Spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother coming up:
A couple of things that distinguish How I Met Your Mother as a sitcom are its love of throwing in Easter eggs that reward attention, and its willingness to ground its comedy in serious, even dramatic, personal stories. “Bad News” showcased both traits, though not necessarily in such a way that they complimented each other, but first let’s focus on the episode’s very strong ending.
Handling a death on a comedy, non-comically, is tricky business without getting into Very Special Episode territory, but although the “bad news” about Marshall’s father was fairly well telegraphed, HIMYM handled the moment just right. The scene neither lingered on the pathos of the development or cut away to avoid risking discomfort; it let us see Marshall stunned and broken up by the shock, and Jason Segel played it credibly. (I’m used to thinking of Neil Patrick Harris as the acting all-star of the group, but a decade ago on Freaks and Geeks, Segel showed that he could handle some of the series’ more dramatic moments as serial-dream-crushee Nick.)
Just as important, his reaction—telling Lily that he’s not ready for this news—was spot-on. HIMYM is a show about growing up in a lot of ways, and the sudden death of a parent is something that brings that on quickly, in ways one can’t possibly prepare for. And being unable to share his final piece of good news with his dad underscores for Marshall how quickly and absolutely he’s going to have to transition from child to father.
Now for the build-up, which is to say The Numbers. Having a countdown play out in the background of the episode is the sort of thing that HIMYM might play with in any episode, just because it can, and it was definitely ingenious. (I noticed about halfway through, and went back to watch the episode in fast-forward afterward.) But it took on a different cast in retrospect, when you realized that it was basically a countdown to a character’s death, as if it were midnight on New Year’s Eve.
I don’t think the producers meant the device to be flippant; maybe there was some intended point about the limited time we all have in our lives. But as a showy meta device building to a real, and nicely handled emotional moment, it felt simultaneously too portentious—basically aiming a flashing neon arrow at the final scene—and too trivializing, and it was probably an idea better saved for another episode.
Despite that, I’ll give “Bad News” credit: HIMYM’s creators said that this season would focus more on its characters’ growth, and this episode did nothing if not that. I’ll be interested to see if and how the coming episodes deal with the aftermath.
Now the hail of bullets:
* I’m not going to pretend that I saw Marshall’s father’s death coming—well, not until Marshall walked out of the bar and tried to phone him. But I did get a premonition earlier, in the first phone-call scene. There was something about how tightly the camera focused on the beer can (in retrospect, probably just to show off the number 36) that made me think it was going to pull back and reveal something badly wrong, and I had the morbid thought that maybe Marshall’s dad was going to collapse. But then I immediately forgot my morbid thought until the end of the episode.
* Just to show that I’m not all that observant, though, I didn’t notice the series of numbers until around 21. You?
* Barney’s doppelgänger revealed! NPH did a very good job here of playing the character as a recognizably different person, but just close enough in manner that you could believe it was Barney faking (as, at one point, it was).
* Also, who knew that when you put a black beard on Neil Patrick Harris, he becomes Jeremy Davies?
