Apartment hunting in New York: don’t believe the TV shows, it’s actually no fun at all if you don’t have any money. Marshall and Lily, however, are just going to pretend that’s not the case. Remember Lily’s credit card debt woes she couldn’t bring herself to tell Marshal about last week? Yeah, those are going to come back to haunt them, now that Marshall and Lily are moving. Where to? Glad you asked...
1. Dowisetrepla. It’s the hippest, most up-and-coming neighborhood in New York, don’t you know? Marshall and Lily see a classic, know-it-all New York broker who ensures them this is exactly where they want to be, and since Marshall and Lily never took DARE and don’t know how to “just say no,” they go for it. This means Lily has to fess up to her rampant credit card debt, except the mortgage broker gets around to it first, which means...
2. “There’s only one possible conclusion. Lily and Marshall were fighting over peanut butter. Lily left the lid off, and Marshall blew his.”. Nice try, CSI: Ted. Typical of Ted, he makes this assumption because he thinks it’s all about him, namely the incident in the beginning of the episode when Marshal flipped out over Ted eating the peanut butter and not putting the lid back on, the kind of “inconsiderate jackassery” that makes Marshall feel like he’s “living in the Real World house, and not the early seasons where they’re socially conscious. I’m talking about Hawaii, and after!” So true, Marshall, so true. Although to be fair, the Real World where there was a fight over peanut butter was in San Francisco, which was a super socially conscious season with one housemate with AIDS... not that I remember all this stuff about The Real World or anything.
3. “I simply want to fool a girl into thinking this is my apartment so I can nail her once and never see her again. I’m not a monster.”. Barney was being pretty typical Barney this week, using the apartment Lily and Marshall wanted to buy to lure a girl who told him at the beginning of the episode she was sick of guys who were afraid of commitment. The next morning Barney tells the poor girl that her mom can come stay in “his apartment” the next week, then waltzes out the door while she’s in the shower. I was honestly waiting for Barney to get his comeuppance this episode, given how unusually cruel he was being. He made up for it a little bit at the end of the episode, when he cries over Marshall and Lily’s big announcement...
4. “That's what we should have said.” The running gag throughout the episode was showing what people should have said before we see what they actually say, from LIly and Marshall agreeing to take the apartment to Lily fessing up to her credit card debt. At the end of the episode Barney, Ted and Robin are concerned that LIly and Marshall have called a divorce lawyer, but it turns out Lily just suggested they get divorced on paper to make it easier for them to get alone. Marshall, of course, said “Noooooooo!” (while drinking a comically large bottle of champagne at McLaren’s). So Marshall and Lily’s big announcement, it turns out, is that they took the apartment. “Are you crazy?!? You can’t afford it!”-- is what they should have said. What did they say? “Congratulations!” of course.
5. The true meaning of Dowisetrepla. “Downwind from the Sewage Treatment Plant.” Marshall and Lily only find this out too late, of course, thanks to a taxi driver. Now I’m even more worried about my next New York City apartment hunt. Are neighborhood abbreviations really going to become sinister now?
One final shout-out to Ted and Robin’s conversation in the kitchen, when they consider a future in which Marshall and Lily have broken up but everyone still gets to hang out with them. Ted: “We broke up, and we still hang out. It’s not weird.” Robin: “It’s a little weird.” Ted: “Yeah, it’s a little weird.” So true, HIMYM. So true.
