s way of indicating that he’s serious about her: He stole her a blue trombone, or something, and it would just be the worst if someone else happened to have sex with her, unless that somehow cancelled out something he had done. Presumably, this doesn’t work, since Ted is with Stella. When Ted’s party starts, Barney is out of time and out of escape plans – but will he keep to the Code or break it? [Random detail! Look out for Ranjit.]
Episode 318, Rebound Bro: Ted and Barney: No longer bros. It’s likely this has more to do with Stella than with Robin, though: Barney takes the bro-breakup hard, but Ted still wants to be friends, so presumably it’s not about them falling out so much as it is about Ted settling down a little. [Updated, 4/29: Although early drafts of the script have Ted saying they can still be friends, clearly that isn't the case after "The Goat."] Either way, Barney immediately looks for a replacement, and, when he is unable to secure one of his preferred bros [one's just had a baby, one already has a bro, one's a priest, etc], he takes Randy, a mailroom employee at his office and a huge fan of his blog, under his wing, only to find that nobody is quite the wingman that Ted was.
Meanwhile, Stella’s back – she and Ted consider sleeping together, and we meet her daughter Lucy.
Barney/Robin: There’s virtually no information about Robin for the next two episodes – it might seem like a bad sign for the pairing that she isn’t a major player in two very Barney-heavy episodes, but at the same time, I find it promising that he spends all of Rebound Bro trying to get someone else laid, unlike his failed attempts to help Marshall back when he and Lily were broken up. At the very least, anyway, they definitely aren’t avoiding each other – Robin asks to join Barney and Randy at the bar.
As always, you can check the spoiler category for previously-posted information.