How Your Mother Got Her Band (Review)

Series: How I Met Your Mother
Episode Title: "Bass Player Wanted"
Episode Grade: B+

It's easy when talking about How I Met Your Mother to focus on love and romance. The show has long had a strong, confident voice on those topics, and those are obviously the show's driving themes.

But How I Met Your Mother is also, to a very real extent, about friendship. The platonic relationships between these five people have carried the show when its broader romance arc lurched and started started straining under the weight of eight seasons. Put simply, it's been fun to watch these guys hang out, and that was always enough to see the show throw the darkness.

"Bass Player Wanted" is essentially a celebration of these friendships, a chance for How I Met Your Mother to toast its characters and their relationships with each other. So, yeah, it's a little easy and self-congratulatory at points, but the show has earned that at this point in its life.

Plus, we get a nifty little storyline for The Mother!

"Bass Player" revolves around the antics of guest star Andrew Rannells, who I've never heard of before in my life but who apparently does quite a lot of voice work for cartoons. Rannells plays Darren, who The Mother labels a "fire-starter" for his ability to ingratiate himself with a couple friends, find out their deepest secrets, then immediately spill them and ruin the friendships. He's also the lead singer of The Mother's band, which comes up later.

We know all of this because The Mother, in one of those bullshit plot devices we're willing to forgive a beloved show in its ninth and final season, drives by Marshall trying to walk the five miles to the Farhampton Inn and picks him up.

The early scenes where Darren manages to utterly charm Robin and Lilly and then Ted and Barney are charming for the contemptuous ease of his approach; Robin is immediately won over when Darren recognizes how "hilarious and adorable" she and Lily are. Barney and Ted, meanwhile, lose their objectivity when Darren breaks out a story about losing his mother in a hunting trip that was inspired by Bambi (he later tells the bartender that his mother was eaten by a barracuda, which The Mother angrily points out is just from Finding Nemo).

There's an element of the 80's sitcom to the resulting conflicts: the friends all have their little spats over relatively minor issues (Robin sort of sides with Marshall in the whole "Judge vs. Italy" debate, but mainly because she's afraid of losing her best friend, while Barney is outraged to learn that Ted is moving to Chicago and hasn't told anyone besides Lily), there's a commercial break, a couple friends make big gestures and all is forgiven and everything is fine.

But again, this is the kind of thing you can get away with when you have nine seasons of character equity build up. We understand the depth of the connection these friends have with each other, and at this late point in the show's run we're willing to accept a certain amount of short-hand from characters we've grown to know so well.

And besides, the big gestures are pretty cute and character appropriate. Robin holds the arms of Lily's "Marsh-pillow" so Lily can beat it up, and Ted steals an extraordinarily expensive bottle of scotch for Barney, who notes approvingly that it could have gotten Ted thrown in jail (Barney thinks going to jail for your best friend is "living the dream").

And hey, The Mother! Cristin Milioti has integrated into the show really well, and "Bass Player Wanted" actually gives her a little plot of her own. It doesn't really add up to much; she used to be the lead singer of her band "Super Freakonomics" (she started it with a bunch of her business school friends), only to be gradually pushed out by Darren. She's trying to work up the courage to confront him, but simply can't.

This is all pretty feather-light stuff, though it gets a reasonably funny conclusion when Darren accidentally breaks the $600 bottle of scotch Ted stole for Barney (the third such bottle to get broken over the weekend) and gets punched out as a result. But Milioti does a really good, really funny job of selling the character's righteous, utterly impotent rage, and, not to overshare, I can certainly appreciate a character struggling with confrontation.

As I've written before, I'm acutely vulnerable to the "awwww...." moments, and How I Met Your Mother has always specialized in them. But it has worked for them over nine years of excellent character work and solid writing that establishes the gang as a group of people worth watching and rooting for. I'm OK with a little bit of reflection in this final season.

Notes:

• I am a little worried about Ted's eventual breakdown, which we've been lead to think occurs as a result of a final, failed attempt to win Robin back. Ted and Barney share a nice moment where Barney recognizes that Ted has trouble hanging around Robin and doesn't say anything, and this season has done such a nice job exploring the bond between Robin and Barney. It would be a shame to lose some of that for the sake of cheap drama.
• Marshall realizes he's hallucinating on the walk to the inn because he saw Bigfoot smoking by the side of the road, and everyone realizes Bigfoot quit smoking years ago.
• The Mother is wearing driving gloves, which is a wonderful little callback to the first episode of the season.
• Barney just wants Marshall to be a judge so he can get all of his public urination citations dismissed. Robin seems really, really proud of all those citations.
• Milioti does a nice job selling a bit where she pretends to be a psychic who knows all of Marshall's history before revealing that she met Lily on the train.
• Barney doesn't think Chicago is a real place. It's just a style of pizza. "You can't live in a pizza, Ted!"

