Tuned In

HIMYM Watch: Going Down to the Cross Streets

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CBS

Spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother below:

Part of me is inclined to look at last night’s episode as the Arcadian Hotel—blown up, history, time to move on. There have been some strong moments in the past season of How I Met Your Mother—Marshall’s father’s death and Barney’s discovery of his own dad—but the series as a whole has become more and more nonessential this season and last. And “Challenge Accepted,” which I would not have believed was a season finale had I not double-checked, seemed less of a bang than a whimper. (Perhaps I was less favorably disposed to it because I watched it, vomit subplot and all, while eating dinner, but there you have it.)

But I’ve invested a lot in HIMYM at this point, and maybe you have too, so it’s worth at least taking a second to look back on the season.

I understand that the producers of the show are walking a fine line. Whenever they make a serious commitment to one storyline or another, like the Barney and Robin relationship, they risk taking heat from fans. (Those, for instance, who thought that that arc drained the funniness out of Barney.) Personally, I think that HIMYM is only good to the extent that it’s willing to commit, and while this season was somewhat of an improvement on the previous one, it wasn’t a big improvement.

I don’t need Ted to find the Mother, per se, but the show seems at this point to have a hard time doing anything with him except take him on romantic detours on the way to the Mother. Zoey was a failed detour for me not because we knew she could not be the Mother, but because the story began as a goof (all that business with The Captain) and never really became emotionally convincing. And yet we just got more and more of her—she even returned in the finale, after that storyline seemed to definitively end, as if the show discovered it had an extra half-hour to fill and didn’t know what else to do.

(Side note: I live one F train stop away from Smith and 9th Street, and while I was glad to see it make the big time, the real intersection is about a decade or so less gentrified than what we saw last night.)

So I was angry at the “that’s not really your Mother” fakeout, not because I need the mystery resolved per se, but because ripping the band-aid off out of nowhere seemed, momentarily, like just the thing the show needed to wake itself up. No such luck—and with Barney’s wedding somewhere off in the future, they may have kicked that can very far down the road.

As for the Barney/Robin/Nora question—which one does he end up marrying?—I’m OK with the setup, because I never thought HIMYM should have abandoned Barnman and Robin to begin with. But at this point, I just don’t have the confidence the show will commit. Let people start grousing that a Barney who is not a single horndog is not a funny Barney, and I worry that the producers will either hit the reset button again somehow.

The one storyline I feel all right about is Lily and Marshall’s baby; because they don’t have to carry the romantic freight that Ted does or the comedic weight that Barney does, the show generally does right by them. But in the larger sense, I suspect that, while I’ll watch the show next season—eventually—I’ll probably blog about it even less than this year. I’m just not sure that it’s really ready to accept the challenge.