Marshall Eriksen
Marshall Eriksen is a lion, an environmental remediation lawyer, and one of the four friends Robin Scherbatsky drinks with at MacLaren's. He is married to Lily Aldrin. He is introduced in the W-Series in "Porch Test", where he folds himself into the inside corner of a booth and spends the evening being the easiest mammal at it to talk to.
Background
Marshall is enormous through the chest and shoulders, with a tawny mane long past management. His practice is environmental remediation, and most of it consists of suing city agencies for records they already owe him. Parks, then Water, then Parks again. He has deposed reporters, and has a working theory about them: the ones who argue do not have the story yet.
He met Lily at orientation the night before the first day of college and told her where he lived. The next morning she knocked, and he opened the door. He has been correcting the retelling ever since: Ted and Lily run it as an argument about whom she was looking for, when the mammal who actually answered the door was him.
Personality
He is warm and slow to be provoked, drinking through an argument he has heard a hundred times without joining it. He notices things sideways, reading Robin's unusual care with a table of strangers back to the mammal who told her no, and he says what he notices without making a performance of it. He is candid about being the easy one, and he does not embarrass over crying at a kindergarten career day.
Series History
W-Series
In "Porch Test", Marshall arrives with the others at MacLaren's and folds himself into the booth's inner corner. When Barney declares that everyone present met by accident, Marshall corrects him: he gave Lily the room number, and the door he opened is the reason the group exists. Once the second table is pushed against the first he finds Luther beside him and works out unprompted that Luther is the one who told Robin no, because Robin has been careful all evening and she is careful with nobody. Told that she wrote the refusal down instead of arguing, he rates her. He then describes his own practice and gets, in return, the best advice of his career from a wolf drinking soda water: ask a city agency for its retention schedule before asking for records, get it on the docket, and then request the files by the schedule's own names for them. Later, when Nick calls his own four a pack and Lily reaches for the word for theirs, Marshall supplies "pride," and Lily keeps it.
Key Relationships
Lily Aldrin
His wife, and the mammal he opened the door to. They keep a running argument about whether law is harder than five-year-olds, which she wins by citing career day. When he says her test worked, she tells him it worked on him, and he concedes without complaint that he was an easy case.
Luther Pawthorne
An hour in a corner that neither of them expected to enjoy. Marshall gets a records tactic he will use for the rest of his career; Luther, off duty, volunteers whole sentences to a lion he met that night.
Ted Mosby
The friend whose habits he narrates to strangers, and the other half of a first-morning story he has never been allowed to tell straight.
Trivia
- Marshall Eriksen takes his name from Marshall Eriksen of How I Met Your Mother, an environmental lawyer there as here.