Rhyme Time (Review)

Series: How I Met Your Mother
Episode Title: "Bedtime Stories"
Episode Grade: B

One of the themes most prevalent in discussions about How I Met Your Mother's final season has been creative exhaustion. Nine seasons is just a long damn run for a sitcom, and it's easy to exhaust most of your compelling plots and character beats. How, then, would the show fare in its last season, especially with the curious choice to set it over the course of a weekend?

The answer has generally been a positive one. There has been an energy to this season that has been lacking from the last few years of the show. It's as if Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, so close to the finish line, have finally found the themes they dreamed about when they first pitched How I Met Your Mother.

That said, if anyone wants to argue that "Bedtime Stories" is an example of creative exhaustion, it would be hard to disagree. It's a classic gimmick episode, a half-hour divided into three rhyming stories, set within the framing device of Marshall trying to talk young Marvin to sleep. It's the kind of idea one can imagine being tossed out in frustration in an exhausted writer's room after several hours of futile attempts to think up new stories.

And let's be clear about what "Bedtime Stories" is and is not. It's not a meaningful or substantive episode of the show. It's not a classic half-hour of television. It's not going to stick in the memory for long.

It is a gimmick episode. But it is also fun and funny and it's evidence of a mind at work. Sometimes desperation is the spark of genius, and sometimes it's the spark of inanity. This week, however, it's the spark of a light-hearted romp that everyone involved clearly enjoyed.

Look, there's only so much you can say about "Bedtime Stories." It doesn't explore any new territory. In the first story, "Mosby at the Bat," Ted wonders whether his dinner with a beautiful young professor is a date or a business meeting. In the second story, "Robin Takes the Cake," Robin steals the wedding cake belonging to her old Canadian high school flame James Van Der Beek (back for a lovely cameo, and looking sharp), only to turn the day into something triumphant by eating the whole thing. In the third, "Barney Stinson: Player King of New York City," Barney has sex with a dumb woman.

The bigger problem is that this is even a hard episode to do the "here are some funny quotes" thing for, as the language is precise enough that it punishes those of us trying to watch live and take notes at the same time. So it's hard to point at concrete examples of why I enjoyed this episode as much as I did.

I would only say this: I kicked off this blog with a defense of Aaron Sorkin centered around the idea that I place more weight on the quality of language than most critics. It's fun for me to watch skilled writers play around with language, explore its limits and shape it into something unique or interesting.

And that's what "Bedtime Stories" is all about: a bunch of sitcom writers letting their hair down for a bit and getting back to the sheer joy of playing with words. Yes, it's basically the television equivalent of eating popcorn for dinner. But we're all allowed to indulge from time-to-time.

Notes

• Barney's story is basically just an excuse to let Neil Patrick Harris ham it up as six different characters on the "Players' Council." Long Island Lou is a particular favorite.
• Cobie Smoulders has that wonderfully useful television quality of looking beautiful even when she looks awful. 
• Ted's date is played by Camille Guaty. I mention this only because I used to watch Las Vegas when I was un-employed and it was syndicated on TBS. She played a concierge named Piper in that show's final season, aka "The Tom Selleck Season." A beautiful woman, no doubt.
• Here, she plays a physics professor who slept with Derek Jeter (Barney in a t-shirt that says "Jeter"). There's also a funny little moment where she claims that architecture is boring and Ted takes great offense. 

Don't Tell Richard Cohen (Review)

Series: How I Met Your Mother
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. 

Winning (Review)

Series: How I Met Your Mother
Episode Title: "Platonish"
Episode Grade: B+

How you feel about How I Met Your Mother's insistence on repeatedly returning to the Ted-Robin well probably informs how you feel about "Platonish" and the last few seasons of the show in general. I know there are a lot of fans who look at these storylines as tiresome and pointless, and not just because we know Ted and Robin don't end up together. You can only watch a man run headlong into a wall so many times before you want to stop, and Ted's persistent yearning for a woman he broke up with five years ago is the character at his most pathetic and least entertaining.

I get this point of view, really. I understand it. But to me, the relationship between Ted and Robin has always represented one of the show's emotional cores. This is a reflection of the strength of their bond, as shown way back in season two. Put simply, the two were good together, and How I Met Your Mother handled their break-up with a rationality and maturity that's rare for sitcom relationships.

