How I Met Your Mother: "The Best Man"/"The Naked Truth"

Season 7, Episodes 1 & 2

Clearly we’re just padding out time here

“And I swear we’re totally, almost, not really all that close to the end.”

“Man, we are not even close to the end!”

-Future Ted

For most of How I Met Your Mother’s frustrated viewership, the main rallying call is “what’s the endgame?”, as if having an endgame will suddenly make everything in the show work again. If you ask me, Bays and Thomas already have an endgame in mind – they just don’t have a plan on how they’re going to get there, and that is the show’s real problem. Back when the show was granted two more seasons, Thomas said something along the lines of (I can’t find the actual interview, sorry) “We’ll keep the show going as long as we have stories to tell”, which is of course Hollywood BS for “We’ll keep making episodes until they cancel us”.

Look, I don’t think that the show needs to make some sort of endgame out of The Mother; at this point, I’m pretty sure I don’t even care about her identity. For all intensive purposes, the show shouldn’t be relying on any endgame at this point. During the show’s fourth season, I realized that it had quit being about The Mother; it was about growing up, and that’s something that takes place naturally. While the putting up road signs in these two episode seems to signify that they have some sort of (short-term) plan, it also hamstrings the show to the obvious artificial waypoints, and that tends to destroy the momentum of the narrative. To illustrate this point, it is best to look at tonight’s premiere not an episode-by-episode basis, but rather on a character-by character basis.

Barney: As Maureen Ryan so astutely notes, sticking Barney in a “mystery bride plot” (her phrasing) is overly similar to (and just as problematic as) Ted’s own quest for The Mother. But that’s not my problem with this plot; having multiple characters go on separate journeys that each have some sort of mysterious end goal has a sort of thematic parallel that I find intriguing, and it’s something that could work in theory. But that theory only works if these parallel paths were clearly set up early in the shows run, and don’t just happen because the show needs to pad out the time.

How do I know that the show is just padding out it’s time? Because Barney is going to end up with Robin. Why? Because Nora is only a guest star. Because, in the words of Lilly, those two have chemistry. Because it’s written all over the motherfucking wall. Because this is just that kind of show. And that just makes all the time spent doing something else all the more ugly. Knowing who Barney is going to end up with sucks all of the dramatic tension out of a storyline revolving around a different woman, and it becomes a useless waste of time.

Now some might argue that Nora is around so that Barney can learn to be in a monogamous relationship before he can end up with Robin, and I see the logic in that. The problem is that this show doesn’t. There’s nothing special about Nora that would make Barney change that isn’t already present in Robin. (They’re both strong women, they both find him funny, they both call him out on his shit, etc.) And without any specific reason or purpose, Nora becomes a MacGuffin, a blank slate on which the writers will put whatever they need to move the story along. And not only does that reveal the fabricated nature of the story, it’s just makes here and story not all that interesting.

Nor do I care about that damn ducky tie. That’s just another distraction that this storyline can’t afford.

Ted: Again, I don’t care about who The Mother is, and I think we would all be better off if the show would just reveal her sooner and have her hang out with the cast for a season or two. While I’m not really opposed to Ted dating someone else in the meantime (a really lively girl could keep things interesting), there needs to be a certain bar that the character has to clear. She either has to be fun, the show has to stop treating every girl that Ted dates so seriously, and/or there has to be a life-lesson type reason why Ted is dating this girl, which needs to be revealed fairly early on. (If she’s all three, then that’s a real plus.) The reason that Zooey didn’t work out is that she/the relationship was none of those things, and the fact that she was still around even after she and Ted broke up made it even more painful.

As for Victoria…How I feel about her in large part depends on what happened in the next episode (and possibly the ones after that). If it’s just a she’s shows up, and Ted remembers something about what he’s looking for in a woman, and then she’s gone by episode’s end, then the twist ending was just another way for the show to fuck with us. If however, Victoria is the fun presence that she was back in season one, and the show lightens up about the relationship, then it could work out all right and be a passable way to kill some time. In the real world, people do backslide into old relationships, so it’s not like this breaks any rules of logic. And since the show clearly wants to keep dragging out the Mother Mystery, getting mad every time the show introduces a character that isn’t Her is just an exercise in futility. All I ask is that the characters we are subjected to in the meantime are well-written and played by capable actresses. And that’s not really that big of a request, is it?

