CBS
Quick spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother:
To its credit, How I Met Your Mother has pushed its characters this season with some real and challenging developments: Barney’s finding his father, Marshall losing his, Marshall and Lily deciding to have a baby, then apparently deciding not to. But HIMYM has always felt a little conflicted about these getting-real moments. Too many of them, and your sitcom can start seeming like a cavalcade of Very Special Episodes, or just a downer. Space them out too far, and it seems like you don’t actually take them seriously.
One solution is to take a kind of X-Files approach, with a certain ratio of episodes devoted to character arcs, and the rest unrelated to them, which HIMYM has attempted at times. The other is to have episodes where you keep the character arcs and just deal with them goofily. “The Exploding Meatball Sub” was a combination of the two approaches—neither very successful.
The main problem with both the Ted and the Marshall/Lily storylines was that they covered territory past episodes have, but better. (When I saw the episode description—that Ted and Zoey would squabble over the GNB tower while Marshall wanted to leave his job and work to save the environment—I honestly at first thought the episode was a rerun.) The Ted storyline just seemed limp—the expected turn in the relationship where we discover that Zoey isn’t The One either, and pretty much for precisely the reasons it seemed like she wasn’t The One when they met.
Meanwhile, we revisited Marshall’s ambivalence toward his job at GNB. Of course, HIMYM has in the past been ambivalent about his ambivalence. First we saw that he took the GNB job because he knew deep down that he and Lily were going to need the money, and he was satisfied with that. Then, no, in fact he hated the job at GNB, but came to see that he could work for an evil company and still be a good person at home. Then, no, it turned out that he always loved working at GNB, even though Lily wanted him to leave the job. And now, no, actually, he has always hated it and decides to quit immediately, but Lily resents it.
As I’ve said before, this kind of indecision (and rationalization) about one’s life choices can be realistic—if the show commits to it and seems to take it seriously. But at this point it seems like Marshall’s career wavering is just something that the writers turn to when they need him and Lily to have a conflict—adjusting their positions on the issue to suit the episode—and in this case, the thing they needed to fight about was Marshall’s getting over his father’s death.
Speaking of fathers, the Barney subplot took the tack of essentially forgetting that the character had just experienced a major life change. And I’m OK with that, in theory: even when you get married or have a kid or discover your long-lost biological father, hey, other crap happens. But the meatball-sub vendetta was ridiculous even by Barney’s standards, and even if you try to hang the fig leaf of sublimation on it—i.e., that deep down, it’s his dad eating at him and not the marinara sauce—it’s still equally silly.
I don’t need every HIMYM to involve a major character journey; in fact, I’m fine with it if sometimes it’s just a show about five characters doing funny things. I just need it to actually be funny, where as last night’s was as soggy and leaden as, well, a meatball sub.