Spoilers for How I Met Your Mother coming up after the jump:
One of the unwritten rules of romantic comedies—or maybe it is written somewhere—is the assumption that all of the rest of humanity’s needs and desires are always subordinate to the protagonists eventually finding love. Strangers will offer help, taxi drivers will run red lights—you can justify dropping a neutron bomb on a population center if it enables the couple to end up in each others’ arms.
Thus it is with How I Met Your Mother—sometimes. That rule hit home in “The Window” when Ted began talking to his architecture class about his long-lost love, Maggie, and down to a person the students were immediately more interested in his love life and his delicate emo soul than their education. So it was a nifty reversal to see in the end that, all along, Ted had actually been secondary—a momentary impediment—to someone else’s real girl-next-door love story.
In the process, “The Window” was a nice, heartfelt episode that got us back to the storyline of Ted’s quest for love (after some time off), without hamhandedly bringing The Mother into it. A return to form for the show after the Barney and Robin interlude, and a welcome one.
The subplot, meanwhile, was also about realizing that Grown-Up You can’t live up to the desires of your youth. Marshall’s conflict between bringing home the bacon and saving the world has been an issue before, and I’m glad the show hasn’t forgotten it. (Though it’s always seemed a little exaggerated—he would probably not exactly starve as an environmental lawyer.) And it offered some of the best lines of the night. (“By now, your rat tail should be hanging down to your freaking knees.” And, more important: “Fart went to the fart to fart fartly.”)
One problem with it, and this is again probably a case of James Taking HIMYM Too Seriously: it’s always bothered me how Lily insists that Marshall keep working his soul-killing jobs so that she can continue to afford to teach kindergarten and feel good about herself. (The show’s implicit rationalization—that they couldn’t afford kids in New York City without a huge lawyer’s salary—is bogus, though it is a bogus idea that a lot of New York professionals believe, so it’s at least plausible.)
What’s sadder, though, is how Marshall always ends up deciding that, as long as he’s happy with Lily, it doesn’t matter in the end that he’s selling out and not saving the world. Yeah, screw the world! I wonder, in fact, if he actually depends on Lily to talk him out of quitting the Evil Bank, because he doesn’t deep down have the nerve to. (And with Lily playing the bad cop, Marshall can tell himself he’s staying for her.) Is he going to come to regret that eventually? Writing his letter to Future Marshall—I love that he feels obligated to call himself “Sir”—he holds out hope that he might be doing something better with his life by then. But once he’s fallen into this pattern—and there will always be reasons to stick with it—will he ever change? Has Marshall’s window already closed?
Of course, the world managed to survive long enough for us to develop time travel, and hopefully buffalo wings still exist 30 years in the future. So I guess everything turned out for the best.