“How I Met Your Mother” Recap: The Leap

By Mike Frey

Synopsis: Remember the episode from last season titled “The Goat”? Well, this week’s season finale tells the story of Ted’s 31st birthday party — the one he kept confusing with his previous birthday party in that episode. It would be easy to mix them up, since Marshall decided to throw him two consecutive surprise parties. At this one, the biggest surprise is that Barney loves Robin. OK, so nobody is actually surprised to hear that, except Robin who overhears Barney describing her to Ted as a Canadian suit in a deliberately delivered metaphor.

Robin feels bad that she’s going to have to break Barney’s heart, so Marshall advises her to instead “Mosby” him. In other words, she should tell Barney she loves him so he’ll feel smothered and lose interest. It certainly worked on Robin when Ted did it unintentionally way back in Season 1. It works like a charm until Lily reveals the plot to Barney, whose feelings for Robin instantly return the moment he finds out she’s not interested. But maybe she is. Later, the two of them have a conversation in which both of them admit to having feelings for one another, though neither seems ready to make a commitment and they decide to sort things out later.

The conversation between Barney and Robin actually takes place in the hospital, where Ted is being treated after taking a goat hoof to the head. He got it — and the reputation among hospital employees for being “the guy who tried to make it with a goat” — because he tried to take a wash cloth away from the goat that Lily had brought home from her kindergarten class to spare it from slaughter. It all happened while he was working on his design for Rib Town, a restaurant that ultimately ends up being designed by the Swedish architecture collective Sven (whom you might remember from the episode “Woooo!”) anyway.

Ted finally makes it up to the roof for the party, where Lily advises him to, “Listen to what the world is telling you to do and take the leap.” He does so literally — as do Marshall, Lily, Robin and Barney — by jumping to the roof of a neighboring building with a hot tub (something Marshall has been trying to do for years). He also does it metaphorically, by accepting a teaching position at Columbia, where he becomes Professor Mosby … and meets his the future mother of his children, who happens to be in his class.

What We Liked:

• The use of the song “Prophets” by A.C. Newman during the first and last scenes of the episode.

• Marshall’s blunt assessment of Robin: “You’re freakishly tall and you don’t believe in ghosts.”

• Marshall’s assertion that the perfect rib joint design merely needs wide doors and reinforced chairs

• Barney going all Bill Lumbergh on Robin when she told him she loved him. Yeah …

• The idea that getting beat up by a girl goat — such as Missy, who kicked Ted’s ass — is somehow more embarrassing than getting beat up by a boy goat

What We Didn’t Like:

• The realization that Lily is not Linda Knievel and she never will be Linda Knievel

• “Baa means baa.” We’re all for a good goat rape joke, but how did this one make the final cut?

Best Barneyism: “Pimped in” — Barney’s description of the kiddie pool on the roof of Marshall and Ted’s building, as opposed to the “pimped out” hot tub on the roof of a neighboring building

Photo: Sonja Flemming/CBS ©2009 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved

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