So there it is, the worst thing HIMYM had ever done, or would ever do. "The Robin" was once my breaking point on this show, the point where I stopped harboring any illusions that it might one day return to being the show and I had known and loved and accepted that, instead, it had metamorphasized into a pale imitation of its former self. HIMYM had previously had bad episode, bad characters, and bad storylines, but none of them was so fundamental to the mythos of the series, so bafflingly wrong-headed, and so essential to the show's past and its future, as "The Final Page."
But before we explore the horror, let's take just a minute to chat about the things that are okay, even good about the episode. The comedy subplot about Marshall and Lily having their first day off since Marvin was born gets pretty broad, between their minute-by-minute list of activities, to their cartoonish lullaby, to their immediate separation anxiety, but it's pretty standard HIMYM Season 8 comedy, with a few cute moments, and that's enough to give it a pass.
What's more, Ted's speech to Robin about the virtues of making an ass of yourself is a lovely little scene, that manages to delve into Ted's fairly unrealistic view of what loves means, and yet draws it back to something sweet -- that even his wildest misfires have helped him to find a great friend. I've never really bought into the show's thesis, first presented in Season 7, that what was holding Ted back from finding The One was that he needed to get over Robin. But accepting that premise, his words are heartfelt and the gesture of taking Robin to the WWN building is meaningful.
With that out of the way, let's talk about the event that manages to wreck one of the show's foundational relationships, botch its romantic-arc storytelling over at least the last season and a half, practically ruin two of the show's main characters, and infect nearly everything that came after it: The Robin.
The result is simple -- essentially everything from Barney's profession of love to Robin in "Splitsville" has been part of a play, a scheme on Barney's part prime Robin for his proposal. The drunken kiss, the dating Patrice, the whole kit and kaboodle, were one grand effort at manipulating Robin into loving him.
Let's address the first problem with this whole plan -- it's tremendously implausible. The problem with a lot of works, be they dramatic or comedic, aping the Tyler Durden-esque twist that reshapes everything you've seen previously, is that too often they require all too much convenience in order for these sorts of byzantine plots to work. Too much of "The Robin" requires people to react in just the right way, at just the right time, on just the right schedule, or the whole thing falls apart.
Now HIMYM has always been a show that runs more on emotional logic than on real logic. To some degree, you accept the level of willing suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy this show, or you pretty much have to give up on the whole thing from the beginning (or chalk it up to Future Ted as an unreliable narrator). I'm generally okay with that idea, and the other contrivances that are necessary for the grand gestures that are the stock and trade of HIMYM to work. But this one stretches the reality of the show too far. Maybe it's just that there's too many moving parts; maybe it's that the plan stacks implausibility on top of implausibility until the whole bit is too unwieldy to pass even the most generous of B.S. detectors, or maybe it's that I don't like what this routine is in service of and that colors my willingness to accept it or not. Whatever the reason, "The Robin" feels like a bridge too far in terms of the coincidences necessary for Barney's ploy to work, and while that's far from this episode's greatest problem, it does sincerely damage the effectiveness of the twist.
So let's get into the greatest problem, which is really two fold: that Barney would do something like this and that Robin would accept it.
The first part is arguably, devastatingly in-character for Barney. There have been several episodes to rehabilitate Barney as not just some sort of Lothario on the prowl, but as an actual human being with real feelings and a desire to love and to be loved. The results have been mixed, and all too often the show falls back into the idea that Barney is basically a sex-minded wizard, conjuring spells on unsuspecting dames at the bar with little moral compunction.
So then it's not crazy that Barney would offer this bizarro version of something Ted might do. Barney too goes in for the big gesture, for making an ass of himself, but he does it in the most deranged, cruel manner imaginable, that plays into the worst qualities of the character. Manipulating someone that you claim to love, knowingly putting them through the pain and humiliation and instability that Robin has been suffering from over the past few episodes, doesn't amount to a grand profession of love; it amounts to the revelation that Barney doesn't really understand what love is.
Because what's striking about "The Robin," and what is supposed to ease the audience into accepting all of these horrible things, is that Barney has no malice in any of this. Barney isn't trying to hurt Robin; he's not trying to trick her into loving him; he's not trying to be an amoral monster about something as sacrosanct as two people pledging the rest of their lives to one another. He just doesn't understand. "The Robin" unintentionally reveals that the Barney's arc from, at a minimum, the end of Season 2, where he slowly develops from a sexual predator into a mature human being, is a failure. It leads to a person who believes he loves another person, and maybe, in his own way, he does, but through his twisted methods, shows he has no concept of what love really is.
