u/Gold_Cup_7879

Interesting thoughts. Maybe you've come across this blog before. Maybe not. But it's interesting.

These are just two examples.

https://www.tumblr.com/himym-confessions

I’m watching the ninth episode of the first season, the Thanksgiving episode. Up until now, I’ve always skimmed over one particular line:

"Barney enters kitchen from dining area singing)

Barney: Excuse me, guys. Coming through.

Ted: Barney?

Barney: Well, hi guys.

Ted: What are you doing here?

Barney: Oh, just the Lord's work.

Ted: But you're Satan.

Barney: Guys, OK, look, I don't advertise it, but I volunteer here. I think it's important to help the less fortunate."

https://tvshowtranscripts.ourboard.org/viewtopic.php?f=177&t=11509

Is Barney really the Satan ? Let's see. Taking the entire series into account:

Barney’s behavior suggests a man with narcissistic and sociopathic tendencies. The uninhibited exploitation of women: the “Playbook” is a collection of extreme, often cruel lies (e.g., pretending to be terminally ill or a time traveler) designed to objectify women without empathy or guilt.

He even uses his closest friends to achieve his own goals—for example, the “Robin” marriage proposal was a deliberate psychological manipulation that lasted for months.

Pathological lying and dark deeds: he jokes about things like leaving deceived women in the woods or “selling” a woman.

Corrupt professional life: for years, he knowingly helped a company commit morally and legally indefensible, illegal crimes (the P.L.E.A.S.E. job).

Neil Patrick Harris’s charisma and the show’s humor sell the joke, but in reality, Barney is an emotionally abusive, uninhibited, and dangerous character.

But this isn’t a realistic story. There’s also a symbolic layer to the series. On this level, Barney’s role and function are what Ted actually names here in the ninth episode of the first season.

This has been hinted at since the beginning of the series, and now Ted actually says it out loud. This is also a very early point in the series as a whole. So this is no secret.

It’s very important that Barney points out here that he’s doing the Lord’s work, and Ted reacts to that.

It’s partly a joke, but only partly. The other part is dead serious.

This has many implications for the entire story, which I’m only just beginning to think through myself.

I just finished watching it for the second time, and I understand the issues surrounding the ending less and less. It’s always struck me as odd that so many people spend time wondering how the series could have been done differently. This isn’t entirely a trivial matter, but it’s not really important and says nothing about the finished work.

The finished series is a given. It cannot be changed. We can say we didn’t like it, we don’t understand it... etc. But we have to interpret the finished material.

So we can say we didn’t like the ending. But it’s meaningless to say that I would have done it differently, which is why I don’t like it. It’s not possible to do it differently, not even in theory. Let me explain: it’s not possible because then a different story would emerge.

There’s no other way; this is our story. To put it another way: we could write a different story, but it wouldn’t be this one.

First of all, I liked the ending, and second, I liked it even more. Don’t be mad at me, but I don’t think we can say we don’t like the ending but we love the series.

Because the series’s focus is on the ending. Especially in the last few episodes. This is very clear in the final, well-known scenes of the last episode, when Ted holds up the horn again.

Of course, this is just my opinion, not a revelation 😉