Broken bro code
Friends can be hard to come by, and sometimes even harder to keep. These are the lessons our dear friends in How I Met Your Mother learn in this week’s episode, “The Broken Code.”
I really empathize with Robin in this episode. After Robin explains all the ways Ted is a better best man than Lily is a maid of honor (Ted hand-wrote the table cards in calligraphy and made a customized Barney poker set, Lily forgot to invite Robin’s friends to the bachelorette party), Lily reveals that the real problem is that Robin has no girlfriends for Lily to invite (Robin’s list of friends included “tall girl from work,” “mouth-breather from coffee shop,” and “average-sized girl from that place”). Robin is not overly upset about this, but Lily decides Robin needs to have another female friend to hang out with while Lily is away in Rome.
Turns out, Robin isn’t very good at making female friends. This is partially because she doesn’t really want to – and that’s where I understand her feelings. I myself don’t really feel that I get along with other women very much, and even further, don’t really feel like I need to have a huge group of friends. I’m happiest alone or in a small group, and the same is true for Robin, who fantasizes about watching hockey alone eating cereal with beer instead of milk.
Yet Lily insists, and so the two go on a quest to find Robin a new pal. Robin strikes up a connection with girl sobbing at the bar, who turns out to be a huge hockey fan, and the pair share their distaste for the Bruins. Lily is happy for a moment, but then she envisions the two sharing their beer cereal and hockey and some sexual tension, and Lily quickly breaks out her charmingly crazy side to prevent any future interaction between the two, thus proving to Robin that Lily is the only female friend she could need.
Ted and Barney, on the other hand, have an interesting exchange. Barney confronts Ted about the scene by the carousel, where Ted was holding Robin’s hand to console her about not finding the locket. When Ted insists that nothing is up between the two of them (“Everything is down all parts of me down!”) and Barney says he’s not upset. But his increasing list of requests for Ted, who is on a mission to be the best best man of all time, become increasingly more and more inconvenient for Ted and seem to indicate that Barney is more upset than he lets on. When Ted confronts Barney, Barney says he is upset, and quotes the Bro Code as proof that the moment was unacceptable. The two bring it to Marshpillow 2.0 (Marshall’s face skyped in on a tablet computer attached to a Marshall-shaped pillow) for him to settle the dispute, and Marshall insists they reenact the scene to prove it isn’t weird. With the two sitting on the beach and holding hands in the rain, Ted reveals that he does still have some lingering feelings for Robin, but promises to put his friendship with Barney over his feelings for Robin.
I really don’t understand why this plot was so rushed. If the creators of the show really want to emphasize Ted’s need to get over Robin and focus on such a short time period, I think they could have gotten away with extending this plot somewhat. The fact that they were able to solve the problem in one fell swoop – Ted revealing his feelings and Barney being totally fine with it without so much as a discussion of the implications of Ted’s feelings is cheap. And if Ted really wants to be a good friend to Barney, what is going to come of Ted’s trip to LA to retrieve Robin’s locket? The anticipation of knowing what happened during that trip is agonizing and I don’t think we’ll find out any time soon.
I would really like to see more overlap between episodes from here on out. I know that this is a sitcom and plots tend to build and resolve all in a 30-minute time slot, but the format of these last episodes would benefit greatly from more complication and interconnection. Conflicts should weave together and build more anticipation for the finale. I was hoping for the story to build and build, but lately it’s been flatlining.
Tidbits:
– Barney’s fake hesitation every time he wanted Ted to do something: “Tssss… Hey, buddy, listen…” Very remniscient of the boss in Office Space.
– Ted only had his travel quills, but they would have to do for redoing the calligraphy on the table cards.
– Tim Gunn is Barney’s personal stylist.
– “Holding hands is like the 4th grade equivalent of banging.”
– Robin’s not good at making friends because she doesn’t know how to relate: “I can moose down a pint of fudge ripple and wake up having lost weight… well everywhere except for my boobs.”
– “Comfortable shoes? What are you, filibustering later?”
– Barney: “But I was having such a good time greasing 12-year-olds!”
– Ted: “Laser tag.” Marshall: “Helpful. Go on.”