Love is not torturing someone so as to catch them off guard with your proposal. (I'm also looking at you, Friends.) Love is not intentionally driving someone "nuts." Love is not toying with people's emotions. Love is not spying on your friends. Love is not pretending to date the object of your heart's desire's worst enemy just to get to them. Love is not an elaborate game where if you lie and cheat and steal enough along the way, you get a human trophy at the end.
These are not the acts of someone who truly cares for another human being. These are the acts of a sociopath. This is the best Barney can do. This is him playacting as a romantic. This is him trying to replicate the rhythms of the Mosbies of the world while having no facility, maybe even no idea, about what truly loving another person means.
And this is the point where Barney crosses the moral event horizon. It is telling that the show's creators patterned Barney's "long con" after a similarly elaborate plot from Breaking Bad's Walter White (occasional HIMYM guest star Bryan Cranston). That moment in Breaking Bad is arguably the point where Walter White goes from being a man with good intentions and bad impulses to being the monster he would become. "The Robin" presents a turning point for Barney as well. This is where he goes from being a character who does some pretty terrible things that you can write off as an exaggerated, nigh-satirical take on "pickup artist," buoyed by the character's accumulated vulnerabilities and affections, to becoming someone who would enact this horrifying, violating scheme and view it as a sincere expression of love.
Maybe it is. Maybe this is the closest Barney can come to expressing the emotions that he believes amount to love. But if so, that's terrible, and speaks volumes about the fissures in the foundation of a relationship HIMYM doesn't just wants us to be on board with, but which has been, and will be, at the core of the series' final three seasons.
But perhaps even more insulting is the idea that Robin accepts it. Robin herself has deteriorated a bit as a character since the beginning, becoming more and more exaggerated herself as the late season dearth of places to take the show's characters became more pronounced. And yet there is little in her history that suggests the cynical, pragmatic, independent woman we have seen over seven-plus years, would not only excuse Barney's deplorable behavior, but accept it as a sign that the two of them should be together.
Robin herself offers the most convincing and powerful rebuke of Barney's inherently messed-up gesture. "Seriously, Barney?" she asks. "Even you, even someone as certifiably insane as you must realize that this is too far. You lied to me, manipulated me for weeks. Do you really think I could ever kiss you after that? Do you really think I could ever trust you after that? This this is proof of why we don't work, why we'll never work. So thank you. You've set me free because how could I be with a man who thinks that this trick, this enormous lie could ever make me want to date him again?"
That should really have been it. Robin should have walked away, resolved never to talk to or let Barney into her life ever again, and recognize him as someone who could not trusted to be honest, to be open, to be a mature human being in an adult relationship. Instead, she realizes that this is all, in fact, leading to a proposal, and convinces her to have a complete change of heart about the whole thing.
And it makes absolutely no sense.
How that sense of betrayal becomes instant acceptance of the offer to marry this cretin is beyond me. The most charitable interpretation is that Robin appreciates this as Barney being all-in as only he can be. But that doesn't erase the horrible things he did to her to get there, or offer any indication that he couldn't or wouldn't twist noble ends into terrible acts once more. The less charitable interpretation is that Robin has been left so off-balance and messed up by Barney's machinations that she's in a bad enough place mentally to be willing to accept this sort of thing. The even less charitable interpretation is that no reasonable human being would ever look at what Barney did as a genuine sign of love, or at least as a sign that someone can be trusted to be a committed, loving partner in life, and the show just fiats Robin's emotional acceptance to get us to an end point it not only hasn't earned, but which is the antithetical result to all that we've seen thus far.
Or maybe there's another explanation.
The version of Robin Scherbatsky we've seen over the last handful of episodes has not been good or decent or likable. She is pointlessly horrible to Patrice. She selfishly tries to sabotage what she thinks is Barney's relationship with Patrice. And she only returns to wanting Barney after his declaration that she cannot have him. This too, is not the foundation of a real, committed relationship, or the kind of person with the maturity to be in one. Robin has always been much more of an adult than Barney, and even within the heightened reality of the show, felt like more of a real person. But the version of her we've seen in the lead up to "The Final Page," presents a discomforting possibility.