"Platonish" starts rolling one of the significant plotlines for this final season: Ted's last, desperate, doomed attempt to win back Robin at her wedding. Its flashback structure raises some questions, and for the first time in the season The Mother is used in a less-than-optimal fashion. But taken as a whole, it's another solid entry in a season that, so far at least, has been brimming with quality.

"Platonish" isn't shy about addressing some of the complaints I mentioned in the first paragraph. The decision to structure this episode around Ted and Marshall at a Harlem Globetrotters game isn't just an excuse to give the two some hilarious dialogue ("That's not a pregnant lady, that's a basketball under his jersey! Blow the freaking whistle!"). It's about acknowledging the way Ted views himself when the context is romantic relationship; he and Marshall are rooting for the doomed Washington Generals, of course, and throughout the series Ted has often seemed like nothing so much as a fool on a doomed journey.

And Robin's a reminder of that. Even compared to being left at the altar, Robin is Ted's great romantic failure. And she's also one of his best friends, which means every day he has to see the ghost of what might have been.

So when he spends the episode insisting to Marshall that he's not interested in Robin, it's (obviously) not sincere. Instead, it's the wary pessimism of a man who's been bitten so many times by the same snake that he's afraid to take a step.

Barney? Well, Barney's a winner, of course. He spends most of the episode accepting and completing various challenges from Robin and Lily, including convincing a girl he's Ryan Gosling after plastic surgery, getting a girl's phone number while speaking like a dolphin and wooing a woman while unable to use the letter "E" (a task which clearly entertained the show's writers).

But Barney doesn't really want to "win." He wants to play. The challenge is the thing. It's noteworthy that Barney doesn't actually sleep with any of the women he talks to in "Platonish;" he just gets their numbers so he can check the challenge off the list.

That stops when he runs into his last challenge, having been dispatched by Lily and Robin to pick up diapers and a smoothie...oh, and also a woman. That woman turns out to be The Mother.

There were a lot of challenges associated with integrating The Mother into the show, and How I Met Your Mother has generally avoided them. This is mainly thanks to Cristin Milioti, who does a lot with her limited screen time. But the show's writers have also used her reasonably well, giving her chances to interact with individual characters and writing her in a way that makes her genuinely appealing.

"Platonish," however, does commit a sin that always tempts writers in this situation by making Milioti just a bit too awesome. It's a venal sin, and I don't want to overstate the extent of the problem here, but it does ring a little false when she diagnoses Barney as lovelorn and miserable after a sentence worth of interaction.

It's the conversation that ends Barney's game-playing and puts him on his collision course with Robin. Again, this is a bit much: retconning the series to give Milioti such an out-sized role in this final story strains credulity, and it's a plot point that seems to exist just to convince us that The Mother is really special.

But the show knocks its ending sequence out of the park: Ted telling Marshall that he's willing to wait for something to happen with Robin, while Barney writes out the play that will win her over.

It's a triumphant moment for Barney, of course, but to the audience, with our hindsight, it's also a brutal, devastating moment for Ted. At the moment when his former urgency and willingness to throw himself off a cliff in the name of love could actually win the day, he instead steps back, content to wait. Instead, it's Barney who exhibits the passion, dedication and urgency we've always associated with Ted.

Everything ends well for Ted, of course. We know as much. But How I Met Your Mother has always been as concerned with the pain of the journey as the triumph of the destination. Winning requires a lot of losing.

Notes

• The show has some fun playing with the fact that Marshall and Robin rarely spend much time together, as Barney imagines them unwilling to make out even if it results in the entire bar being blown up by a madman with odd demands.
• Barney, introducing himself without using the letter "E:" "My word for this guy is Barn...O."
• Bryan Cranston shows up as Ted's old douchebag boss, making the offer to move to Chicago that Ted will eventually accept. He's in a bit of a pickle, as the concave glass tower he built raised the temperature of the water in the city aquarium to 190 degrees, killing several species of rare fish. 
• "Hey ref, you should check your voicemail. You've missed a lot of calls!"

The Light of the Future (Review)

Series: How I Met Your Mother
Episode Title: "The Lighthouse"
Episode Grade: A

It might be a good idea at some point in the future to sit down and write a post about the difficulty of separating one's emotional reaction to art from a reasonable evaluation of the work's merits. Emotion is a key element to that evaluation, of course, but it's not difficult for a moderately skilled artist to create something that is both mediocre and capable of plucking the audience's heartstrings.

All of this is a long way of saying that I don't know if I enjoyed "The Lighthouse" as much as I did because it was a genuinely moving, well-written episode or because I'm soft-hearted enough to be easily bowled over by its sentimentality.

Maybe trying to answer that is an exercise in futility and pointless navel-gazing. And in fairness, I'm pretty good at both of those things. But whatever the cause, watching Ted propose to The Mother in a flash forward at the end of the episode was a thrilling moment, and it won me over completely.

