Quick spoilers for last nights How I Met Your Mother coming up:
After Marshall’s father died, he returned home to Minnesota, as he described it, to help his mother out. As last night’s episode, “Desperation Day,” showed, there was much more to it than that: he was really going back home, in the end, to help himself out. His mother, suddenly widowed, was left without a man around the house, but Marshall—already adjusting to the idea trying to become a father—was also suddenly left to be the man of his own metaphorical house: to make the transition from being someone’s child to being an adult and, soon, a father. And in showing how he regressed to move forward, How I Met Your Mother perceptively and empathetically handled a transition that most people encounter at some point in life, but that sitcoms rarely look at up close.
The sugar that made it go down, of course, was the funny and in-character premise of Marshall becoming a kid again, playing Mario games and waiting for “Hot Pocket o’clock”—then to be joined by first Lily, and then Ted, escaping his own scary next step with Zoey. (Speaking of which: did they travel via the secret magic tunnel from Manhattan to Minnesota? Airplane or no, you could barely get from a bar to airport security in NYC inside four hours, much less the upper Midwest.) And the nicely turned metaphor of the headlights—and with it, Marshall’s realization that no adult really entirely knows what he’s doing—risked sappiness and ended up being satisfying and even funny.
I’ve already discussed my lack of interest in Ted and Zoey, so I’ll pass over that arc except to say that the subplot itself was fine enough; there’s more potential, if HIMYM pursues it, in the idea of Barney actually ending up interested in a girl in the long term (i.e., longer than 24 hours). I’m not ready to say HIMYM is back in top form yet, but its handling of Marshall’s storyline these past several episodes has given me hope that it’s ready, as it were, to commit again.