Maybe these two people deserve each other. Maybe they both have such a fucked up view of what it is to want and care for and love someone that they are made to visit these types of violations of trust and of conscience upon one another again and again, in a spate of co-dependence rather than legitimate connection. Though Barney's missteps are much greater in magnitude here, both he and Robin act terribly in the lead to this mid-season finale. They mislead, don't consider the genuine happiness or well-being of the other (not to mention innocent bystanders), and above all act with wanton disregard for anyone's interests but their own. Perhaps that level of myopia leaves them unexpectedly well-matched, even if not portends a thoroughly unhealthy relationship to follow.
But that's not what How I Met Your Mother seems to want its audience to take from "The Final Page." It wants us to take this all as the act of genuine devotion rather than of hopeless narcissism, as a moment filled with true love than a reveal of psychopathology, as two people who belong together beautifully and finally joining as one than as an implausible acceptance premised on falsehood and manipulations.
This, more than any prior missteps, more than any previous faults in the characters or the plot, more than even the justifiably polarizing finale, is the moment that broke the show, that proved it had truly and fully lost whatever tenuous grasp it had on its understanding of its characters, their stories, or how love and romance work. It's the point at which we were asked to accept the product of a depraved act of betrayal and manipulation as an enviable celebration of true feeling.
There was no turning back from "The Robin." No retcons could save it, and no amount of attempted rehabilitation could rescue the show in its wake. It is the point at which How I Met Your Mother ceased to be a series that had always had a certain rom-com view of romance but which grounded it in genuine human emotion and moments of real feeling, and instead became one simply playing out the string to its unsatisfying endgame, increasingly fixated on relationships that hadn't and didn't work, and which were founded on so much betrayal -- of character, of love, of common sense -- that it could no longer have even the force that came from the years of good will and myth the series had crafted for so long. "The Final Page" is, without question, the worst thing the show ever did, and true to HIMYM's non-linear bent, its ripples are felt in both the past and the future of the show.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2016-08-22T21:52:12Z
So there it is, the worst thing HIMYM had ever done, or would ever do. "The Robin" was once my breaking point on this show, the point where I stopped harboring any illusions that it might one day return to being the show and I had known and loved and accepted that, instead, it had metamorphasized into a pale imitation of its former self. HIMYM had previously had bad episode, bad characters, and bad storylines, but none of them was so fundamental to the mythos of the series, so bafflingly wrong-headed, and so essential to the show's past and its future, as "The Final Page."
But before we explore the horror, let's take just a minute to chat about the things that are okay, even good about the episode. The comedy subplot about Marshall and Lily having their first day off since Marvin was born gets pretty broad, between their minute-by-minute list of activities, to their cartoonish lullaby, to their immediate separation anxiety, but it's pretty standard HIMYM Season 8 comedy, with a few cute moments, and that's enough to give it a pass.
What's more, Ted's speech to Robin about the virtues of making an ass of yourself is a lovely little scene, that manages to delve into Ted's fairly unrealistic view of what loves means, and yet draws it back to something sweet -- that even his wildest misfires have helped him to find a great friend. I've never really bought into the show's thesis, first presented in Season 7, that what was holding Ted back from finding The One was that he needed to get over Robin. But accepting that premise, his words are heartfelt and the gesture of taking Robin to the WWN building is meaningful.
With that out of the way, let's talk about the event that manages to wreck one of the show's foundational relationships, botch its romantic-arc storytelling over at least the last season and a half, practically ruin two of the show's main characters, and infect nearly everything that came after it: The Robin.
The result is simple -- essentially everything from Barney's profession of love to Robin in "Splitsville" has been part of a play, a scheme on Barney's part prime Robin for his proposal. The drunken kiss, the dating Patrice, the whole kit and kaboodle, were one grand effort at manipulating Robin into loving him.
Let's address the first problem with this whole plan -- it's tremendously implausible. The problem with a lot of works, be they dramatic or comedic, aping the Tyler Durden-esque twist that reshapes everything you've seen previously, is that too often they require all too much convenience in order for these sorts of byzantine plots to work. Too much of "The Robin" requires people to react in just the right way, at just the right time, on just the right schedule, or the whole thing falls apart.