One of the advantages that comes with nine seasons of television is that it's difficult to have an un-earned character moment. Ted proposing to an adorable Cristin Milioti isn't just the climax of an episode, it's the climax to nine years of character work. Maybe the connection viewers have to television characters is silly (OK, it definitely is), but that connection is there. And we've seen enough skillfully constructed heartbreak that witnessing a moment of sheer triumph resonates in a way it wouldn't on a shorter-lived sitcom.

One of the themes How I Met Your Mother has consistently hit on throughout its run has been the reality that, even if The One actually exists and we're actually capable of finding him or her, that still means every relationship we have along the way is going to end in disappointment. The show's writers have taken pains at times to demonstrate that the disappointment at the end doesn't negate what came before, that a relationship that ends isn't a relationship that failed and that life is the beautiful disappointments that come before the messy successes. But there's always that hint of sadness, even in the knowledge of Ted's inevitable happy ending.

We some of this idea in "The Lighthouse," which ends by contrasting Ted's moment with The Mother in the titular lighthouse with the earlier moment in the same lighthouse he shared with Anna Camp's Cassie. Cassie's basically a decent girl; beautiful, of "normal height," as Lily points out. She's just in the middle of an awful weekend, and she's not really a good match for Ted.

So when Ted hauls Cassie up to the top of the lighthouse (she sprained her ankle on a kid's toy car), only to end up vomiting over the edge of the thing, it seems like another place that he's ruined with his desperate search for Mrs. Right.

But "The Lighthouse's" theory is simple: you're not history's prisoner. The failures of your past don't dictate the course of your future. A setting isn't ruined simply because you once shared it with someone who wasn't right for you; instead, you can discover the beauty of a place and a moment by finding someone who is.

Robin and Barney's plot ties into that theme, at least at its conclusion. This is a fairly light plot through most of the episode's running time, as Robin and Barney's mom play out their hostility through the time-honored art form of scrambled eggs. It's occasionally amusing, and Cobie Smoulders continues to give an MVP-caliber comedic performance this season.

Once the comedic table setting is cleared away, however, and Robin lets slip to Barney's mom that she can't have kids, the plot takes a different turn. Part of the reason "Symphony of Illumination," an episode in the show's seventh season, was such a masterpiece was that it allowed Robin to experience genuine despair at the revelation that she was medically incapable of bearing children without implying that she would have done so if she could. Robin never wanted kids, but having a road barred to you can be heartbreaking even if you don't think you're going to take it.

When her aerophobic mother calls to say she can't get on the plane to come to the wedding, it's a reminder that there are things Robin has never had and things she never can have. Her relationship with her parents has always been distant, at best, and she's unable to forge a new family in the usual way.

So her final embrace with Barney's mom is a recognition that there are other ways of doing so. There are things Robin has never had, and there are things she can never have, but that doesn't mean family is a ruined lighthouse.

Notes

• "A scramble-off to the death! Watch out for the cops!" "We really should have checked up on this town before booking our wedding here."
• Marshall and Daphne spend the night at Ted's old house in Cleveland. Ted imagines a highway sign saying "Welcome to Cleveland, Home of Ted Moseby," then admits that was unlikely.
• Ted's mom has an Old West-style photo Ted took with his best friend when he was a kid. Ted's best friend was a balloon.
• "I've always liked children. I've always wanted a Lamborghini with a hot tub in it."
• Turns out, ZZ Top's hit "Legs" was actually about Loretta's eggs. Robin's not impressed by this revelation about "Zed Zed Top."
• Ted's future wife doesn't have to share his love of coins, but it'd be nice if he didn't have to go stag to CoinCon.
• Lily being handed a glass of booze by Linus the bartender is never not funny.  

Texts and Sub-Text (Review)

Series: How I Met Your Mother
Episode Title: "No Questions Asked"
Episode Grade: A-

How I Met Your Mother has always been fond of the running gag. At the series' best, the show's writers take that age-old concept and turn it into something more than a frequently repeated joke. As in "No Questions Asked," tonight's stellar episode, the gag is both episodic glue and thematic through line.

"No Questions Asked" eschews a traditional multi-plot structure for a single narrative that ropes in the entire core cast. It does so with skill and humor, and it does so in a way that pays off with surprising emotion at the end of the episode.

"No Questions" asked picks up right after the end of last week's episode, which ended with Marshall's phone ringing with a call from Lily. And since Sherri Shepherd had admitted to texting Lily with the news that Marshall had accepted a judgeship in New York, there was every reason to think she was calling about that bit of news.

