How I Met Your Mother - "Tailgate"

Season 7, Episode 13

Say, did you know that there was a new episode of How I Met Your Mother this week, just a day after New Years? No, well you can thank CBS for the inability to advertise for it properly and/or to stick to a more traditional television schedule. (I have this same problem with ABC starting new programming on Wednesday, but that’s neither here nor there.) If I were feeling more cynical tonight, I might think that CBS did this on purpose, to bury a lower quality episode in a timeslot where maybe a many people might not have seen it. Which is a shame, because as unaffecting as the episode was, it held a lot of importance for the season as a whole.

One of the biggest shadows that I think still looms over HIMYM is the large misstep in season five where the show experimented with essentially hitting the reset button at the end of each episode, and that in an attempt to compensate for that ill-advised moved, the show has been relying on serialized plots more heavily than they ever before, building them up in season six and even more in this season. (Okay, I could be wrong about that, but it certainly feels that way by comparison. Nobody watches television episodes in a bubble.)

One of those plots last season was the death of Marshall’s father, which while it became the strongest subplot of the entire season (and probably the series),  it also had a fairly divisive introduction, in the guise of “Bad News”. (You know, the “countdown episode”.) So for the show to more or less bring back the memory of that episode by making this episode, which also aired very shortly after New Year’s and focus on the death of Marshall’s father (there it was his passing, here it was the remembrance of the event) feels sort of ballsy. I realize that this wasn’t the episode’s intention, as Marshall at his dad’s grave was mostly the framing device for the A/B/C-stories, but reducing Marvin’s death to yet another gimmick – albeit a gimmick that’s part of the show’s DNA, and that works much better than the countdown ever did – is something that most other shows would shy away from, especially considering that such a gimmick didn’t play as well the first time around.

But this is How I Met Your Mother, a show that revels in its dramatic moments of pathos, especially in its later seasons, so I think we can forgive the show for going back to this well (again, it helps that it mostly worked). Besides, in the light of everything else, that’s a fairly small quibble. And what was this everything else? Why, it’s three separate stories of Marshall’s friends of course. I don’t begrudge the show for breaking down the episode into such a simplistic manner, as they done it like this many times before, but I think where the episode went wrong was that in trying to mix two stories of pathos with one that’s purely comedic, it ends up shortchanging all of the stories.

The two stories of pathos – those of Robin and Marshall & Lilly – were clearly set up to exist on the two ends of the pathos spectrum, with Marshall and Lilly’s stories banking on pre-established knowledge to deliver the emotional goods, whereas in Robin’s the uplifting moment comes out of a plot development, to the end that that feels like the most important thing about her storyline. This is not a mark against it, nor an attempt to downplay what either of the two stories was trying to accomplish, as they both mixed pre-established emotional baselines and plot development, albeit in different proportions. 

But the importance of this dialectic between the two stories isn’t so much about how they chose to tell their stories, but why. As I’m sure everybody remembers, Robin has been through a lot this season, what with the resurgence of her crush on Barney and the therapy and dating her therapist and then cheating on him with Barney and then that frustrating pregnancy scare, and while all of these make sense in their context, as each development more or less built on the other before it, but looking at it now, it’s easy to see a pattern on rubbernecking, of the show flailing about to give Robin, its historically most underused character, something, anything substantial to do.

In truth, I don’t think I would have come to this realization were it not for this latest development, which sees Robin suddenly set upon a new career path thanks to a series of fortuitous events lands her to host her news channel’s New Year’s Eve program. As an idea, this should work; the show has often shown Robin struggling to land any sort of significant gig in her career, and at this late point in the show’s run, this feels like the kind of story that should be told before an endpoint is reached. (HIMYM is show best served by happy endings, it’s quite possible next season will be their last, etc.) However, because we spent so much time this first half of this season worrying about Robin’s personal life, and we ended on something so heavy (and divisive) as that pregnancy scare, focusing on her career feels very unsubstantial at best, and like backpedaling from a controversial plotline at worst. (This to say nothing of the fact that the show has thrown out yet another future plotline that it will have to deal with later.)

