How I Got It Wrong

Last night's season finale of "How I Met Your Mother" was a surprise. Not just because Lily's "food poisoning" turned out to be morning sickness - she's pregnant!!! - not just because Ted briefly pondered reconciliation with Zoey, and not because he finally met his future wife when a farewell gift to Zoey was inadvertently given to another woman (actually, the joke was that the other woman was not his future wife, future Ted was just teasing in his narration), but . . . it turns out that Barney is preparing to to reconcile with his British girlfriend Nora after all.

And the wedding at which Ted does meet his future wife is not a minor character's wedding, as hinted before, but . . . Barney's!

Well, you have to figure that a libidinous letch like Barney would have to settle down eventually. And it looks like I was wrong. Nora is back in the ongoing storyline again, and Barney is going to marry her.

Or is he? You never can tell with the plot twists in this sitcom. I'm still trying to figure out whether Marshall got that environmental law firm job he tried out for.

And was that George Harrison's "The Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll)" I heard as the finale of season six faded out?

This all should make the next two years for the series very interesting.

How I Met My Father

It finally happened. After various teases in several episodes, "How I Met Your Mother"'s Barney Stinson (played by Neil Patrick Harris) finally met his dad.

And he was played by John Lithgow.

Last night's episode of "How I Met Your Mother" was a rather poignant installment in which Barney comes face to face with a father he never knew and becomes disappointed when the cool and exciting man he hoped to meet turns out instead to be just a regular suburbanite. It seems Barney's father Jerry was a onetime rock and roll concert tour manager (i.e., a "roadie") who gave up that life to become a driving instructor in White Plains, New York and start a new family. (Jerry has a son by his present-day wife.) Barney resists having any more contact with him after finding out the truth about him (and after making up a story about how his dad is still cool) but his buddies, after learning the truth, convince him to have dinner with Jerry. Barney goes to Jerry's house to have dinner with him, but . . .

Well, why don't you find out for yourself if you haven't already seen it? Just go to this link, the show's official Web site. It's a pretty good episode, full of heartfelt pathos, where Barney comes to terms with the reality of who his father is and the pain of having grown up without him. Also, this episode demonstrates how Hollywood and the rest of America got it right by letting Neil Patrick Harris make the move from child star to adult actor.

Without giving too much away, the ending is open-ended enough to allow for Lithgow to return in what could be a recurring role. And, as CBS has renewed "How I Met Your Mother" for two more seasons, there'll be plenty of opportunities for him to return. (But please, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, no more Britney Spears!) This was actually a very gratifying episode after the dissatisfying result of the previous one, in which Barney started to develop a fondness for an English girl named Nora, only to deliberately screw things up with her to avoid a commitment to her. That episode ended with Barney reconciling with Nora in what turned out to be a scene in his own imagination; in reality, he chickened out at the opportunity for a reconciliation. It seems unlikely that this particular storyline will be developed any further.

And, after all that drama about Ted's girlfriend Zoey (Jennifer Morrison) possibly being the woman he ends up marrying, it was revealed in one episode, in a scene taking place ten years in the future, that she isn't. Carter Bays and Craig Thomas risk stretching the theme of Ted's search for his soulmate so far that, despite the two-year renewal from CBS, many viewers might just find the whole shtick tiresome and stop watching.

How I Killed Your Father

Death may not walk behind us, but he certainly made a spectacular appearance at the end of this past Monday's episode of the CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother." Titled "Bad News," the episode involved the married couple of Marshall and Lily (for those who aren't familiar with the series) trying to determine whether or not both of them are able to sire a child. Marshall holds off on calling his father with any news; Lily turns out to be fertile despite their inability to conceive, leading Marshall to think he's sterile. He doesn't want to call his father with this bad news, but he ultimately tells him in person when both of his parents visit him. Upon learning he too is fertile, Marshall calls his father on a borrowed cell phone but doesn't get an answer. Then Lily arrives with an answer of a different sort - the weaver's answer. She tells Marshall that his father has died of a heart attack.

Marshall's father's death came as a shock to most viewers in an episode ironically building up to something monumental happening at the end, but the anticipation wasn't just in the performances from the cast or the dialogue from script writer Jennifer Hendriks. The episode also featured the numbers from 1 to 50 in reverse numerical order - a visual countdown to the end - hidden in inconspicuous props and backgrounds. The placement of these numbers was so subtle that many viewers, while expecting some kind of dramatic climax, didn't notice them. They appeared on book covers, magazine covers, cereal boxes, sports jerseys, and ominously toward the end, a clock in Marshall's father's empty workshop, among other places. The Grim Reaper was sending a signal for anyone to see, but, ironically, it went over the heads of many of "How I Met Your Mother"'s fans. And those who did notice the numbers likely expected the countdown to be to something wonderful - yet another irony.

I myself only noticed a few of these numerals but didn't tie them together as a countdown to anything about to happen. I had to watch this episode of "How I Met Your Mother" again online to see the sequence. The number 48 appeared on a ketchup bottle! More irony: If the countdown had started at 60 and the number 57 had appeared on a ketchup bottle, more people would have likely noticed. This episode made me upset and depressed enough when I saw it on TV; taking note of the countdown when I saw it again online, I found the whole thing creepy and morose.

(One other clue appears to have been planted. Throughout the series, the characters have crossed paths with their "doppelgangers" - people who look almost exactly like themselves, a common dramatic technique in American situation comedies. The doppelganger of Neil Patrick Harris's character Barney was the fifth and last one to be seen, in this episode - a medical specialist whom Marshall and Lily go to for help. He is also the only doppelganger any of the characters have any kind of association with. In many cultures, doppelgangers are bad omens.)

In killing off Marshall's father, the show's producers pulled off the greatest shock involving death in a sitcom since writers Everett Greenbaum and Jim Fritzell killed off Henry Blake in the third season finale of "M*A*S*H." (Read the attached comment for some of my observations about that shocker.) Monday night's episode of "How I Met Your Mother" not only left people angry, sad, and shocked, it generated heavy Internet chatter full of reaction to the episode's outcome - most of it negative - and likely sparked more water cooler discussion among those lucky enough to have a job these days than any other sitcom had done since "Seinfeld" was last on network television. I'm still as upset and disturbed over this episode of "How I Met Your Mother" as I was when I saw it; I don't know when I'm going to calm down.

This episode is sure to set the tone for "How I Met Your Mother" not just for the rest of this season (its sixth), but for the 2011-12 season, which will likely be its last. Seven years are long enough to explain how Ted Mosby (the first person of the show's title) met his wife. But before we find out who she is, we're in for some sharp, more dramatic turns in a series long known for its surrealistically quirky humor. It remains to be seen what effect this will have on "How I Met Your Mother." But most of us will be watching to find out.