This turns out to be a fairly predictable fake-out, and instead Lily is scared to learn she's staying in the room haunted by the ghost of Deerdorf the Hooker, who murdered people with his hook hand (or, alternatively, was a popular male prostitute who killed no one and died of syphilis). Marshall's pretty stoked about this, of course, being a huge fan of ghosts.

The show's writers have some fun with the ghost story element (this is HIMYM's Halloween episode, presumably), but it's there to instigate the episode's plot: Marshall's realization that Lily hasn't checked her text messages yet and hasn't seen Shepherd's text.

He then starts calling in favors, which presents some amusing vignettes. These are "no questions asked" favors, and Ted, Barney and Robin all owe him one. Ted, because Marshall got him out of the mailbox in which he was stuck. Barney, because Marshall agreed to sign him out of the hospital when Barney had been rushed there after winning $50 from an Irish guy by swallowing large versions of all the items in Lucky Charms cereal. And Robin, who Marshall rescued from a horde of unitard-clad ninjas when she herself was mysteriously wearing her own purple unitard and calling herself "Night Falcon."

The way all three friends take to the task of deleting the text from Lily's phone with over-the-top bravado is good for some easy laughs. Ted climbs the drain pipe outside of Lily's room in a driving rain storm. Barney crawls through the air ducts "like the bad guy in Die Hard" (Bruce Willis). And Robin, who orders obscenely expensive room service and hides in the food cart. None of them are the least bit concerned with the fact that Lily's room is unlocked.

This is all really, really funny, and that's quite enough for me. But "No Questions Asked" takes a step into something more with the way it nods at questions of love and marriage. There's a little sideplot here where Barney and Robin start worrying about the long-term viability of their marriage when they realize they're both "lone wolves" who don't consult each other before making decisions.

Is this a little sudden and on-the-nose, a bit of tossed off material mainly there to advance the plot? Sure. This isn't something that's been discussed before. But this is also where our familiarity with the show's characters, build up over nine seasons, comes in handy. Yes, the particulars Barney and Robin are talking about are new, but they reflect broader truths we've long recognized about these characters. In fact, the dynamic explored in this episode is part of what makes the Barney-Robin (Bobin? Rorney?) pairing so much fun.

And it's reflected back nicely at the end of the episode, when Ted calls in his own "no questions asked" favor with Lily (he brought cupcakes to her kindergarten classroom and rescued her from homicidal children) and gets her to destroy her own phone.

After Marshall gets the news, he realizes that he never did the "no questions asked" thing with Lily. He tells Lily that he's been arrested for tackling Russell Brand because he thought Brand was Bigfoot. He tells her that he was mauled by a raccoon he tried to hug. He tells her that he took apart the television and made a robot from its parts. And he tells her that he's been arrested for tackling Russell Brand because he thought Brand was Bigfoot. Again.

Marshall doesn't want to play "no questions asked" with Lily, because she's the love of his life, and that means sharing that life with her. So he ends up just telling her about the judgeship, the reaction to which we're going to see next week.

Yeah, this is a little saccharine. But, again, it fits with the character dynamics that have been so painstakingly established over nine years. Marshall's a little saccharine, and I'm prepared to accept a resolution that turns on him acting according to his nature.

"No Questions Asked" probably falls short of true greatness. Despite some of its thematic richness, it's still a pretty light and inconsequential episode. But for all that, it shows How I Met Your Mother at its best: funny, structurally innovative and built on a long-established foundation of outstanding character work.

Notes

• "You were a...priority male." "You said you'd stop telling that joke after the editor of Bazooka Joe comics rejected it." "That man is a comedy snob!"
• "So, you didn't order room service and 'Prison Sluts 9?'" "I'm telling you, I didn't order room service." Lily likes her lesbian porn.
• Barney and Robin begin questioning the long-term viability of their marriage when they realize Barney arranged to have a flight of doves released after the wedding while Robin's relatives plan a 21-gun salute. 
• "Can't your guys just fire blanks?" "Blanks? At a wedding? Yeah, that's romantic."
• Barney and Robin gain confidence in the long-term viability of their marriage by concocting a plot to retrieve Lily's phone that involves a unitard-glad Robin creating a distraction by shooting a priceless vase and Barney dispatching a trained dove to pick up the phone. "Sometimes it's best to go simple."
• "It's absolutely insane...how foolproof this plan is!"
• "Why do you have a gun? Why do you always have a gun?"

The Wedding Crusade (Review)

Series: How I Met Your Mother
Episode Title: "Knight Vision"
Episode Grade: C+

A full season of network comedy is going to have some valleys. It's exceedingly difficult to come up with 20+ compelling, funny stories, especially in your ninth season. The best you can hope for is that these episodes are more valleys than canyons; a few solid jokes, some good work from the actors, etc.

