How I Met Your Mother - "The Broath"

Season 7, Episode 19 

How I Met Your Mother has had a particularly bumpy ride over the past few months, as emotional twist after emotional twist has left me exhausted, and without anything to show for it. In it's prime, the show was able to deliver the some of the best emotional beats that I have ever seen on a four-cam, and it seems like the show has been trying to recapture it as of late. Yet while last season was able to up the pathos and deliver some of the strongest beats in the show's entire run, it seems like this season is trying to push that even further and its become to much, and each successive twist leaves me colder and colder. So it was quit surprising tonight when the show was able to take some of the more recent questionable story twists and deliver an emotionally resonant half hour. 

There were two main plots to tonight's episode, both dealing with recently explored relationships. I'll admit that the Barney/Quinn relationship is the least compelling of the two, because like so many of the show's guest star relationships of the past, it's hard to become involved with something that you know will eventually end. (Well, that and the fact that he and Robin getting together is almost a inevitably at this point.) That the show is willing to own up to the fact that yeah, Barney dating a stripper when in the past he's usually been so dismissive of those in the position is kind of a fucked up basis for a relationship, and that even if they both share a lot of the same interests, maybe that doesn't make them a perfect match. 

Barney's story leads into Ted and Robin's, as they get into a fight over who will get to sublet Quinn's apartment, and while this story started out with far less weight, I think it ultimately was the more compelling because the emotions here, even if they weren't as overt, have a far longer lasting impact. Yes, Ted suddenly being in love with Robin again did come out of nowhere and was a really hard sell, but I think it finally clicked tonight how and why this is going to work. While it didn't work as any sort of last-ditch 'shipping drama, the blowout from this has been fascinating to watch, especially as it keep chipping away at whatever fragile remains of Ted and Robin's friendship.

Unfortunately, the show also undercut all of that strong emotional work when towards the end of the episode it was revealed that Barney and Quinn were just talking the rest of the gang out for a long con. I'm not so upset that Barney would play a trick on his friends about how whipped he was in the relationship, or try to throw his friends' judgmental natures back in their faces, but Quinn's outrage at Barney during the intervention – sorry, Quinntervention – certainly felt real, and it was an emotional bit of darkness that I not only bought, but was interested in seeing develop in Barney. I want to say the show backtracked from the twist by showing that yeah, maybe Barney is slightly uncomfortable with Quinn being a stripper, but it just didn't compare to the raw emotion of the earlier scene.

Admittedly Ted and Robin's storyline didn't suffer as much from the reveal – it's not like the emotional undercurrent changed any – but for those brief few minutes I did feel hopelessness at the thought that the great character work might slip away, and that at the fact that suddenly their fight over the apartment felt so manufactured, both within the internal logic of the narrative and in the way the writers constructed it. Luckily the episode managed to keep it alive, but only by dipping back into the plot of Robin's career advancement, which was hinted way back at the beginning of the year, and because it was gone so long that serving as the solution to the apartment problem felt a little bit like a cheat as well.

If there was one plot that I didn't have a problem with it was Marshall and Lilly's, because even though it too had a reveal (this time the truth about Marshall's story about getting to second base in the tenth grade), it was mostly just sort of sweet the way to see the way that the couple approaches sex with a certain sort of mature frankness.

Okay, so now that How I Met Your Mother has gotten back around to telling stories with appropriate levels of pathos, can it now implement them using a more sensible plot?

Quotes and Other Thoughts:

The show also played heavily and uncomfortably with weird double standards this week. First, while the show didn't really look down on Lilly for her various sexual kinks, it did feel like we were supposed to look down on Quinn for being a stripper, and isn't that just a bit hypocritical?

Second, and more offensively, while Robin and Lilly's kiss wasn't played for humor outside of how into it Lilly got, Ted kissing Marshall was supposed to be funny because guys kissing is just totally gross, right? That marks the second appearance of gay panic in this season, and I'm really starting worry about how the show approaches this issue.

Additionally, the show already teasing the fact that Barney is going to get married to Quinn (or at least have a marriage ceremony), because I just really don't want to have to think about that again. Though I suppose “already” isn't quite right, because there's only five more episodes left after this, even though it feels like there should be more, all thanks to CBS's weird airing schedule. 

Between "broath" and "Quinntervention" this episode was chocked-full of awkward portmanteaus.

Okay, one thing I did like in spite of myself: Caesar fighting off ninjas. That was just surreal enough to work.

“Baby, you're like 20 slutty chicks all rolled into one.” “Sweet talk is not going to get you out of this.”

“DAMMIT PATRICE, STOP SMOTHERING ME!!!!”

“There's a working fire place!” “Patrice is ironing my pants all wrong!”

“Don't say that whore's name in front of our baby!”

“Ted, have you ever study history?” “Extensively. But I'm a little shaky on fake history...”

“And then he banged like, a hundred chicks, and then invented a salad. True story.”

“Unless it's an issue of health, national security, or he's about to get up on a fatty.”