How I Met Your Mother - Season 8 Episode 13 - Recap and Review - Winter Premiere - Band or DJ?

Recap and review of How I Met Your Mother - Season 8 Episode 13 - Winter Premiere - Band or DJ?

You're killing me, How I Met Your Mother.

I love this show to death, as it's one of the few serialized sitcoms on TV that actually tells a truly engaging story. But I don't know how much longer this show has to belabor the point of Ted's unrequited love for Robin (Cobie Smulders). We know they don't end up together. The flashforwards have pretty much told us as much (or, at the very least, they've told us that Robin isn't the Mother). I can certainly understand just how hard it is to let go of someone you love, someone whom you've still pinned your hopes on, whether you realize it or not. But we're at least four seasons past the point where Ted (Josh Radnor) should have comfortably been over Robin, and for him to resent her engagement to Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and whining that she should be with him, when Robin has already told him, straight up, that she doesn't feel the same way about Ted, paints him as an unsympathetic character, if not an outright antagonist, in many ways. It's kind of a shame that the episode went to that well again, since "Band or DJ" is a solid episode, in a vacuum. But when set against the larger context of the series, it feels like the show spinning its wheels, delaying the growth of some characters, while undoing the growth of others.

Credit: CBS

The episode is among the more interesting of the season for how it explores Robin's complicated relationship with her father (Ray Wise). When Barney admits that he neglected to ask Robin's father for permission to marry her (in an amusing, overlong sarcastic diatribe), Robin insists that he do things the old-fashioned way and do just that. Robin's father, a "stone-cold Slytherin" who terrifies every one of her friends, is a walking contradiction: a hard-nosed Canadian in a Tommy Bahama shirt with a quizzical fascination with internet memes (I never thought I'd hear Robin's father say the words "I can has cheeseburger?", yet here we are), and putting his entire life up on Facebook. He loves his daughter, but has no traditional sense of fatherly duty. He refuses to give Barney permission out of the belief that Barney isn't very much of a man. For one, he's blonde, and what kind of man allows himself to be blonde? Worse, he's squeamish about killing animals, with hunting being the sole province of manhood, apparently. Though Barney tries to change his mind by dying his hair black and almost-killing a rabbit (before being reduced to a quivering puddle of tears), Robin's father is stubborn in his refusal to give his blessing. Until Robin discovers that her father has gotten married to a fortysomething dental hygienist named Carol without telling her, and decides she doesn't need her father's permission or his blessing to live her life.

Eventually, Robin is able to procure her father's blessing when he realizes that he's losing his daughter's love. All she wants is a normal father who does normal, fatherly things: attending her wedding, giving her away, sharing a dance. Her father announces that he's divorced Carol to erase the offense of having married her without consulting Robin (in a reaction that is amusingly over-the-top, particularly when he adds that "if there's a price to pay to win my daughter's love, I have no problem letting Carol pay it."). He goes on to make the compromise that he'll attend the wedding and give her away, but he'll only do one dance, to "Cheeseburger in Paradise", which Carol will sing. That seems to be good enough for Robin, clearing (hopefully) the last hurdle impeding she and Barney's wedding. Unless you count the planning of a wedding as an impediment in itself.

Enter Ted, who takes over the planning, much to the chagrin of would-be planner Lily (Alyson Hannigan). Of course, for Ted, "planning" boils down to the decision between whether they want a band or a DJ for the reception (though his super-thick binder of cake selections implies a much more detailed planning scheme than we get to see - maybe we'll get more of Ted Mosby: Amateur Wedding Planner in the coming weeks). However, all this planning puts Ted in close proximity with his feelings about the wedding. And if we know anything about Ted, it's that he makes letting go way harder than it should be. Though Ted's unrequited feelings about Robin is tired territory, the storyline does produce some very sweet moments, particularly Future Ted (Bob Saget) recounting the pain he felt upon reading the text from Robin announcing her engagement to Barney. He explains all of the hurts in his past, with an accompanying montage of Ted's most painful moments set to his unofficial song, "Voices" by Cheap Trick (or, in this case, a gorgeous cover by the magnificent Jon Brion), which produced one of my favorite music-related bits of the series when Ted sang the song in McLaren's and fell off the chair he was standing on - a moment briefly referenced here. Lily takes Ted up to the roof to get him to admit that he's not okay with Robin and Barney getting married. Lily astutely observes that Ted refuses to confess this because he fears it will mean he's a terrible person. So Lily one-ups him with a terrible admission of her own: sometimes she wishes she weren't a mom, and that she could just pack up and leave. It's a jarring revelation, made all the more powerful by Hannigan's tearful performance, and this moment on the roof became among the more fascinating scenes of the season so far. But it's ephemeral, as we're quickly move on after a curt discussion in which Lily and Ted come to the decision that this is their lot in life, and (to borrow a phrase from my favorite work of short-fiction-turned-Oscar-winning-film) "If you can't fix it, you've got to stand it."

As the episode winds to a close, Robin decides she wants a band at the wedding (figuratively choosing Barney, in Ted's mind, as he'd boiled down the courtship to a decision between Ted-as-DJ or Barney-as-band). As we learn in the climactic flashforward reveal, this choice is what ultimately leads to Ted meeting the Mother. When the originally-booked band bails on the wedding, Ted runs into ex-girlfriend Cindy (Rachel Bilson) on the subway and asks if she knows any bands who can play a gig on short notice. As we know that the Mother was Cindy's college roommate, and that she plays a mean bass guitar, and that Ted meets the Mother at the wedding, the writing is essentially on the wall. We get a brief glimpse of the Mother's hand at the wedding reception (so it looks like Robin and Barney go through with the nuptials) as Ted recounts to his kids that if Robin had listened to his stupid suggestion to get a DJ, he'd have never met their mother. So we've now seen a foot and a hand. We're getting closer, people.

"Band or DJ?" is a fine episode, though the issue of Ted still being hung up on Robin is likely just a means of giving Ted something to do between now and the wedding. I'm probably over-exaggerating how annoyed I am by this development, but I really don't think there's any drama left to wring out of this love triangle. And it's actively doing damage to Ted's character, as his stubbornness in insisting that Robin belongs with him undermines that beautiful moment in the winter finale where he finally lets Robin go (as per Barney's final play) and allows her to find happiness with Barney. It's that maturity that was the most winning aspect of Ted's personality, yet his persistence is as exhausting as it is off-putting. It will be tricky trying to reconcile Ted's growth with this latest lapse into uncertainty. That said, the episode still produced the strangely sweet story between Robin and her father, which builds its emotional foundation on the tumultuous relationship on display throughout the past eight seasons. And hey, it's not like the show isn't still funny. So even if the drama is tired, I can still count on a dependably funny line from Barney or Marshall (Jason Segel, who gets less to do as the show goes on, although he did garner some good laughs getting sprayed with "confetti" by baby Marvin). The show has its problems, but none of them are insurmountable. And they're making gains towards the endgame of Ted finally meeting the titular Mother. I'm genuinely interested where the show will go, as we move forward.

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