How I Met Your Mother – Happily Ever After

CBS

(Season 4, Episode 6)

I really, really didn’t want to watch an episode of Ted whining about the loss of his relationship with Stella. It turns out that I didn’t have to, thanks to the solid writing and the Barney-isms throughout. Ted mourns Stella through denial, which leads to some very funny flashback scenes about who the gang would each avoid if they were to run into them.

Not only was this episode funny, it was also meaningful and poignant. After the jump, I’ll break it all down for you.

Ted figured that if he could avoid Stella, he could avoid the pain of being left at the altar. When Ted puts the gang on the spot and reveals the people they’d avoid, we end up with some classic flashback scenes.

Lily ruins Gasser’s popularity by blaming her fart on him. C’mon, everyone has done that once in their lives, right? So just relating to this scene makes it funny, but seeing Lily as a semi-Goth teen was priceless.

Of course Barney would use a prison inmate to get regularly scheduled sex. The priceless part of this scene? The catfight, of course.

Ah, it explains so much to know that Robin’s father raised her as a boy: her penchant for firearms, for one. Seeing Robin dressed as a boy, making out with her teammate as the light dawns on her father that he doesn’t actually have a son was a riot, but the way the gang responded to her with sympathy was well done.

Now, for my favorite Barney-isms:

• “Where would Ted’s nuts be? Why don’t we check the vice in Stella’s garage?”
• “Kids are awesome,” in reference to Lily ruining Gasser’s reputation by blaming the fart on him.
• Barney would be proud to look any of the women he has slept with in the eye, some of them for the very first time.
• It was funny when Barney said he’d rather get under the table with the three hot chicks, but when he actually did, the look on his face was a Barney-ism all to itself.

One last observation of a funny moment: the impetus for Ted finally getting angry at Stella was the fact that she was going to make him move to NJ, when instead she moved to the city for Tony. Yep, NJ would do it every time.

This episode was actually pretty deep, when you think about the title, “Happily Ever After,” and the lesson Ted shared with his kids at the end of the episode: you’ve got to just let the anger go for it to truly be gone. This was accentuated by the fact that the gang all held onto their anger with the people they would hide under the table from: Gasser, Becca and Robin’s father.

Pretty solid writing for a half-hour sitcom, eh?

Clacked by Debbie McDuffee
on Nov 03, 2008 @ 21:29 EST5EDT