Episode Title: "Mom and Dad"
Episode Grade: B-
This final season of How I Met Your Mother has had a few themes. One of them has been family and the lengths to which these characters will go to find one. Barney's getting some of that with his marriage to Robin, but there's still something lacking: parents.
"Mom and Dad" is mainly a filler episode, a half-hour that exists to get some guest stars some screen time, give Billy Zabka a plot and take up some time while the season-long arcs percolate. It's a reasonably entertaining episode, but it's basically the Three Musketeers bar of television: delicious air.
"Mom and Dad" is primarily concerned with...well, mom and dad. Barney's brother James brings his biological father, a minister, to the wedding, thus solving the whole "dead Edward Hermann" plot from earlier. Meanwhile, Barney's dad, the always-delightful John Lithgow, arrives with his wife in tow.
Part of the fun of Barney's character for the show's writers is that he's occupied enough different emotional states over nine years that they can do pretty much anything they want with him and Neil Patrick Harris will make it work. So when "Mom and Dad" calls for him to act like an obsessed child trying to get his mother and father back together after three decades, well, it's not as big a stretch as it sounds.
His antics here are entertaining enough, in part for their total transparency and ineffectiveness. He hatches a scheme that involves fooling his biological parents into thinking the stairs are broken; he achieves this by erecting a sign that says "The stairs are wet. No, broken. The stairs are broken."
Having driven the two into the elevator, which he sabotages, he proceeds to lower them supplies: wine, champagne, an iPod playing romantic music and "a television showing pretty graphic 70's pornography."
The highlight of the episode probably comes after, once Barney's mom and dad figure out what's going on and James admits that he's trying to get their mom together with his dad. Barney and James come up with dueling musical numbers to express their fantasy of a traditional, white picket fence family; amusingly, both brothers are wearing beanies and short pants in these fantasies. And Barney interrupts James' number to claim that their mom is totally cheating on James' dad with Barney's.
As it turns out, their mom actually is dating James' dad, a fact that Robin convinces Barney to accept by pointing out that James needs this a lot more than Barney does. It's a fairly standard, yawn-inducing ending, and not quite as touching as the show thinks it is.
The B-plot here is more fun, because it involves Ted acting like a self-important douchebag and a heist plot centering around Billy Zabka. Barney gives Ted an autographed photo of Wayne Gretzky for safekeeping, as it's going to be Barney's gift to Robin (she sometimes says Wayne's name in bed. Barney's accepted it). Ted gets out of the shower to discover that the photo is covered with his calligraphy ink.
Ted unleashes "Detective Moseby," even though Lily points out that Ted couldn't figure out the pineapple incident from season three. There's some funny business in this plot with Ted accusing three different people, including Zabka, a bell boy and Robin's cousin Claude. Claude seems the best bet once Ted finds him with his hands covered in ink, but it turns out Claude was just saving an elderly Rastafarian paraglider who crashed into the ocean and was attacked by an octopus.
It turns out that Zabka, the villain of Karate Kid and Barney's long-time hero, is just tired of being a bad guy. People have been throwing popcorn at him his whole life. Even his Mom boos him. So he stole the photo and covered one of his own autographed head shots in ink (he always carries around 2,000 in his trunk), planning to give the photo to Barney and earn back the best man title.
This is all feather-light and wafer-thin, and if you're not terribly concerned with Billy Zabka at this point in the show's run, well, I can't blame you. But it's the kind of enjoyably random side plot that HIMYM has long specialized in, and if you're going to stretch a weekend over 20+ episodes, they aren't all going to be crucial to the central plot.
Notes
- Barney arranges for his dad's wife to be out of the hotel, then leaves a suicide note with lines like "I'm going to kill my-wait for it-self" and "so to summarize, I'm super dead and you should totally bone Loretta."
- "Oh no, my calligraphy ink! I mean, oh no, the photo!"
- Even Zabka has heard about Ted's failure with the pineapple incident.
- The musical numbers really are funny. Hopefully CBS will post them online at some point; it's hard to take notes while watching live.
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