"Knight Vision" is a pedestrian, lightweight episode. It doesn't advance the story of How I Met Your Mother's final season, and it doesn't address the show's significant themes in any but the most cursory of fashions. There's enough mildly entertaining comedy here to keep "Knight Vision" from becoming anything truly dire, but not enough to really justify detailed analysis.

We have a pretty standard A-B-C plot structure here. In the A-plot, Ted eyes a lovely young woman (Anna Camp) for your standard wedding weekend hook-up. How I Met Your Mother has gone to the "Ted latches on with a crazy chick" well often enough that it's a little uncomfortable, so it's not a lot of fun to see the show hit that note again.

There's at least a nod here to a slightly different form of crazy; Camp's character is not so much psychotic as caught in the middle of what seems like the worst week ever. She loses her job, her car is stolen, her boyfriend breaks up with her...it's just a bad scene. As even Camp's parents point out, "Our daughter's kind of a drag."

Camp's energetic, if not particularly nuanced. There's a lot of shrieking and loud sobbing, and Ted's immediate discomfort is at least moderately interesting. The episode's insistence on making a running joke out of frequent appearances from the "he chose poorly" knight from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade is almost enthusiastic enough to make the gag work, but not quite.

The B-plot is better, as it focuses on Barney and Robin and gives us the always-welcome Edward Herrmann as a judgmental minister. Again, there's some fairly pedestrian writing here that's salvaged by the great chemistry between Neil Patrick-Harris and Cobie Smoulders.

Ultimately it's just fun watching these two play perverts. Robin and Barney stealing Lily and Marshall's rom-com meet cute is pleasant enough, and I laughed out loud at seeing a flashback of Robin dressed as college-aged Lily, with college-aged Lily's hair.

This ends in kind of a weird place, with Robin and Barney accidentally killing Hermann's character with tales of their debauchery. But the scene leading up to that moment is funny and sweet in a really odd sort of way.

The C-story, which once again features Marshall (who is probably permanently demoted to c-story status this season), is mainly just an excuse to put Sherri Shepherd's sassy black woman voice in Alyson Hannigan's tiny, adorable little girl face, which, again, I'm not above that. It's fair enough to have Marshall play out his "I accepted a judgeship" conversation in advance, but it's not a particularly weighty plot.

And perhaps that's the best description of "Knight Vision" as a whole: fair enough, but not particularly weighty.

Notes

• The episode begins with Barney putting himself and Ted in The Last Crusade. Ted's not happy with his role."Really, I'm the one working with the Nazis?" 
• "Ted and I are happy." "Are we?"
• Barney has the right idea when the minister dies. "Wedding at Bernie's!" "We're not doing Wedding at Bernie's."
• "By my third date with Robin I hit more bases than Bob Hope in wartime." "Real topical."

The Departing and The Soon-To-Be Departed (Review)

Series: How I Met Your Mother
Episode Title: "Last Time in New York"
Episode Grade: A-

I went on at great length last week about the emotional underpinnings of How I Met Your Mother, because I'm largely incapable of talking about anything without going on at great length. And it's that core of emotion that has enabled the show to achieve a kind of resonance that even well-crafted sitcoms lack.

But an emotionally resonant sitcom is still a sitcom, and it's fair to judge How I Met Your Mother on a comedic standard. That's largely where the show has fallen short in recent years, even while getting many of the emotional beats right.

"Last Time in New York" has some lovely moments, and we'll get to those. But above all else it is funny, a consistently entertaining half hour of television that provides reason to hope Carter Bays and Craig Thomas can make the world's most drawn-out wedding something we enjoy watching.

Writers tend to talk about "A" plots and "B" plots in episodes, but "Last Time in New York" really has two A plots. The first, which is more light-hearted, has Barney and Robin freaking out about the arrival of all their elderly relatives and the possibility that they might end up a bitter, sexless old married couple themselves.

The Barney-Robin pairing can raise a number of troublesome questions, but the chemistry between Cobie Smoulders and Neil Patrick Harris is sensational enough to quiet most of them. The two have an easy reporte built over the course of eight seasons, and it remains a pleasure just to watch the two bounce off each other and reveal just how perfectly, pervertedly compatible they are.

Barney and Robin spend most of the episode trying to find a naughty public place to have sex, but they're stymied by the hordes of elderly relatives who have descended on Farhampton (and who are inexorably drawn by uttering the words "Mandy Patinkin"). This is all pretty frivolous, and the jokes about old people trade more on hoary stereotypes than genuine wit.

