Monsters of Television

“It’s just so much easier to let the Universe decide.”

Maybe that’s the mentality the show has decided to take, because it’s the only thing that makes sense. I imagine a conversation in the writers room goes something like this:

“So we get Robin and Barney together until Hippie Intern wears a tie!”

“Perfect!”

2 months later…

“Guys! Hippie Intern is wearing a tie!”

“Gotta break ’em up. Call Alan Thicke!”

Perhaps my annoyance at “Doppelgangers” is that I found the preceding episode to appear so promising, a return to form. And instead I get an episode where Ted dyes his hair, Barney ends up encouraging kids for Marshall and Lily (the true protagonists of this show, I’ve decided), and the show tries to pass this off as growth, but it’s growth the show can’t fully claim.

So let’s tackle the growth first. The episodes winds itself up with Ted arguing that as people grow, they become doppelgangers of themselves, using the past selves of the group as examples: Marshall and Lily go from being in a committed non-married relationship to being in a committed married relationship, Barney fell in love, Robin turned down a career chance because she loved Don. Ted…well…Ted hasn’t grown at all.

He’s still idealistic and romantic, and that’s great, but when you’re trying to make the case that these characters have grown, it helps if you can demonstrate that your show’s main character has grown as well. And what has Ted’s growth been? He had the “I’m a douche” arc all this season that ultimately didn’t push the character forward in any real way. If anything, the episode continues the show’s depiction of Ted as vain and kind of a douche (sorry, but Radnor was not pulling off that hair at all).

It’s hampered all the more by my near-constant refrain: the episode wasn’t about Ted, despite it being Ted’s story. Marshall and Lily’s relationship, while the model that Ted has aspired to all these years, is the focal of the episode and really the series by this point. The episode kicks off the next arc of Marshall and Lily having a baby, but gives nothing to Ted: nothing on the mother or a romantic relationship.

Ultimately this idea of growth is really about regression. As Jamie Weinman and I were discussing on Twitter (and if you’re not following Mr. Weinman, you really need to be), the show’s aborted arc — Barney and Robin (and can we add finding the mother, or does that seem a little spiteful?) — caused the show to lost track of itself. It wasn’t sure about, as Mr. Weinman put it, “how much to ‘grow’ characters” and tried to hit a reset button. That reset button resulted in the lack of Robin and Barney follow-through and an lack of direction for Ted that up until last week, was given no clear narrative reason for.

That reset button is firmly pressed with “Doppelgangers.” Robin moving back in with Ted re-establishes their dynamic (after, supposedly, needing to work through being with her exes all the time), Barney can go back to his full-on womanizing ways (“That will close out the Baltics!”), and Lily and Marshall get to set off on a new journey stage of couple-hood. And Ted can go back to doing whatever it is he’s supposed to being doing on this show that is, supposedly, his story.

I think one of my key frustrations with the show has been its selectivity in engaging continuity. Reoccurring telepathic conversations are great, and I think it works as a great short-hand for the type of communication that develops between a tightly-knit group. But I feel like the show prefer joke continuity instead of consistently deployed narrative and character continuity. And perhaps this season has just been especially bad about its wheel-spinning, but it seems that show can’t handle its own ideas sometimes, and that’s, well, sad.

I guess the show wants me to think that this inert season was a doppelganger of the show I loved. There had better be some follow through come next season.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• Lily imagining what it would be like if she and Marshall let the gang know that they were trying to conceive was pretty much the highlight of the episode.
• “Get around the world in 180 lays.” Crass, but I would high five that.

Addendum: Jamie Weinman expounds more on wheel-spinning of the season over at Maclean’s.