The Summer of Love 2012 was boring. So let’s skip ahead to the Autumn of Break-Ups.
If there’s one thing How I Met Your Mother fans have learned over seven seasons, it’s that the timeline of the show jumps around and you just need to go with it. Do we need to know what happened after Ted got Victoria to leave her husband-to-be at the altar? Not really, because we know she’s not the mother. The story needed to be told, but now we can jump ahead a few months to the present day.
The Autumn of Break-Ups starts in “The Pre-Nup” after Barney gets some overdramatic advice about signing a prenuptial agreement from a divorced coworker. If he doesn’t sign on, the coworker will neuter Barney before Quinn ever has the chance to.
Like many HIMYM episodes, this one is split into two versions of the same story: “You won’t believe what Barney/Quinn did today” each of them complain to their gender groups. This kicks off a chain of events that starts to make each of the couples fight to the extreme. It turns the episode into another necessary one to move the show from its current status to “A Little Ways Down the Road,” where we know certain details about everyone’s life.
Lily is mad at Marshall after he tossed little Marvin in the air. Most of their tension for the remainder of the show will surround their differences in raising a child. While it’s great to see them come together, I hope they’re not reduced to secondary characters now that they’ve had a baby. Showing their growth has a couple has been an integral part of the show, and I hope we continue to see it. But there shouldn’t be too much time detailing this journey when we’re so close to the end of Ted’s.
We know those two aren’t going to break up (again), but we do know that Ted and Victoria, Barney and Quinn and Robin and Nick eventually will need to call it quits in the Autumn of Break-Ups. Robin, who has been dating some guy named Nick, was caught watching television while they were having sex. It’s always fun to see Robin in her element, even if it’s interacting with a character that will be gone in a few episodes. Robin is more like Barney than the characters realize, which is why they’ll eventually make a great couple again.
Then there’s Ted and Victoria (ugh). She’s mad at him because of his flip-flopping on a decision to help out Klaus, her ex-fiancé. As much as I still love Ted, I really hate seeing him with Victoria—hated so way back in the beginning seasons and still do. Yet, they’re saved from breaking up, which leaves one couple.
Barney and Quinn: a client falls for his stripper. Great love story, right? This arc finally comes to a close after the pre-nup proves to be too much for Quinn and Barney realizes he can never trust a woman. Did I guess pre-nup would be the reason the two break up? No. Why? Because it’s the opposite of legendary. It’s washed up, and HIMYM could have written any absurd reason and we would have bought it.
But we don’t, and this episode falls flat compared to last week’s premiere. While I do like seeing tidbits of “A Little Ways Down the Road,” I don’t want to see them every week. Teasing viewers with glimpses of Barney and Robin’s wedding is great in small doses, but back-to-back episodes is a little much.
Hopefully now that the writers have gotten back up to the current timeline things will slow down and start to get fleshed out. I’m certain that this was a small, but necessary, bump in the road.