i know i'm one of the only people on ilx who watches *how i met your mother* on a regular basis, but did anyone else see the robin sparkles episode? where robin didn't want people to know that she had

should i watch this show? what's its deal?

Via Youtube, i found out that Robin played a hottie artist/sculptor on The L Word. A show I still have never seen.

scott, you are right abt this show. it is cute! and pretty funny!
(i wish it weren't in traditional sitcom form but hey)

i like this show

these kids are alcoholics

whoa so weird b/c i watched a bunch of episodes this week and was going to revive this thread
i laughed out loud several times! - the barney runs a marathon one, the fiero one, etc
i like that they hang out in a bar

my gf loves this show, and it is pretty charming. I'm glad NPH got an Emmy nom.

if John Larroquette got 4 Emmys for Dan Fielding, NPH is due.

I really only watch this show because Jason Segel is a comic genius. There are some funny jokes and scenes but the standard sitcom format of the show is a tremendous drag on it. The laugh track pains me so much. It's watchable now, but it could be just so much better without the cruft. Also, they get points for putting Martin Starr in an episode.

maybe he goes home and hangs himself

Robin rolls her eyes, says "go home Ted, you idiot," and shuts the window.

the final moment i actually loved on its own but this would've been so hilarious

maybe then ted goes home, makes his kids listen to him give another 9-season narrative about how much he hates robin.

'kids let me tell you a story about a nice guy trapped in the friend zone'

Robin rolls her eyes, says "go home Ted, you idiot," and then a sweaty (and shirtless) Lilly and Marshall appear on either side of her and say, "yeah, go home Ted."

then barney and 12 other women appear on either side of robin, lilly and marshall and say "yeah, go home ted!"

then ted goes home. crying.

then he wakes up next to Bob Newhart

haha

In a snow globe held by an autistic kid.

as he and his kids scurry to get into a spacecraft, escaping earth's fiery doom for a colony on jupiter.

we could totally write a better series finale than they did.

I will admit to not having a vested interest in HIMYM for a while (mostly cos I have trouble keeping up with 26-episode seasons of shows that last longer than 4-5 years), but I was amused by many of the folks that rushed to the show's defense in Alien 3 fashion by saying "Life isn't easy, sometimes you can't have a happily ever after!"

I mean, ok that is true, and the wife dying wasn't really the *horrible* decision, but that defense of the ending as executed to me presupposes that the ONLY alternative to a pat ending was this butchery; where the narrator, six years later, seems to have already forgotten his deeply-seated feelings for his dead wife and spents the entire story emo-jizzing to his kids over a distant ex of his. "Creepy" is right!

it just seemed to be poorly-executed. of course, i would have steered it toward totally sad, out-of-sync-with-the-show's-longstanding-tone territory. (like i said, this story arc has a lot of odd parallels to a recent "great american novel," and i felt like that book -- devastatingly good, btw -- tied things up too neatly at the end).

still would have dug a no kids, talking to self in a padded cell reveal.

i would have steered it toward totally sad

"And that, kids, is how I met..."

(Nuclear warhead touches down in yard, Ted's kids instantly obliterated into gooey mess in front of his eyes)

xpost haha clover

still would have dug a no kids, talking to self in a padded cell reveal.

― wat is teh waht (s.clover), Wednesday, April 2, 2014

could ted still have woken up next to bob newhart?

or "dad, how come mommy's diary mentions this other guy named Pierre approx 9 months before each of our b'days?"

those kids look like Radnorspawn

Jason Segel OTM three years ago:

“I had two other suggestions [about how the writers should end the series]. One is that they’re dead. The two kids and their father — they’re dead, and they’re in purgatory, and he’s telling the story for eternity. […] And then my other suggestion, which they never used, which I think would be so funny, is — it’s the future, right? I think in one of those scenes, they should open the window, and it should be, like, a postapocalyptic wasteland outside. It should be like I Am Legend. Horrible mutants.”

the narrator, six years later, seems to have already forgotten his deeply-seated feelings for his dead wife and spents the entire story emo-jizzing to his kids over a distant ex of his. "Creepy" is right!

This is more accurate than what I quoted originally but it's only slightly better.

eh, that's a bit disingenuous consider we just spent the last year recounting magical adventures with Tracy

8/9 of the story

I mean, even scanning these, I see more Robin than Tracy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Met_Your_Mother_(season_9)#Episodes

I like to think Ted died on Robin's doorstep after she opened the door

but THE YELLOW UMBRELLAAAAAAA *sob*

Not gonna introduce you folks to my friend the tragic young widow who married an ex-boyfriend three years after and is happy and speaks well of her dead husband.

ha! IN YOUR FACE ILX!