But, again, it's fun. Watching Barney constantly misinterpret Robin's statements as an invitation for anal sex is fun. Watching Wayne Bradey sacrifice himself as if he's a doomed soldier in a classic war movie to the old relatives so that Barney and Robin can get away is fun. Smoulders wasn't necessarily asked to do much in the first couple seasons of the show, but she's evolved into a really outstanding comedic performer, and her work with Harris is always a highlight.

A-plot Two is Lily discovering Ted's list of things to do for the final time in New York. There's more of an emotional core to this, and not just because Ted expects to leave behind Robin and the rest of his friends. Ted's love for New York has itself been a theme running through the show's many seasons; his passion for the city's architecture, its energy and its beauty have been re-visited constantly. Sometimes it's been played for laughs, sometimes for drama, sometimes for thematic resonance, but it's always been there. And it's always been one of the better elements of Ted's character; he's hardly unique in fiction in having a passion for New York, but How I Met Your Mother's writing staff have done a remarkable job in keeping that passion from coming off as the insufferable arrogance you see from other fictional New Yorkers.

But this is also a consistently funny story. The to-do list is perfect Moseby: whether Ted is correcting the "Your a penis" graffiti on the corner (that's YOU'RE a penis, thank you very much), saying goodbye to the Empire State Building (he sometimes talks to it about life, OK?) or finally coming clean with the beautiful woman upstairs (she's an incredibly loud walker and can't play the bongos at all), the little cutaway gags developing from the list are funny.

"Last Time In New York" ends on something of a cliffhanger: Ted finds Barney to share a last glass of Scotch, only to be confronted by the fact that Barney saw him helping Robin dig in Central Park for her old locket last season. So the emotional stakes remain. But there are two syllables in "sitcom," and tonight was excellent proof that How I Met Your Mother is still aware of the second.

Notes

• The C-plot tonight is Marshall driving through a "hellish, cheese-infested wasteland" (Wisconsin) with Sherri Shepherd. Jason Segel was apparently quite reluctant to come back for a final season, and I wonder if the road trip plot is a way of working around his lack of availability, because he doesn't get much screen time tonight.
• Lily's awesome dress, which was both slutty and classy in exactly the right proportions, was ruined, which forces her to opt for her back-up dress, which is just classy.
• Marshall and Ted ruined the dress in a sword fight sparked by Ted's discovery of the old swords he and Marshall once shared. Marshall ends up raising a pretty valid point about the way Andre the Giant is disrespected in The Princess Bride.
• Of course, it turns out even Lily and Robin are unable to resist the allure of a sword fight, and they end up dueling. Lily apparently thinks Mandy Patinkin's famous line is, "My name is Rodrigo Montoya, you killed someone I love, prepare to dance."
• During the fight, Lily and Robin accidentally destroy the 30-year-old bottle of expensive scotch Marshall and Ted bought for the wedding. They replace it with cheap whiskey, chocolate syrup, ketchup and hand sanitizer. Ted can't tell the difference.
• Josh Radnor in a 1910-era bathing suit. Always comic gold. 

Final Beginnings (Review)

Series: How I Met Your Mother
Episode Title: "The Locket"/"Coming Back"
Episode Grade: B+

How I Met Your Mother has always been a show torn by different instincts. It is, of course, a CBS sitcom, and an important one for the network; it's been a tent pole show for CBS, and one that, as the Monday primetime opener, really launches the week's programming. That position carries with it certain duties, and the format its own tropes. As such, HIMYM can never veer too far from the standard sitcom atmosphere and plots.

But there's always been another side to How I Met Your Mother, a side with ambition and heart and an intense yearning that takes the show to places other sitcoms never care to visit. This sometimes shows in "gimmick" episodes in which Carter Bays and Craig Thomas play with narrative techniques such as scrambled timelines or an unreliable narrator.

More often, however, what distinguishes How I Met Your Mother is the emotion animating each episode. How I Met Your Mother is a show about love, about the heights to which it can elevate us and the depths to which it can drive us. That means a lot of swelling music and gushing admissions of love, yes; "Come On," season's one finale, is a truly extraordinary romantic comedy, an episode that achieves remarkable heights of true sentimentality.

But the show's central conceit also means that, in many ways, How I Met Your Mother is a show about failure and heartbreak. There's only one mother, only one successful relationship, and while Ted's revolving door of women is often played for laughs, the show isn't afraid to explore the effect all of this romantic futility has on its main character.

There is an undercurrent of sadness in the show, a frustration that anyone who's ever wondered at the persistence and ubiquity of loneliness can understand. It's a sadness that, remarkably, pairs well with the hope and yearning I wrote about above. The sense that all of this heartbreak will be in some way redeemed by the end of the series is the true appeal of the show, and it's that a little too neat and tidy for real life, well, who ever suggested that our art must always adhere to strict realism?

