15 TV episodes we’ll never get tired of watching

How I Met Your Mother, “Slap Bet”

Two words: Robin. Sparkles.

That’s right, this legendary How I Met Your Mother episode is when we find out about Robin Scherbatsky’s alter ego, Robin Sparkles, from when she was a teen pop star back in Canada in the ’90s. But that’s not what her pals think when they find out she has an aversion to malls.

Barney is sure that Robin’s hesitation about going to a mall is somehow because she did porn. Marshall, on the other hand, thinks she got married at a mall back in Canada. They agree to a “slap bet” which means that whoever ends up being right gets to slap the other person in the face, and Lily is made the Slap Bet Commissioner to keep things on track.

Robin confides in Ted that she was married at a mall and that’s why she hates them, and he promises not to tell anyone… but he still tells Lily and Marshall. Since he was right, Marshall gets to slap Barney across the face, but that doesn’t mean Barney was done researching Robin’s past. Robin ends up admitting that she wasn’t actually married, so when Lily finds out, she gives Barney permission to slap Marshall three times — once for Marshall lying, and two for being “prematurely slapped.”

Barney gets word about a video starring Robin from a man in Malaysia, and it gets uploaded to MySpace (so dated). He calls her “Robin Sparkles,” and Robin demands to know where he heard that name. The video starts with Robin, dressed as a schoolgirl, begging her teacher not to give her detention, so like, it definitely seems like porn. They pause the video for Robin’s sake, and Barney gives Marshall a nice slap across the face for being right. But… he wasn’t right after all.

When Robin lets them play the full video, the gang finds out that their pal Robin found success as a teen pop star under the name Robin Sparkles, and her hit song was called “Let’s Go To The Mall.” Not only is “Let’s Go To The Mall” a total bop, but as punishment, Marshall gets to slap Barney five times over the course of all eternity. The slap bet lives on in later episodes, and this is the one episode that started it all.