6x24 Challenge Accepted

7.7/10. Having made it this far on the rewatch, it's clear to me that Season 6 is where the show truly started to lose its fastball. It's not that there aren't great episodes or great stories in the season--Marshall and Barney's shared father issues lending to many of them--but there's far more duds and clunkers, and even the regular episodes lack some of the spark and surprise at the show in its heyday.

But despite that, the show still knew how to pull off a big, awesome moment. The reveal that Lily is pregnant, with the moment intercut with Ted demolishing The Arcadia, is in some ways shallow. At a broad level, there's the idea that this has been a rough year for everyone, and on the one hand you have Ted taking the building that symbolizes all their struggles and sending it to the dust, and on the other, you have Marshall and Lily celebrating new life entering the world, and with it a new beginning. That said, to some degree you can cut any pair of scenes together, find some interesting parallels, and tell your film school buddies that your work is reminiscent of The Godfather.

Nevertheless, with the right narration, the right indie song, and the right contrast of destruction and creation, and you're still going to get me. That moment bumps this episode up quite a bit by my ranking, and it makes a lot of the uneven stuff that precedes seem better by its halo effect.

Because while the reveal that Lily was throwing up because she was pregnant, not because of the soup, is a nice one, a lot of that story is fairly weak. The idea that Marshall's going to get sick and acting like a terminal patient had some juice to it, but a lot of it was pretty blunt gross out humor, and the whole "you just tell people you have the sniffles" thing was kind of dumb apart from the amusing "nailed it" gag.

Plus, the idea that Ted gets back with women every time he hits the even the most minor of setbacks just has no basis in the continuity of the show. I'm not a continuity hound, and I can accept that there are characteristics or developments that have an implied background that may break from what we've seen. But man, Ted's love life and romantic habits have been practically the focus of the whole show from the beginning, so taking something so central to the narrative and tacking on this strange behavior that we've never seen before just feels off. The coda for Zoe is mostly unnecessary, but it works to dovetail into the idea that it's been a rough year in some ways for Ted and he needs to face that rather than retreat into romance.

At the same time, Barney and Robin agreeing that they weren't right for one another, but admitting that they loved each other, if only for a moment, was a really nice bit between them, and exactly what I want from those two. The truth is that they don't work as a couple, and I think the show gave it a go on that front and left them in the right place when it broke them up. But the idea that they care for each other, even if they realize falling back on something like that would be bad for both of them, works to humanize them and make their relationship feel realer in the aftermath than it did when they were actually together. As I've said before, Nora does nothing for me as a character, so setting her up as Barney's holy grail doesn't work for me, and after that nice beat about not just giving in to old habits, Robin's wistful look as Barney pursues Nora feels like a hasty retreat toward a weak unrequited affections bit.

But there's still that last scene. The thing about HIMYM is that however cartoony or broad, the show got, however much it lost some of the shine and humanity that made it great, you (or at least I) still cared about the character. We've seen these five individuals go through so much that when you see Barney give Ted the chance to push the button after making such a thing about it, when you see Robin and Barney share a sweet moment, when you see Ted turn away from the past and face the future by destroying The Arcadia, and when you see a dejected and defeated Marshall livened beyond words by Lily's news that she's pregnant, you can't help but be heartened by it all.

I think that's why so many of us stuck it out despite the decline of the show--not because we were so desperate to meet the mother, but because even as the show gradually found itself reaching more and more to give these characters something to do between now and "a little ways down the road," we felt for them along the journey. And in moments like the last sequence of the season, it's a reminder of who these characters are, what they've been through, and the catharsis that comes from seeing them move on and get what they wanted, even if it wasn't how they were expecting it.