The Internet is a beautiful thing. A wealth of information is instantly available at your fingertips on any conceivable topic, day or night (provided the WiFi isn’t wonky). In fact, with the modern-day search engine, you never have to be wrong ever again — just Google and feign omniscience. All this accessibility, however, can be pretty frightening when you consider the average person’s propensity for Facebook stalking. Nothing is sacred anymore; someone’s entire life story can be found in a matter of minutes. In “Mystery Vs. History,” Ted takes a stand against this obsession with technology — and of course, because it’s Ted, it is all done in the name of a girl.
It begins in MacLaren’s: Ted meets a Janet McIntyre at the bar, and Barney and Robin (flanked by her therapist boyfriend Kevin, who refuses to psychoanalyze their motley crew) immediately try to perform a background check, as they do with all of Ted’s dates. However, Ted wants to get to try getting to know someone the old-fashioned way, and insists they don’t tell him anything about her. In fact, he takes it a step further, making a pact with Janet not to look up each other’s histories online.
In the meantime, Marshall and Lily are involved in a little mystery of their own: They’re keeping the sex of their child a surprise. While Ted goes out on his date, everyone else helps paint the future Ericksen nursery a nice gender-neutral shade of yellow. But when Barney and Robin refuse to give up intervening in Ted’s romantic life, Kevin loses it and gives everyone his unsolicited professional opinion: Mildly put, they’re unhealthily dysfunctional.
Everyone is highly offended by this, but Kevin offers proof: They can’t go minutes without talking to each other, they frequently over-share and they are completely in denial of how ridiculous they are. In keeping with this denial, the group ignores him, and Barney continues to bug Marshall and Lily about whether he’s having a niece or a nephew. They allow him and Robin to look at the results of their test, and Lily changes her mind and asks Barney to reveal the secret — but Marshall throws the test out the window, and he and Lily agree to keep their baby’s sex a surprise.
On his date, Ted finds that it's difficult to talk to a girl without any prior knowledge as to what she’s actually like. But just he and Janet finally start hitting it off, the gang sends him everything they’ve discovered about her, and he eventually caves. What does he learn? Janet McIntyre is a genius, kidney-donating, baby-saving super athlete…who is also rich.
Ted, intimidated by all of Janet’s accomplishments, makes a fool out of himself, revealing that he broke the pact and causing Janet to storm out. When he joins everyone else later, he leans back, puts up his feet and concludes that mystery beats history. However, this is quickly disproved when Marshall sees the test results on the bottom of Ted’s feet, and he, Lily, and their odd group of friends celebrate that they’re having a son.
Highlights
A flashback to a 14-year-old Robin (who looks an awful lot like Lesbian Robin of the Five Doppelgangers), and her emotionally distant father.
Ted: When my parents met, they didn’t have the Internet! They just went out on a blind date and fell in love.
Janet: That’s nice! And they’re still together?
Ted: Right up to the divorce.
Barney: You might wanna see this, Ted — naked pictures.
Ted: That’s not Janet.
Barney: Who now?
In addition, when the group’s penchant for violence is brought up, we get a montage of acts of aggression and Slap Bets past set to the Canadian classic “Murder Train.”