Now HIMYM has always been a show that runs more on emotional logic than on real logic. To some degree, you accept the level of willing suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy this show, or you pretty much have to give up on the whole thing from the beginning (or chalk it up to Future Ted as an unreliable narrator). I'm generally okay with that idea, and the other contrivances that are necessary for the grand gestures that are the stock and trade of HIMYM to work. But this one stretches the reality of the show too far. Maybe it's just that there's too many moving parts; maybe it's that the plan stacks implausibility on top of implausibility until the whole bit is too unwieldy to pass even the most generous of B.S. detectors, or maybe it's that I don't like what this routine is in service of and that colors my willingness to accept it or not. Whatever the reason, "The Robin" feels like a bridge too far in terms of the coincidences necessary for Barney's ploy to work, and while that's far from this episode's greatest problem, it does sincerely damage the effectiveness of the twist.
So let's get into the greatest problem, which is really two fold: that Barney would do something like this and that Robin would accept it.
The first part is arguably, devastatingly in-character for Barney. There have been several episodes to rehabilitate Barney as not just some sort of Lothario on the prowl, but as an actual human being with real feelings and a desire to love and to be loved. The results have been mixed, and all too often the show falls back into the idea that Barney is basically a sex-minded wizard, conjuring spells on unsuspecting dames at the bar with little moral compunction.
So then it's not crazy that Barney would offer this bizarro version of something Ted might do. Barney too goes in for the big gesture, for making an ass of himself, but he does it in the most deranged, cruel manner imaginable, that plays into the worst qualities of the character. Manipulating someone that you claim to love, knowingly putting them through the pain and humiliation and instability that Robin has been suffering from over the past few episodes, doesn't amount to a grand profession of love; it amounts to the revelation that Barney doesn't really understand what love is.
Because what's striking about "The Robin," and what is supposed to ease the audience into accepting all of these horrible things, is that Barney has no malice in any of this. Barney isn't trying to hurt Robin; he's not trying to trick her into loving him; he's not trying to be an amoral monster about something as sacrosanct as two people pledging the rest of their lives to one another. He just doesn't understand. "The Robin" unintentionally reveals that the Barney's arc from, at a minimum, the end of Season 2, where he slowly develops from a sexual predator into a mature human being, is a failure. It leads to a person who believes he loves another person, and maybe, in his own way, he does, but through his twisted methods, shows he has no concept of what love really is.
Love is not torturing someone so as to catch them off guard with your proposal. (I'm also looking at you, Friends.) Love is not intentionally driving someone "nuts." Love is not toying with people's emotions. Love is not spying on your friends. Love is not pretending to date the object of your heart's desire's worst enemy just to get to them. Love is not an elaborate game where if you lie and cheat and steal enough along the way, you get a human trophy at the end.
These are not the acts of someone who truly cares for another human being. These are the acts of a sociopath. This is the best Barney can do. This is him playacting as a romantic. This is him trying to replicate the rhythms of the Mosbies of the world while having no facility, maybe even no idea, about what truly loving another person means.
And this is the point where Barney crosses the moral event horizon. It is telling that the show's creators patterned Barney's "long con" after a similarly elaborate plot from Breaking Bad's Walter White (occasional HIMYM guest star Bryan Cranston). That moment in Breaking Bad is arguably the point where Walter White goes from being a man with good intentions and bad impulses to being the monster he would become. "The Robin" presents a turning point for Barney as well. This is where he goes from being a character who does some pretty terrible things that you can write off as an exaggerated, nigh-satirical take on "pickup artist," buoyed by the character's accumulated vulnerabilities and affections, to becoming someone who would enact this horrifying, violating scheme and view it as a sincere expression of love.
Maybe it is. Maybe this is the closest Barney can come to expressing the emotions that he believes amount to love. But if so, that's terrible, and speaks volumes about the fissures in the foundation of a relationship HIMYM doesn't just wants us to be on board with, but which has been, and will be, at the core of the series' final three seasons.
But perhaps even more insulting is the idea that Robin accepts it. Robin herself has deteriorated a bit as a character since the beginning, becoming more and more exaggerated herself as the late season dearth of places to take the show's characters became more pronounced. And yet there is little in her history that suggests the cynical, pragmatic, independent woman we have seen over seven-plus years, would not only excuse Barney's deplorable behavior, but accept it as a sign that the two of them should be together.
