How I Met Your Mother "Challenge Accepted" Review

Season finales sometimes annoy me. In the lazier series, characters will remark about how much they've been through in the last year. For instance, the 90210 finale featured two characters telling one another how much they've been through in the last season. I never watched previous episodes of the season so the sentence thoroughly confused me but who am I to doubt that the characters went through a lot? The later seasons of Dawson's Creek decided to have their characters comment on their life-changing journeys throughout that past season. Usually, such commentary means the characters did NOT actually experience a life-changing season. Season finales need to make a season feel worthwhile like change for the characters as well as progress of the overall narrative. Sometimes a series achieves this and sometimes a series forces it. And whenever characters comment on how much change they've experienced, it usually means that NO change actually happened.

"Challenges Accepted" mostly annoyed me as a season finale. Sure character arcs paid off but Craig Thomas and Carter Bays have the most annoying way of paying off character arcs. Ted closed the season no closer to meeting the mother. His arc during the season was mostly about his professional career and growth. Zoey only related to him through his work. Bays and Thomas essentially stated that was their intention for Ted when Robin and Barney told Ted that he can't retreat to the past when the future scares him. If the show runners had to squeeze meaning into that train wreck of a relationship, they could've done worse. The message suggests that Ted felt scared throughout the season, that he knowingly entered a relationship with Zoey because she stood between he and his professional growth. Ted's fear never received an explanation. Ted finally manned up and decided that he could oversee the construction of the newest Manhattan skyscraper. The amount of time the show spent on Ted and Zoey did not make the conclusion worthwhile. Bays and Thomas are really wasting time now.

The Lily pregnancy arc annoyed me even more. I doubt anyone felt surprise by the twist at the end when Lily revealed that she never had food poisoning. The teaser introduced Lily and Marshall's favorite soup place that happens to give the couple food poisoning. As soon as Lily began vomiting, I knew the episode would end with Lily pregnant. The show used to be clever. The soup shop should've been called plot device. Bays and Thomas really dropped the ball in Marshall's arc. Marshall had a job interview that he seemingly blew because he feared the food poison would cause bodily explosions (not my words--the show's words). The food poisoning somehow became a metaphor for Marshall's arc this season, in which his insides are continually ripped out as he cites his father's death or his unemployment. Marshall never experiences the effects of food poisoning. He sleeps soundly with his insides intact--another poorly designed metaphor for his future. Lily announces that she's pregnant. The scene between she and Marshall's nice but the food poisoning part of this story absolutely destroyed any good feelings toward the writers.

In the C story, Barney and Robin recalled their relationship. Both decided that they needn't revisit the past. Barney ran into the British girl he spent two episodes with. The episode ended with the reveal that Ted's the best man at Barney's wedding. I'm fairly certain Robin's the bride because of her expression when Barney asks the British girl to coffee. Do I really care enough about the identity of the bride to sit through 22 or 24 episodes next season just to find out the identity? Not really. I don't care enough about the mother to sit through two more seasons of the show to be honest. I don't like the characters very much. The stories are derivative. I'm going to continue writing about the show though. The series used to be great fun. It's running out of gas and I dread how bad the next 44-48 episodes could be.

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