Themes of paternity run deep in How I Met Your Mother’s sixth season and drive its strongest and most emotional story lines, and because of how engrossing one of those threads is, we’re going to take this opportunity right now and warn you there are spoilers ahead. For those who don’t want the spoilers, here’s the concentrated take away message: the sixth season of How I Met Your Mother is split evenly between episodes with a comedic slant and those with intense character development, and thus it may not be the funniest, but it’s easily one of the strongest in a while. For everyone else, How I Met Your Mother has easily outdone itself by taking two of the favorite characters, Barney Stinson and Marshall Erickson, and given them some moving moments as they deal with revelations about fatherhood through discovery and loss.
Let’s first just touch base with the plot line that gives the show its name: the story of how Ted meets his wife. This season he’s hired to build the new headquarters of GNB, a project that has been in limbo for a few seasons, and when it’s revealed that the site for the new location will require a historic building to be torn down, he crosses paths with a protestor named Zoe. Their relationship starts as a rivalry and, through a series of parties and encounters, evolves into a romance. However, no matter how much fun they have, forever looming in the future is the inexorable point of conflict of whether or not GNB will destroy a piece of history to make way for Ted’s new design.
Along with Robin, the writing for Barney and Marshall has always been the highlight of the series, and this time around it’s still true, but in an entirely different way. Instead of just having the best zingers, Barney and Marshall get put through the emotional ringer as Barney finally meets his father just as Marshall loses his. The two rally one right after the other in a one-two punch that leaves the season feeling like the series’ dramatic zenith, and it’s hard to imagine it ever attempting to reach this level of depth again.
On the lighter side of drama, Barney, who for every season until now believed his father to be Bob Barker, has the truth about his childhood laid bare when an unexpected piece of history bubbles up revealing at long last his father’s true identity. In a multi-episode arc, John Lithgow features as Barney’s dad who has all this time been living a quiet life with a new family in suburbia. Their seasonal path hits its height when Barney visits his home for dinner only to break down and question his father’s absence. It’s a moment the writers build to and then pull off with incredible gusto thanks to a heart wrenching turn by Lithgow. Sandwiching that piece of excellence is a number of moments where Neil Patrick Harris and Lithgow get to flex their comedic muscles, and the two play exceptionally well off one another.
Conversely, Marshall’s story comes out of nowhere in the midst of a story about him and Lily worrying about whether or not they’re biologically capable of having a child. To cheer them on, Marshall’s parents come to visit and after plenty of humorously awkward parent moments, the writers throw in a punch to the gut: his dad dies of a heart attack. What follows is a series of episodes that watches Marshall’s grieving process from the funeral, to his hermitage at his parents’ house in Minnesota, to the eventual confrontation with the rest of the group so they’ll stop being so sensitive around him. It’s a great arc for a character usually charged with keeping the proceedings light and it has just enough lead up from the number of times we’ve seen Marshall’s father in the past.
Meanwhile, Robin and Lily are mostly sidelined for the season’s duration as the three aforementioned plots give them little room for their own independent spots. To be fair, Lily’s self-exploratory trip to San Francisco in the second season and Robin’s relationship with Don and Barney in the previous two seasons make their roles as supporting characters this time around reasonable. Add to that the face that the Robin and Barney story begins to pick up again near the end of this season and it’s pretty clear that Robin, at least, will have a bigger part in the seventh season. Whereas Lily’s biggest part in this season is in a spotty arc about her and Marshall trying to get pregnant which is really just a setup for Marshall’s tragedy.
For avid How I Met Your Mother fans, the sixth season introduces a key piece of information and likely the final piece of the puzzle hinting at who Ted’s wife is. Assuming the writers hold to it, it’s rather genius in that it validates how the narrator has been addressing both Robin and Barney this entire time, and makes Barney’s familial revelation all the more relevant to the series’ final answer. Of course, until it happens, it’s just a piece of speculation that happens to fit all the clues, but it seems fair to say that if you’ve watched every episode of every season up to this point, you should be able to guess who the “Mother” is, even though she technically hasn’t even been introduced yet.
DVD Bonus Features
It’s not rich with extras, but the sixth season set features a solid blooper reel that reveals just how close to cracking up the cast is at pretty much every stage of filming, and a audio commentaries among which there’s a superb one by John Lithgow and Neil Patrick Harris on one of the Barney-centric episodes late in the season. Behind the scenes featurettes for the episodes “Glitter” and “Subway Wars” have a fair number of laughs, but beyond that the rest of the extras are deleted scenes, an extended cut of Wayne Brady (as James, Barney’s brother) and Ben Vereen (as James’s biological father) singing “Stand By Me”, and a rundown of what we know about the identity of “Your Mother”.
"How I Met Your Mother: The Complete Season 6" is on sale September 27, 2011 and is not rated. Comedy. Directed by Pamela Fryman. Written by Carter Bays, Craig Thomas. Starring Alyson Hannigan, Cobie Smulders, Jason Segel, Josh Radnor, Neil Patrick Harris.
