The Playbook gets a worthy send-off.
Though each of the characters on How I Met Your Mother are supposed to be adults in their early 30s, we’ve come to realize that most of them still have a lot of growing up to do. Throughout this season, we’ve watched each character take steps towards maturity — some in one giant stride, as with Lily’s and Marshall’s major career changes, and some in countless tiptoes, as with Robin’s realization of her true feelings and Ted’s (apparent) final moment of clarity about his habit of dating anyone who gives him a second look.
But perhaps the character taking the most (albeit slow and dragging) steps toward development is Barney. He has decided that he is ready to settle down with Robin and end the womanizing, but he has a long history of scheming and persuading that he’s having trouble shaking. Throughout the season, he has grappled with the realization that being a one-woman man means no more plays and maybe a little less excitement, and though he’s tried several times to experience single life through Ted, either by forcing Ted into hook-ups he shouldn’t be in or by injecting himself into the gang’s crazy stories, he’s beginning to realize that it’s a part of his self that he may need to leave in the past in order to have a future with Robin.
There is still, however, a piece of his former life that Barney has not yet rid himself of – the Playbook. We all thought he burned it back when he was running “The Final Play,” but apparently, that was only the ceremonial copy – you know, for celebrations and inaugurations and stuff. Barney’s still got the real copy, and he wants to use it to help Ted find a date for the wedding. (Jeanette broke up with Ted after tearing up his apartment because she found a sexy spam email when she was snooping in his email. She said he was too intense.) Barney remotely guides Ted through several plays, all of which end with the same punchline, “My penis,” and all of which fail. Barney says it’s because Ted’s saying it wrong, which leaves Ted screaming “my penis” in a hospital gown the middle of the bar to prove a point.
In the middle of the third play, the “I have a pet Loch Ness monster,” Robin stops by and finds the Playbook, angrily storming out. Barney stops her in the middle of the street and delivers a perfectly crafted speech about how he has been, is and always will be a liar but that it lies upon an honest core of love, while simultaneously emptying his pockets of all of his magic illusions to offer her three bouquets, not giving up when she rejects the first two. It’s an important moment for both of them, as Barney reveals that he is ready to put to rest some of his tricks without denying who he is, and Robin accepts Barney for that identity without expecting him to change his core self.
In Barney’s absence at the command post, Jeanette has swept in on Ted’s play (which appears to have been working without Barney sending it to a fiery “my penis” end) and reclaimed Ted for her own. But it doesn’t take long for her to find the Playbook and send all of Ted’s belongings to the street, capped off by Barney encouraging Jeanette to strap the Playbook to fireworks and let it explode in mid-air, symbolically imploding the final pages tying Barney to his single life.
As for Lily and Marshall, Lily has her first job as the Captain’s art collector: making friends with up-and-coming artist Strickland Stevens so as to have first dibs on his work when it goes on sale. Marshall comes along, armed with a jumbo bag of Skittles and an arsenal of art jokes (“For a gay guy, Andy Warhol sure liked cans!”) and determined to define his role as the perfect art collector’s husband, smoozing the other gallery-goers. However, most of his jokes sink horribly among the snobby art critics, and when Stevens calls for a moment of silence in the memory of his dead grandmother, Marshall’s bag of Skittles pours, rolls and bounces across the floor. His perfectly stiff composure and the sheer length of time it takes for the bag to empty created one of the funniest scenes Marshall’s had to date. But in the end, he redeems himself by bonding with Stephens over Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and managing to make the connection for Lily.
Tidbits:
– Barney’s newest play: The Weekend at Barney’s. (Robin doesn’t get it, but Barney explains: “Um, a little thing called rigor mortis?”)
– Barney brandishes fake concert tickets to get out of Lily’s art shows: “Steely Dan, Carnegie Hall, backstage passes. We don’t want to miss whatever their big song was.”
– After breaking up with Ted, Jeanette returns to him an apartment key he never made her and his grandmother’s ring, which she was buried with.
– One of Barney’s many one rules: “Lebanese girls sprint to third base and stay there.” Also, “you can tell how old a girl is by her elbows.”
– “I don’t know if you heard but I dropped some Skittles.”
– Things in Barney’s playbook disguise trunk: Fireworks, a framed photo of Barack Obama with a gold plate under it reading “Dad,” and a newspaper reading “World’s gonna end, sex now!”
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