And this all comes back to the story-allotment issue that I brought up earlier. While following Robin around as she set about looking after Sandy did make for some inspired moments, this probably wasn’t the best comedic storyline to connect to a moment of pathos, given how little time there was to develop that closing beat within the episode. (I’d also argue that trying to mine comedy out of another Robin/Sandy team-up wasn’t all that original either, but I think that if this had been a more disposable plot, I wouldn’t have minded it for what it was.) Frankly, my wind was still on the whole pregnancy scare, so it was quite the whiplash to go from there to remembering that Robin worked as a national news station and that she wasn’t happy there, and with all those Sandy Rivers jokes the ending just came up way too fast.

So for comparison’s sake let’s look at Marshall and Lilly’s story. We already know how Marshall feels about his dad. We already know what Lilly’s relationship with her father is like. These are basic tenets, and though Marshall’s arc here is more established than Lilly’s they are both established enough to work as templates. Thus the show can direct our attention elsewhere – in this case there argument over Marshall’s book of urban myths – and then make it to be a case of representation, wherein Lilly makes the issue of the book stand in for her paternal abandonment. It’s a tired ploy, and one that I frankly should have seen coming, but it work because of the established emotions, the solid acting of Hannigan and Segel, and because frankly it was just funny. The same could be said for the final twist wherein Lilly’s dad arrives after the earlier fake out. I was so distracted by everything else that I couldn’t see the obvious twist coming, but even if I had, I think I would still have given it a pass because of Hannigan and Elliot. (Yeah, I just said that Christ Elliot did some good acting. What are you gonna do about it?)

That this argument spilled over and gave us a connection to the framing story of Marshall at his dad’s grave was something that I did see coming – that’s how these things to work, after all – but here it was a boon to the story, has having Marshall learn two unrelated lessons probably would have taken up too much time in an already overstuffed episode. However, I think what really made this work was that by learning about Lilly’s own paternal issues first, it helped to reinforce one aspect of Marshall’s memory of his father (the urban legends), which paved the way for another (the communal aspect of his tailgate cookoffs). It was a small connection that helped to link the present and past storylines without much fuss.

To close this thought off, let’s look at the plotline that was the most successful and the least substantial, that of Ted and Barney opening their own bar. Now, on the surface, this isn’t a plot that I’m particularly happy with – this is yet another call-forward that I don’t think the show needs to be bothering with right now, not when we’ve got bigger developments (the Mother, Robin/Barney) that really should be dealt with first, and that this wasn’t even an event that needed, by the show’s internal logic, to be dealt with. In other words, nobody before this episode ever said that Ted and Barney did open a bar before this episode, so why did this have to be a plot?

But I’ll have to admit that this was actually a fairly funny story, both because it just allowed Barney and Ted to bounce off of each other at their respective heights of sleaze and douchiness, and because – and this is important – the story didn’t try to swerve into an emotional moment at the last beat. Look, I like when How I Met Your Mother goes for the pathos, as it’s one of its strongest points, and I think it differentiates it from just about every other multi-cam sitcom on today. But there were three moments of pathos spread out across two storylines here, and it just ended up being too much for the episode to handle.

Quotes and Other Thoughts:

You know, for a show so in love with its own mythology, it’s weird that Marshall would Marcus for wetting the bed till he was 11, when Marshal did the same until he was 12 or 13 (I forget which exactly, but somebody with access to “Slap Bet” can fill me in), without so much as acknowledgement of this fact by the episode itself. Why not deal with that instead of the Puzzles storyline.

And oh, so apparently Marshall and Lilly are just straight up living in the house now, no more debate about it. Thanks for the heads-up, show.

“I don’t see how people don’t get this. 'Shoplitfter' doesn’t promote crime, it celebrates it.”

“Plus, she likes it fast and dirty, and that’s how Sandy rides!”

“First off, I wouldn’t use the ‘M’ word. Only they can call themselves that.”

Lilly’s reasons to get up in the morning: Wife, child, dropping a deuce.

“Finishing in the hallway was the nail in the coffin.”

“The scenario is: high school wrestling match.”

“Annnnnnnndddd….wrestle!”