The Naked Man (How I Met Your Mother)

"The Naked Man" is the ninth episode in the fourth season of the television series How I Met Your Mother and 73rd overall. It aired on November 24, 2008.

Plot

Ted ponders how long it will take to recover from being left at the altar by Stella, asking for advice from Lily, Marshall, Robin and Barney. He soon finds out himself as he begins to talk to a woman he always sees at the elevators at work, Vicky. Slowly they get to know one another, until Ted blurts out that he got left at the altar. He rebounds into asking her out to a date, which she accepts.

He comes home later that day, passing by Robin talking on the phone outside. When he enters his apartment, he finds Mitch, Robin's blind date, sitting naked on the couch. After hearing from Lily that the blind date had been going badly, Ted goes back and confronts Mitch again, who tells Ted about his "move", The Naked Man, where one takes advantage of a distraction in order to shed their clothing and surprise their date with nakedness in the hope of receiving sex by means of humor, pity or sheer spontaneity. Ted tells the gang about the move's effectiveness (it supposedly works "2 out of 3 times, guaranteed"), and they proceed to rebuff the claim, thinking Robin may end up shooting Mitch instead. Taking the notion seriously, they storm back to Ted's apartment to find a makeshift "Do not disturb" sign hanging from the doorknob and realize Robin is indeed having sex with her horrific blind date.

Convinced that The Naked Man indeed works, Barney believes it will revolutionize the one-night stand, much to the chagrin of Lily, who still believes Barney has feelings for Robin. Ted's still amazed that The Naked Man worked on Robin. Marshall calls her a slut, saying that the only reason to sleep with someone is true love (mostly because he was recently strong armed into reading The Notebook by the secretary's book club at work). Everyone disagrees, and Lily claims she can name at least 50 reasons to sleep with someone while everyone but Marshall helps. Stuck on 46, Lily resolves to finish her list as Barney tries to convince Ted to do The Naked Man with Vicky on their upcoming date while he goes out to attempt The Naked Man himself. As Barney's getting ready, he calls Ted to let him know that he's going through with it. To his surprise, Ted is too after he realized that there was no future between him and Vicky, mainly because she is incredibly rude to a waiter.

On their second date, Robin tries to start up small talk with Mitch, who tells Robin that she's out of his league. After debating which pose to display themselves in, Ted finds a volume of Pablo Neruda's poetry in Vicky's apartment and decides to put his clothes back on. When he finds out that the book isn't even hers, he busts out The Naked Man, as does Barney on his date, and Lily on Marshall.

Ted tells Lily and Marshall at the bar of his success with The Naked Man, and they tell him that it worked out for them as well. Robin, still trying to defend herself, brings Mitch with her to the bar. Marshall takes back what he said, to Robin's relief, and she lets Mitch leave. Ted thanks Mitch for the move, saying that it worked for everyone. Marshall decides to call Barney to see how it worked for him. As it turns out, Barney fails and was forced to leave her apartment naked, leaving his cell phone, which was then thrown in the toilet after the end of the call (with the "Naked Man" having worked 2 out of 3 times; Ted and Lily succeeded while Barney failed). Ted proposes a toast to his hero Mitch, The Naked Man.

Meanwhile, Barney roams the streets naked trying to get home. He comes across some cheap suits on a rack outside but is not interested in any of them, so he continues to roam naked.

Continuity

• As Ted recalls strange occurrences at his apartment, one of them is a goat in his living room on May 8, 2009. The goat was first seen in Ted's bathroom on his 30th birthday as mentioned in Ted's voice-over narration in the first season episode "Milk", and foreshadow the events of the episode "The Leap" later this season. During the episode "The Goat", future Ted stated that the goat in his bathroom was actually on his 31st birthday, which would be April 25, 2009. Also, when Ted walks in on Barney in the glass room, Robin is there, but it is July 16, 2007. During this time Robin was in Argentina after her break-up with Ted.
• Barney previously tried a similar technique when invited back to Robin's place to play Battleship in the episode Zip, Zip, Zip: He immediately stripped naked, thinking she wanted sex.^[1]
• In the season 5 episode "Rabbit or Duck", Don tries the Naked Man technique on Robin.^[2] Don says he read in "some guy's blog", referring to Barney's writings.
• Marshall unintentionally scares Lily by saying that a shadow looks like a "scary toothless clown" right before bed. Lily's fear of clowns could go as far back as her childhood, when her father created the board game "There's a Clown Demon Under the Bed" and showed it to her after she had a nightmare.
• Barney is shown chained in a glass water tank, another example of his doing magic.
• Lily asks Barney whether he uses devices for sex or not. Her curiosity about Barney's sex life shown in "The Goat"

Cultural references

• Among the strange occurrences at Ted's apartment is a scene were Robin is seen pointing her gun at two thieves, one of them aiming at the other one and that one aiming at Robin. This is a typical Mexican standoff situation, seen in many movies, especially well known from Reservoir Dogs.
• Mitch describes his technique as a mixture of surprise and pity, or "shock and awww", a play on the military technique of rapid dominance known as Shock and awe.
• Barney describes The Naked Man as being like a superhero, the Superman to Barney's Batman, contrasting the Barney complicated approach, gadgets, gimmicks and secret identities, to the simple idea of ripping off one's clothes.^[3][4]
• When Ted admits he is wearing tinted sunscreen because he wants his eyes to stand out, it is a reference to makeup artist Carmindy from the television series What Not to Wear.^[4]
• Some of the poses they used referred to the Captain Morgan rum logo, Superman, the Heisman Trophy, Mr. Clean, the Coppertone Girl pose, Rodin's The Thinker, and actor Burt Reynolds, whose pose existed in real-life.^[5]
• When Ted is standing around naked in Vicky's apartment, he opens a book of love poems by Pablo Neruda and discovers it is bookmarked to his favorite poem, which appropriately is "Desnuda Eres" ("Naked, You Are..").
• The end of the episode is a reference to Commissioner Gordon's ending monologue in The Dark Knight.

Critical response

Donna Bowman of The A.V. Club graded the episode "A-".^[6]

Cindy McLennan of Television Without Pity rated the episode with a grade "A-".^[4]

Michelle Zoromski of IGN gave the episode 8.5 out of 10.^[3]

References

External links

• The Naked Man at the Internet Movie Database
• The Naked Man at TV.com