How I Met Your Mother recap: Neutered in tweed

While Monday night's episode leaves unanswered how many billable hours Marshall wastes uploading slide shows of uncomfortably lame double dates, at least Ted proves he can overcome the romance-killing powers of a professor's tweed jacket.

Call it "Revenge of the Sexless Innkeeper," or "The 'How I Met Your Mother' episode where the subplot makes up for an otherwise weak storyline."

Marshal and Lily's overeager attempts to lure Barney and Robin into the domesticity of double-dating fail miserably. Barney and Robin aren't quite ready to settle down in a world where cheese platters and a game of charades represent a rocking Saturday night,  not when you can still hang out at MacLaren's bar, making fun of Ted as he tries to pick up women while wearing a tweed jacket.

After a series of dinner parties with other couples who aren't ready to lock in their New Year's Eve plans in April, Marshall and Lily see Barney and Robin as another chance to share their story about bumping into Sammy Hagar at the Belgian waffle station at the Cabo resort. But they try too hard, and creating a "itwasthebestnightever" Web site devoted to their double date only scares Barney and Robin away.

Barney cruelly compares the dinner party to a date "with a sad, chubby girl our mom made us call," but then every one looks chubby in real life next to the impossibly slim Neil Patrick Harris. So after ignoring a flood of e-mail and text-message invites for a second double-date, Barney decides it's better to tell their friends into thinking that a U.S. Navy-sponsored search for intelligent life at the bottom of the ocean is more likely to take up their time than another night wasted avoiding Marshall's cheese platter.

Marshall and Lily get the hint, and after putting aside their hurt feelings, find a new couple to fill the void. Py and Shea love playing Marshall and Lily's Sammy Hagar story and can't get enough of their Gouda. Somehow, this leaves Barney and Robin regretting what they gave up, although they accept that it would be pathetic to give them a late-night call to see if they're up for a midnight game of Taboo or some other board game couples love to play.

"We can't Taboo-ty call them. It's pathetic," Robin says.

Eventually, though, Barney and Robin lure Marshall and Lily out of a dinner party with a trail of egg timers — Marshall's favorite time keeper for charades, naturally — and beg for another shot. Double-date nights are reinstated, and we all yawn as they set off for brunch together the next day.

But back to the tweed. Ted thinks the tweed makes him look professorial. Barney prefers to think of tweed as "the textile of the eunuch." Ted points out that he lured a woman upstairs to his apartment wearing that same tweed jacket a night earlier.

Of course, he also admits she passed out on the couch but chalks it up to her being exhausted from being turned on. Amused, Barney educates poor Ted on his new role as "the sexless innkeeper" used for a place to crash by women too tired to make the drive home to Westchester.

Barney's salute to the sexless inkeeper includes a mutton-chop vision of himself inside a Charles Dickens-style poem where he recounts the time he wooed a husky lass with facial hair to avoid the fruitless search for a cabride home from Queens.

"I swallowed my pride and six shots of whiskey, and prayed to the gods that she wasn't too frisky," mutton-chopped Barney recites.

Ted becomes the target of a series of 'sexless innkeeper' jokes. Even Robin, his ex, can't help joking that normally it's the innkeeper who offers turndown service, not the guest.

But in a rare turn of events for this show, Ted shows up Barney, who's on hand to witness the blonde with a thing for tweedy professors urging Ted back to bed. It's enough to make Barney question the value of double-dating as he and Robin walk out the door for a brunch outing with Marshall and Lily.

It's also enough to make us wonder if they could pull off a whole show with all the male cast members sporting mutton chops and speaking in Charles Dickens-era English. Anything's better than a night of charades.