HIMYM

HIMYM’s penultimate hour hits its stride in the final minutes, a promising sign heading into the final hour.

How I Met Your Mother Season 9, Episode 20 “Daisy” Written by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas Directed by Pamela Fryman Airs Monday nights at 8pm ET on CBS   Much like the entirety of How I Met Your Mother‘s final season, “Daisy” gets off to a slow start, and an unfortunate one; save for a few …

Heading into the home stretch, HIMYM doesn’t appear to be done with the emotional twists – but should it be?

How I Met Your Mother Season 9, Episode 17 “Sunrise” Written by Carter Bays & Craig Thomas Directed by Pamela Fryman Airs Monday nights at 8pm ET on CBS   Letting go is never easy. It doesn’t matter what it is: something as silly as a favorite pair of ratty shoes gone ratty, or something as …

HIMYM’s 200th episode steps away from the group to focus on The Mother and her journey over the past eight years.

It took 13 episodes, but How I Met Your Mother’s final season finally finds its voice in a poignant episode about hope.

How I Met Your Mother says farewell to 2013 with an episode full of contrived dramas and unearned resolutions.

Has How I Met Your Mother lost its sense of wonder? Judging by “The Rehearsal Dinner”, the answer is yes and no.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about ‘novelty’ episodes like “Bedtime Stories”: while they often give late-season episodes a nice injection of wit and energy, by construction they require a show to conform to different rules, both for creative types and audiences watching the final product.

With the Mother wish fulfillment journey on hold for the time being, How I Met Your Mother turned back to Farhampton for another round of unfunny hijinks, centered around Barney and James’s selfish competitions to get their mother to sleep with their birth fathers. If that doesn’t sound like fun, Ted’s in the background arguing with Billy Zabka over a photograph of Wayne Gretzky – another entertaining round of adventures so terrible, I couldn’t believe the script is actually credited to the series’ creators. Make no mistake: this is one of the worst episodes of the series, an episode that doesn’t take a single breath between bad jokes to actually find anything meaningful in its story.

In theory, “Platonish” is an episode about Ted dealing with his feelings for Robin – not only does the title give it away, but the numerous Ted voice overs and longing looks at Robin made it pretty clear early on they were planning to beat the dead Ted/Robin horse for twenty minutes. However, the episode quickly snaps its attention to Barney, focusing in on a disgusting night of woman-chasing to lead him to a completely contrived resolution introduced by a character – the Mother – we still don’t know yet. It’s a messy episode, rehashing old material and retconning pieces of the past, all for the sake of superficial drama that doesn’t matter, a relationship that feels more forced with every episode – and in the specific case of “Platonish”, an A-list cameo that unfortunately fails on every level.

The best thing I can say about “The Lighthouse” is it’s not the worst episode of How I Met Your Mother in 2013. Unfortunately, that’s not saying much: it’s another episode of wasted potential that’s so busy checking off boxes on the narrative checklist it never stops to make any of the stories meaningful. Laden with convenient turns of emotion that culminate in a nice, but completely unearned conclusion, “The Lighthouse” is yet another episode of HIMYM unable to recognize its own potential.

How I Met Your Mother Season 9, Episode 6 “Knight Vision” Written by Chris Harris Directed by Pamela Fryman Airs Monday nights at 8pm ET on CBS In recent weeks, How I Met Your Mother has struggled to fill the void of The Mother while her story line sits on the sidelines (her next appearance will …

It’s officially the Holiday Season, that latter part of every year when Americans, perhaps in a bid to combat the increasingly chilly weather, draw together with friends and family to celebrate whichever holidays are most important to them, usually starting with Thanksgiving. It’s at this time of year, right as kids start getting time off …