Also? Future Ted isn’t helping. You’re jokes about how far we have left to go are just sooooooooooo not funny.

Robin: Though Robin had an actual role in the show in the first two seasons (in season one as the love interest, and in season two as Ted’s girlfriend), from season three on out she has mostly floated along without any real purpose. Sure, she made random, unbelievably short jaunts over to Japan, or she has crass-analogy-inducing relationships with guys we never really got to know, but for the most part, she just kind of bounces around to other people’s stories as needed.

The one big exception to all of this was her relationship with Barney, and even that mostly coasted by on how well Neil Patrick Harris could play Barney’s pining affection for her. But the actual relationship never really panned out dramatically due to poor planning by the writers, and it didn’t get any better when the show tried to retroactively fix it throughout season five.

The one good thing to come of it is that we finally were able to see just how Robin actually felt about Barney, and I think that’s going to help the show going forward. As much as I didn’t care for Robin randomly having feelings for Barney again (I’ll just choose to pretend that it was due to that conversation they had in the cab back in “Hopeless”), Cobie Smulders played the hell out of that scene where she has to talk Barney through his apology to Nora that I actually felt for her, and before I knew it, I was back on that particular ‘shipper bandwagon.

But then Robin had to just go and only hang out with Ted again in the next episode. While I like that Robin is a flexible enough character that she can be placed in any other person’s storyline and just fit, it’s also frustrating that she can’t be in something more substantial more frequently. Of course she won’t be able to enter such a storyline until Barney gets over Nora (the show has already proved it’s not good with writing for Robin outside of the group), so until then she’ll exist in -this in-between space, just biding her time.

Marshall & Lilly: Given their sidelined role throughout most of season one, and again in seasons three through five, it’s surprising how powerful Marshall and Lilly’s stories have became last season, and how strong they remained here at the open of season seven. And the power of their stories lies in the very thing that the other stories seem to lack: an organic sense of evolution that lends itself to an engaging sense of mystery.

When Marshall’s dad died, it was a punch in the emotional gut, one of those natural parts of life that you never see coming, and it spun Marshall (with Lilly in tow) into an emotional charged plot that kept things interesting and, since it was allowed to clip along at a natural pace, it never felt forced and it ended up in a meaningful place. Now that Marshall and Lilly are pregnant, there’s a little less mystery to their lives at the moment (face it, it’s not like that kid isn’t going to be born), but the show is smart enough to couple it with things that matter. Seeing Marshall still struggle with his need to be an adult adds a lot of weight to this storyline, and assuming that they don’t just reduce her to a string of pregnancy jokes, there’s some good growth in here for Lilly as well as she learns how to be a mom.

In short, Marshall and Lilly’s story is clearly about growing up, and that’s what How I Met Your Mother should be about as well. It’s hard for me to know just why exactly it is that I keep watching, but I’m pretty sure that my reasons closely mirror Alan Sepinwall’s. And if I’m in this for the long haul, all I ask is that the show keeps making the episode interesting, and doesn’t just reduce the storylines to a string of cheap and dirty tricks.

Quotes, Etc:

“Single file ladies, no fatties.” “That’s ridiculous.” “You’re right, it’s Cleveland. Single file, ladies.”

“Get ready Cleveland. The last man to screw you this hard and then disappear was Lebron James.”

“Before you go, please answer this survey to help me bang you better in the future.”

“Shamelessly plug yourself so that you can shamelessly plug, let’s say…that.”

“The only person on earth you loves you more than Marshall Eriksen, is drunk Marshall Eriksen.”

“She is so cute. All I want to do is put her little feet in my mouth.”

“It’s like a minefield of cuteness. There are babies everywhere. Look at this little bastard!”

“The son of a bitch has knee dimples.”

*********

“Lose the cast.” “A one man show. I like it!”

“Or maybe you want that, cause you’d get free tacos, cause you’re my peeps…”

“You’re joking about the fantastic ta-tas, right? ‘Cause I am looking around and I do not see it.”

“3^rd base. It gets serious at 3^rd base.”

“Robin, get my legal pad. IT’S PROS AND CONS TIME!”

“Look at me, I’m a windmill!”