Robin herself offers the most convincing and powerful rebuke of Barney's inherently messed-up gesture. "Seriously, Barney?" she asks. "Even you, even someone as certifiably insane as you must realize that this is too far. You lied to me, manipulated me for weeks. Do you really think I could ever kiss you after that? Do you really think I could ever trust you after that? This this is proof of why we don't work, why we'll never work. So thank you. You've set me free because how could I be with a man who thinks that this trick, this enormous lie could ever make me want to date him again?"
That should really have been it. Robin should have walked away, resolved never to talk to or let Barney into her life ever again, and recognize him as someone who could not trusted to be honest, to be open, to be a mature human being in an adult relationship. Instead, she realizes that this is all, in fact, leading to a proposal, and convinces her to have a complete change of heart about the whole thing.
And it makes absolutely no sense.
How that sense of betrayal becomes instant acceptance of the offer to marry this cretin is beyond me. The most charitable interpretation is that Robin appreciates this as Barney being all-in as only he can be. But that doesn't erase the horrible things he did to her to get there, or offer any indication that he couldn't or wouldn't twist noble ends into terrible acts once more. The less charitable interpretation is that Robin has been left so off-balance and messed up by Barney's machinations that she's in a bad enough place mentally to be willing to accept this sort of thing. The even less charitable interpretation is that no reasonable human being would ever look at what Barney did as a genuine sign of love, or at least as a sign that someone can be trusted to be a committed, loving partner in life, and the show just fiats Robin's emotional acceptance to get us to an end point it not only hasn't earned, but which is the antithetical result to all that we've seen thus far.
Or maybe there's another explanation.
The version of Robin Scherbatsky we've seen over the last handful of episodes has not been good or decent or likable. She is pointlessly horrible to Patrice. She selfishly tries to sabotage what she thinks is Barney's relationship with Patrice. And she only returns to wanting Barney after his declaration that she cannot have him. This too, is not the foundation of a real, committed relationship, or the kind of person with the maturity to be in one. Robin has always been much more of an adult than Barney, and even within the heightened reality of the show, felt like more of a real person. But the version of her we've seen in the lead up to "The Final Page," presents a discomforting possibility.
Maybe these two people deserve each other. Maybe they both have such a fucked up view of what it is to want and care for and love someone that they are made to visit these types of violations of trust and of conscience upon one another again and again, in a spate of co-dependence rather than legitimate connection. Though Barney's missteps are much greater in magnitude here, both he and Robin act terribly in the lead to this mid-season finale. They mislead, don't consider the genuine happiness or well-being of the other (not to mention innocent bystanders), and above all act with wanton disregard for anyone's interests but their own. Perhaps that level of myopia leaves them unexpectedly well-matched, even if not portends a thoroughly unhealthy relationship to follow.
But that's not what How I Met Your Mother seems to want its audience to take from "The Final Page." It wants us to take this all as the act of genuine devotion rather than of hopeless narcissism, as a moment filled with true love than a reveal of psychopathology, as two people who belong together beautifully and finally joining as one than as an implausible acceptance premised on falsehood and manipulations.
This, more than any prior missteps, more than any previous faults in the characters or the plot, more than even the justifiably polarizing finale, is the moment that broke the show, that proved it had truly and fully lost whatever tenuous grasp it had on its understanding of its characters, their stories, or how love and romance work. It's the point at which we were asked to accept the product of a depraved act of betrayal and manipulation as an enviable celebration of true feeling.
There was no turning back from "The Robin." No retcons could save it, and no amount of attempted rehabilitation could rescue the show in its wake. It is the point at which How I Met Your Mother ceased to be a series that had always had a certain rom-com view of romance but which grounded it in genuine human emotion and moments of real feeling, and instead became one simply playing out the string to its unsatisfying endgame, increasingly fixated on relationships that hadn't and didn't work, and which were founded on so much betrayal -- of character, of love, of common sense -- that it could no longer have even the force that came from the years of good will and myth the series had crafted for so long. "The Final Page" is, without question, the worst thing the show ever did, and true to HIMYM's non-linear bent, its ripples are felt in both the past and the future of the show.