How I Met Your Mother: Slapsgiving
By fred | November 20, 2007
(S03E09) I’m usually trying to stay away from spoilers, and also not give them away in here without warning, but with this episode this became a little more difficult than usual, because as you’ve surely already noticed there’s some kind of spoiler in the title of the episode.
Now it is true to say that this will only be a very minor spoiler, not just because Slapsgiving is reference in the very first seconds of he episode, but also simply because if you are fan of the show and were checking from time to time www.slapcountdown.com you were probably expecting it already even without knowledge of this episode’s title.
Now did the fact that we knew a new slap was coming tonight affect the slap in itself ? Of course it did. Did it make it any less enjoyable ? Absolutely not. Are this episode and this slap going to be legen..wait for it..dary ? Maybe, but I’m not sure it will.
Now don’t get me wrong, neither the episode or slap were disappointing in any way, but to the question “was this episode a classic, or will it become one”, the answer is a most certain “no”.
Let’s first focus on the slap itself. It was great, and of course you knew it was coming, you could even tell exactly when it was coming, but that didn’t made it ane less good. I think it did affect the slap in itself and I probably not enjoyed it as much as if it had came out of nowhere with no kind of warnings whatsoever, but I enjoyed it another way, and still it’s always very fun to watch Marshall mark Barney’s face with his hand.
But I agree with what Barney said during this episode, giving away the exact time the slap would occur did affect it. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it ruined it, far from that, but it wasn’t without effect. But what the slap itself may have lost, was a gain for the build-up leading to it. What was so great during this episode, even better and more enjoyable than the actual slap was without a doubt the mental torture Marshall put Barney through.
Oh he tried to deny it, but even before his hilarious admittance and begging not to get slap no more, you could tell. Even in the very beginning, when Marshall was only inadvertently referencing it, you could read some confusion and anxiety, if not fear, on Barney’s face, and it was just awesome. True story.
Just like having him to try to get out of it, looking for a rule that would forbid Marshall to slap him on Thanksgiving, or to appeal to his feelings and how cruel such a thing would be. Eventually breaking down in tears begging for his life, or close. But nothing could have Marshall change his mind, nothing could ever stop him from slapping him when the countdown would be over.
Nothing, except of course an intervention from the slapbet commissioner herself, Lily. Yet we knew it was coming anyway, because there couldn’t have been such a build up without an actual slap to occur, there couldn’t be a Slapsgiving episode without the giving of a slap, obviously.
At first I thought Marshall would just have to wait, and once the day would be over, seconds only after midnight, he would just throw it at Barney in full legitimacy. But as soon as you saw Barney putting the laptop out on the table, and then refusing to listen to Lily when she asked him to put it away, it was obvious what was going to happen next.
Posted in Reviews
Shows: How I Met Your Mother
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