So How I Met Your Mother begins its last season, and it's an important one. Finale seasons are always crucial, of course, especially when we know they're coming ahead of time. It's our last exposure to the show, and everyone wants to go out on a high note.

But this final season, which began tonight with back-to-back episodes, is even more important for How I Met Your Mother's legacy. It will go a long way toward determining how we remember the show: an above-average sitcom with some nice moments and a lengthy decline phase, or genuinely one of the best comedies of its time.

Much of the show's decline these last two or three seasons has been overstated; season seven's "Symphony of Illumination" is one of the show's greatest episodes, and its exploration of despair and friendship is nearly unmatched in the recent history of sitcoms. But for all that, the decline has been real; the humor broader, the laugh track louder, the mugging for the camera more intense. How I Met Your Mother has been a pleasant enough show to watch these last few years, but it's largely been coasting on our stored affection for these characters.

This ninth and final season, then, is vital, and it represents the culmination of what the show has been working toward since (God save us) 2005. When your show is entitled "How I Met Your Mother," the season in which that actually happens takes on an out-sized importance.

It's heartening then that these first two episodes are so strong.

I want to begin at the end, with two Teds. One of them is sitting alone at the bar in the Farhampton Inn, doing a crossword puzzle while he waits for Robin and Barney's wedding. The other Ted is sitting at the same table, a year later, talking to his wife.

It's a scene that, in its juxtaposition of loneliness and unabashed sentimentality, could very well serve as a mission statement for the show itself. It is a moment of true, unalloyed hope, and a scene that's written with unwavering confidence.

Probably the most encouraging aspect of these two episodes is Cristin Milioti, who plays the still-unnamed future wife and mother. This is a difficult role. There are nine years of expectations weighing on it, and so the decision to cast a relative unknown like Milioti was probably wise.

She handles her part with aplomb. Lily, driven to Milioti's train both by Ted's insane road trip behavior and the kind of coincidences that fuel sitcoms, is actually the first to meet the mother, who's in the band playing at Robin and Barney's wedding. This is a good start for Milioti, who is given some funny lines, a good sense of humor and that kind of likably quirky personality that only seems to exist on network television.

There's only so much going on in these two episodes. Barney and Robin are afraid they share a Canadian cousin, Mitch, but then find out that he's only Robin's cousin by adoption (his actual parents were eaten by sled dogs). Marshall stresses out upon discovering that his mom posted a Facebook photo that revealed his decision to accept a judgeship and gets kicked off his plane back to New York (alongside guest star Sherri Shepherd). Lily desperately wants to view the photo so she can see her son, but doesn't want to be tormented by Mrs. Erickson's passive aggressive photographic sniping.

It's all set up, basically, moving plot pieces into place so that they're in the proper position for the more important moments later in the season. Marshall ends up renting a car with Shepherd, which gives the writers an excuse to keep him away from the wedding for most of the season and give him wacky adventures with a sassy black woman. Ted's voiceover indicates that he'll end up causing a fuss by making one last run at Robin later in the season.

But it's pleasant set up, and the final scene of "Coming Back" is as beautiful and touching as the show's last season deserves. There will undoubtedly be some rough spots during this season; the decision to turn Barney and Robin's wedding into a year-long affair effectively guaranteed that. But I fully expect enough laughs and tears to make the whole thing worthwhile.

Notes

• I didn't get at this much in the body of the review, but these two episodes are quite funny. More amusing than laugh out loud hilarious, but they consistently elicited a chuckle.
• Lily groans when Ted pulls out his leather driving gloves, but he makes the unassailable point that "in 99.9 percent of crashes, the driver wasn't wearing gloves."
• Ted has a massive travel binder of all the interesting sights between New York City and Farhampton. One section? "Mennonite Windmills," which drives Lily to the nearest train.
• How do we know the mother is a good fit for Ted? She also owns a pair of driving gloves, and Ted reminds his kids about the seven-hour side trip she made them take on the way to Disney World so the family could see the goat who could blow smoke rings.
• "Lady Tedweena Slowsby."
• Barney isn't worried about the potential incest with Robin, because King Joffrey's parents were related, and he turned out to be "a fair and wise ruler."
• Lily fondly remembers Marshall's calves, which "launched a thousand lady boners."
• There's a great running gag at the hotel, where Lily pays a bartender $100 to keep a drink in her hands at all times. He calls it "the Kennedy package."
• The Stinsons were cursed by a gypsy woman in 19th century to perpetual horniness. Oh, and the performance of awesome guitar solos.