How I Met Your Mother: Reachers and Settlers

Monday night's "How I Met Your Mother" offered some helpful, albeit obvious, relationship advice for married men.

If your new work buddy is a woman, immediately correct your wife if she automatically assumes said work buddy is a guy. And definitely don't let that misconception linger if said work buddy is Amanda Peet hot.

For the first episode in several weeks, Neil Patrick Harris doesn't overshadow his fellow cast members with Barney's over-the-top exploits, giving the rest of the cast a chance to carry the show. No show-stopping Broadway song-and-dance finales here for Barney, as in last week's episode, but was anyone really looking for one? (One "Glee" is enough.)

We're expected to believe that uber-sensitive Marshall would be dumb enough to make this classic mistake in not setting Lily straight when she assumes that his new lawyer pal Jenkins is a doughy, Chris Farley-type clown. That character inconsistency aside, it's amusing to watch Marshall's frustration mount after Lily welcomes with underwhelming ease her eventual discovery that Jenkins (Peet, in another HIMYM celebrity cameo) is more sexy than sloppy

Even after processing all her husband's past stories about Jenkins' exploits chugging jars of maraschino cherries and climbing atop a table and ripping her shirt off at a neighborhood bar, Lily clearly doesn't see her as a threat to their marriage. That's because, Robin explains, every relationship has a reacher and a settler. 

And Marshall married out of his league, is the underlying implication, which makes him the settler. In other words, Lily isn't worried about Jenkins developing a taste for her man, Robin tells him.

"The settler is never jealous of the reacher," Robin tells Marshall. "Where is the reacher gonna go?"

Confident in her own hot settler status (exhibit A: her year-long romance with Ted), Robin gets her comeuppance when Ted discovers that in her professional life as an early-morning news anchor, she has inspired a drinking game among his architecture class students. Every time she says, "But, um ..." on her newscast, apparently a frequent occurrence in her pre-dawn interviews, the students drink. And drink. And drink.

Ted and Barney try the game out, sitting through one of her broadcasts downing a bottle of vodka. (Really? These guys are in their 30s and still trying out drinking games?)

"Well, then I guess it's not a very good drinking game," Ted tells Robin when she scoffs at the news of her status as a drinking-game icon. "Which would mean that last night when Barney and I played it, I didn't get super-wasted and throw up all over myself. Oh, wait, I did both of those things. So, face ..."

Perhaps clouded by his own Skeeball triumphs at the college bar he and Ted have begun frequenting, Marshall takes it as a matter of pride to force Lily to feel jealous, if not threatened by Jenkins' flirtations.

But Lily doesn't believe that her loving, little reacher could ever attract the attention of someone as pretty as Jenkins, even after he confesses that she kissed him at the office. It turns out that Jenkins was still drunk that morning after an all-night round of the Robin Scherbatsky "But, um" drinking game, but she's so embarrassed about her indiscretion that she tells Marshall that she will apologize directly to Lily.

That sounds like a good plan to Marshall, since I imagine he expects it will offer him the opportunity to, as Ted would put it, tell Lily "So, face!" Instead it ends with Lily pummeling contrite Jenkins as she yells, "Nobody kisses my future baby daddy but me!"

And just like that, the settler becomes the jealous reacher. Or maybe that's a reach.