‘How I Met Your Mother’ season 8, episode 17 review: The Captain and trainwrecks

After a few weeks of some big revelations on “How I Met Your Mother” season 8, most of Monday night’s episode felt as though it was going to be a throwaway half-hour that was not going to amount to much of anything. Then, much of that changed over the past seven minutes. We ended up seeing some important movement for Lily’s character, and a reminder that she is more than just a wife and a mother: she is someone with pursuits of her own that became lost over time.

Lily’s career realization came about this week courtesy of a man making his grand return in The Captain (Kyle MacLachlan), and a narrative that feels familiar to people who watch the show over the years: the same story about an event from the past being told from multiple perspectives.

While at first this just seemed to be a story stuffed full of silliness about Ted’s fears of The Captain being made at him over stealing Zoey away, and then Robin thinking that the man wanted to hit on her, it instead turned out that the real reason he was sniffing around the gang was to contact Lily and hire her as his personal art consultant. This came at a big moment for the character, as she was obviously tiring of being an elementary school teacher, and just moments before she had let out in a powerful moment how her dreams of being an artist had been put on hold over the years courtesy of every other little part of her life.

So overall, this may not be the best episode in the show’s history, but it was fun and gave us some more insight into the character.

What did you think about this episode? If you want to read some more scoop on what is coming up on “How I Met Your Mother” this season, you can do so over at the link here.

Photo: CBS