As a brief note, I should point out that if I were still in grad school, this would probably be an excerpt from a much, much longer paper chronicling the course of the entire series and the ways in which we, the audience, are lied to, and the benefits and drawbacks of such choices.
Never lie to your audience.
That’s one of those “rules” of film and television that are, in reality, broken all the time. But in the case of the long-running How I Met Your Mother, this is, in fact, one of the rules that they break, and break quite often – and given the structure of the show, which functions as a product of the narrator’s memory, it’s a big structuring element of the show.
There is, however, a second unreliable narrator guiding the audience throughout the run of the show, and that is, of course, the creator/showrunner team of Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, who have long utilized the show’s flexible relationship with time to provide retroactive meaning to events that the audience has already experienced.
Because the show has often found the emotional punch in its third act by retroactively explaining how what-we-just-saw-wasn’t-what-we-just-saw (two examples of this would be Season 4’s “Three Days of Snow” (where the act three reveal is that the seemingly simultaneous storylines we’re seeing between Lily and Marshall are, in fact, not happening on the same day) and Season 7’s heartbreaking “Symphony of Illumination” (where we discover that the fictitious children Robin is narrating to throughout the episode are not, in fact, real), the audience should, generally, be prepped to handle this kind of behavior, and perhaps, to expect it.
Naturally, there’s a danger in relying on formula to elicit emotional response (see Shyamalan, M. Night), but in general Bays and Thomas have done a decent enough job changing up the pieces surrounding the act three reveal that they feel relatively fresh and new (even though the savvy audience member would be expecting it, particularly in an emotionally heightened moment).
Over the first half of Season 8, however, they have perhaps pulled off their greatest feat in using not just one but multiple episodes to pull their longest con, culminating in the great “The Final Page, Part 2”.
Having armed the audience over the past couple years with the knowledge that Robin and Barney are headed for their eventual wedding (as well as the possibility that this season will be the show’s last), the HIMYM writing staff had an extremely difficult task: get Robin and Barney back together in a way that, at worst, was emotionally satisfying, and at best managed to surprise at least a reasonable segment of the show’s fans.
Once the show dispatched with Barney’s previous love interest, Quinn, and got him through the requisite amount of depression/loneliness/soul-searching, the show started to move Barney and Robin back toward one another – first with Barney confessing his love (very clearly in a pretending-he’s-pretending kind of way), then with him making a move/being rejected by Robin, followed by his declaration that he’s done chasing her and his subsequent (fake) relationship with Robin’s nemesis, Patrice – all steps that were either out of character for Barney, or signs that he was maturing (in some way), and all steps that, it turned out, were part of his final “play”, but instead of getting a woman into bed, the endgame was to get Robin to (hopefully) accept his proposal.
There is a danger in using this trick too many times, in that you risk alienating your audience with the constant half-truths and subjective, rather than objective, point of view (of course, one could argue that no media is truly objective in its point of view, but regardless) – in other words, they might get tired of the trick. The greater danger in what HIMYM did this time around (and what makes this arc ultimately tougher to pull off) is that they left themselves open to attack in the week-to-week moments of the arc, when people could have (rightfully) pointed out that characters were acting in a way that wasn’t consistent with their worldview – leading people to believe that the writers had lost their way.
“Trust us, we know where we’re headed,” is something that Bays & Thomas have long said, and while I believe that on some level it’s true, TV audiences will no longer give their trust over so easily (not since, at least, Lost failed to acceptably explain every single thread that they ever put in). But in this instance, those who remained patient with the storyline were ultimately rewarded with a successful, emotional payoff, and one that felt largely earned.
There was a second, perhaps greater danger undertaken in this story, in the fact that truthfully, the storyline wasn’t all that funny. Because this go-round of the Robin/Barney arc focused on the romantic side of the romantic comedy world that HIMYM lives in, the last several episodes were required to pile the humor onto Lily, Marshall, and Ted, and lowering the overall joke counts throughout.
Despite these dangers, ultimately this was a risk worth taking, for a number of reasons: one, the show had to get to Robin and Barney getting engaged somehow, and this was a way to get there in a still relatively short amount of time, and two, because the show is set to end with the Ted meeting the mother, the Robin/Barney relationship has become the most important romantic pairing on the show – Lily and Marshall were never going to break up, and we’ll never get to see the evolution of Ted’s relationship with his eventual wife, so it was important for this show to treat the reconciliation of (and proposal between) Barney and Robin with enough emotional weight that it rewards the viewers, who, at this point, are unlikely to receive the same type of emotional payoff from the first meeting between Ted and his future wife, no matter how great it is.
Fortunately for the show, the moment worked. Besides the aforementioned use of retroactive logic, the show leaned on a number of significant running gags as emotional signifiers – the most significant of those being, of course, Barney’s burning of his playbook, which served to both prove to a hidden Robin that he was moving forward emotionally, as well as attempting to throw the audience off the fact that there was one final page that had not been burned.
The episode also broke from its technical norms, using a crane shot (or as much of one that you can have in a multi-camera setup) to move from Robin discovering the mistletoe to revealing Barney’s presence on the roof, and the close-up POV shot of the page in Robin’s hand to Barney, ring extended, as he kneels in front of Robin. These are unusual techniques for even a hybrid multi-camera comedy such as HIMYM, and they helped to highlight the importance and singular nature of this moment – the point being, this is not an ordinary moment in the lives of our characters.
From there, the acceptance of the proposal led to a beautiful montage of our characters at the end of 2012; Robin and Barney, together again and happy; Marshall, Lily, and baby Marvin, happy; Ted, celebrated in his success, but staring out across the city, still alone. With this final shot, HIMYM has given us the “where is everyone emotionally” montage that comes just before we reach the climax, a clear signal that we are nearing the end of our journey, and they have set the stage for Ted’s last stretch of solitude before he finally meets the woman who he will marry.
Although of course, with Bays & Thomas, you can never be completely sure.