You'd like her. BUT NOW YOU'LL NEVER KNOW.

If this tragic young widow sat her kids down and told nine years of anecdotes about her ex under the pretense of discussing their father until the kids demanded she go try to fuck her ex already I'm cool with not being introduced.

He didn't actually spend nine years telling the story (the kids haven't aged), but it probably felt that long to them

That's why I said nine years of anecdotes not nine years telling anecdotes.

"In order to understand how I met your mother, you should first hear the sexual history of me and aunt robin, focusing primarily on 2005-2013, but there will be some tangential flashbacks - I do ramble."

If it had just ended with "but then I met mom...speaking of mom, when's dinner?" The show basically would have been a pg-13 version of Nas' "remember the times"

alternate ending getting a DVD release.

It would be awesome if the alternate ending was otherwise like the official ending, except that Marshall and Lily and Barney die too.

mother lives, kids are ghosts

So I wasn't going to cop to it lest that became a tangential debate, but I didn't actually get to watch the finale until last night (my wife was out of town and wanted me to wait) - my opinion's basically the same, but there was a bit of nuance I lost:

1. I can't believe they didn't just end it with the train meet-up. Even if they felt weird about not showing the kids again, not staying true to their vision, whatever, it was such an earned moment, the moment promised by the very title of the show, that the postscript was guaranteed to be superfluous-to-offensive.

2. ...especially cuz following it, it's the kids that come off weirdly cavalier at the end. If you're going to hear that whole story, let it end with dad getting misty-eyed over your mom, I don't think you're going to go "Dad. What the fuck. You're in love with Aunt Robin" unless you're going to follow that with "I HATE YOU SO MUCH" rather than "go fuck aunt robin, it's been six years and you have such good chemistry when she comes over for big holidays. Which is a thing she does now despite how much time this episode was spent discussing her remove from your social circle."

3. If they WERE going to jump from "and that's how i met your mother" to "but i've been a widower for six years, yeah...guess i do still wanna bang the ex. thanks, kids!" Wouldn't it have made sense to cut down on some of the shoe-horned "marshall's journey to the supreme court" filler, have the kids' robin intervention come at the half-way point, and make the last half about future ted talking to future marshal, lily, and (probably climactically) barney about his trepidations re: hooking up with robin again? Like, actually give some weight to this theme-disrupting postscript? Then the point could be about there being more than one One rather than that there's a One but that's no reason to live without sex after a proper mourning period. You can always just have future Marshall in judge's robes, we'll figure out the middle period ourselves.

Which is a thing she does now despite how much time this episode was spent discussing her remove from your social circle.

TBH, Ted's stories pretty much end in 2024, when Tracy dies, the period between that and 2030 is hardly covered at all. So there's plenty of time for Robin and Ted become pals again, and it'd be understandable why the lone widower Ted would like to hang out with her. (Possibly he also feels the kids need a new mother figure, and judging by how much Robin appears in the kids' drawings, which were shown in the early seasons, she does appear to become that too.)

But that just brings us to your point 3, which I totally agree with. Instead of jumping from the mother's death to Ted dating Robin again in 2 minutes, and letting the viewers' imaginations fill in what happened in those 6 years, they definitely should've shown some of that. It's understandable Ted wouldn't want to talk to his kids about how lonely he was after their mom died, or how he still has the hots for Robin, but you're right that he could've told that to Marshall and Lily. It feels like the writers were unnecessarily constrained by their framing device (this a story Ted tells to his kids about their Mother, and it ends with him meeting her), and didn't want to break it even in the finale.

mother lives, kids are ghosts

Having future Ted interact with his future friends would have allowed someone to confirm that future robin may not have lived alone with her future dogs yelling "TV! Show security camera!" since her divorce.

She was probably getting strange ass all around the globe, but I don't know if we needed to see that

speak for yourself!

ring bear, classic for the ages

Why did I watch this all the way to the end??? The last season was so terrible.

to see if it was a real bear

we had to know who jacob really was

to give that villain from The Karate Kid a new lease on life

Did they ever release the supposed alternate ending?

Hannah sent me a picture of a Tim Horton's receipt from Leicester cos she was super excited to be there

The "How I Met Your Dad" pilot w/Greta Gerwig has surfaced.

https://www.avclub.com/after-watching-the-failed-how-i-met-your-dad-pilot-we-1847345513

I had to watch out of curiosity; weird to see. Already feels dated, and watching Greta Gerwig like this feels like peering into another universe. Not as terrible as feared, tough.