Episode 3.6 - I’m Not That Guy

In this episode, there are three people who behave in strange ways and we, as an audience, just want to know WHY. We want to understand their motivations.

Okay, so for one of them, we know her motivations pretty quickly, but the people around her don’t know, and they are stuck wondering about her behavior.

First up is the unrelated story: Barney finds a porn star using Ted’s name as his stage name. Why on earth would someone do this? How did this guy land on “Ted Mosby” as a porn star name, when let’s face it, that name is not exactly sexy.

The guys go to a pornography convention and talk to The Other Ted Mosby. He says he grew up in Ted’s hometown and is about five years younger than Ted. Ted, at one point, saw this kid being bullied and ran the bullies off. The kid swore he’d honor Ted Mosby someday, and this is his way of doing so.

This motivation is silly, but it’s also pretty straightforward. Ted did a heroic thing, and this person is trying to honor that heroism in their own backward way.

The other two storylines are intertwined. Let’s start with Lily.

Lily and Robin come back from shopping and Robin asks a question that never gets asked in sitcoms: You are a kindergarten teacher, with a kindergarten teacher’s salary, how do you afford designer clothes?

Lily prevaricates a bit, but Robin isn’t buying it, so Lily confesses: She has dozens of credit cards and she’s in debt up to her eyeballs. This ends up explaining some of her recent behavior. She’s been encouraging Marshall to take a job that he has an interview for, but he doesn’t really want. Marshall wants to be an environmental lawyer, and this job is for a corporate defense firm that represents companies that destroy the environment.

Again, her motivation is pretty straight forward. She’s in debt and their life would be easier if Marshall had a high-paying job.

So we’ve seen mysterious motivations that get explained late in the story, wrapping up a mystery. We’ve seen motivations that are self-explanatory but don’t get revealed to the other characters in the story, despite being revealed to the audience.

This brings us to Marshall, who is tied up in the story that doesn’t get explained on screen at all.

Marshall is interviewing for a job at Nicholson, Hewitt, and West (named for dorms at Wesleyan University; Lily and Marshall and Ted all met in Hewitt Hall). NHW is selling him hard. They have him interview with a cool, young, handsome attorney. They take him out in a limo for an ultra-fancy steak dinner surrounded by celebrities. They promise he can have only one client, a theme park, and they take him to the theme park to stoke his nostalgia. They give him a “big” salary, a salary big enough to shock Marshall. Marshall graduated from Columbia University Law School, and the average starting salary for Columbia Law grads is in the neighborhood of $180,000 a year, plus bonuses and a company car, etc. This number must be in the $250,000 range for it to shock Marshall so soundly.

Which all begs the question: Why are they selling themselves to this one specific lawyer so hard? He’s not the only Columbia grad, and definitely not the only Ivy League grad in the city. He doesn’t even have his bar results yet.

Additionally, the young handsome lawyer says that he knows Marshall was already offered a job at the National Resource Defense Counsel (NRDC - an environmental defense firm).

None of this lawyer’s motivations are explained in any kind of detail, and the firm’s motivations are never explored at all. We just know that they want Marshall and they want him bad enough to lie to him and pay him a million dollars over the next couple years.

My theory? They are specifically recruiting lawyers who want to work for the NRDC or other non-profit groups. They don’t want talented, enthusiastic, well-educated lawyers working for their enemies, so they recruit those lawyers specifically. If this is the case, the story makes all kinds of sense. Every bit of it lines up, and a silly mystery ends up feeling like a sinister plot.

And this is the thing the writers must have done, knowing they weren’t going to get full credit for it. They know this law firm’s motivations, and those motivations color every single thing this law firm does. If the writers hadn’t been so meticulous in their plotting and planning, this storyline would have felt messy. It would have felt incomplete. But because they nailed this all down ahead of time, and even though they didn’t put it in the episode, the character feels consistent. His actions make sense, even if you don’t deduce the backstory.