Season 9, Episode 15
Unpause
Sunday, 2am, 16 hours before the wedding…
After a very disappointing slap last week, it was great to have “Unpause” really leave its mark, in a good way, this week. While not the funniest of episodes, it was chock-full of pretty major and satisfying confrontations AND reveals.
The premise for this evening’s late night antics is that the gang has enjoyed quite a few drinks at the Farhampton Inn bar as they creep into the wee hours of wedding day morning. Marshall is determined to keep his pals drinking rather than unpausing his looming argument with Lilly. And Barney has become so drunk he is past his previous drunk high-score (where he talks like Jabba the Hutt) and has entered a new level of inebriation: truth serum drunk.
Marshall and Lilly do part from the gang so that Lilly can “tear Marshall apart” [read both good and bad ways] but not before Marshall does his road trip souvenir showcase. It was a nice call-back to an earlier episode this season when Marshall and Daphne stopped by the Mosby childhood home and Marshall took some of young Ted’s embarrassing items…a photo of cowboy Ted and his best friend, a balloon, is clearly the winner.
But then the call-backs, and eventual reveals, just kept coming! While Barney is under the power of the drink, Ted and Robin take him for a joy ride down memory lane to ask the questions for which they always wanted straight answers. Here are just a few of the big things we finally learned:
- Barney never went all the way with Ted’s mother, Virginia, much to Ted’s relief.
- Robin’s family is apparently super wealthy, even if it is in Canadian craploads of money. Fun side note: Ted is perturbed that he footed so many of their date bills from back in the day, now that he knows she is loaded.
- Ring Bear, or Ring Bearer? Robin still desperately tries to find out. Barney gives a truthful answer—there is a ring bearer named Trevor Hudson. Unfortunately for Robin, Trevor is not who (or what) it seems.
- Barney’s actual job! OK, this is big folks. I wasn’t sure we were ever going to really learn what Barney did for a living. We knew it had to be pretty smarmy and something very “evil corporate” that paid a lot of money. I mean, Barney is pretty much The Wolf of Goliath Bank. So it was a nice little twist to learn that when Barney would always laugh and say “please!” when asked about his job, he really did mean P.L.E.A.S.E. (Provide Legal Exculpation And Sign Everything]. Yep, Barney is Goliath’s fall guy. And if that was not already a good enough reveal, we got another call-back to Barney’s hippie days with his first girlfriend, Shannon, who was stolen by the original suit guy, Greg. We know from many seasons ago that this incident did cause Barney to “suit up.” It turns out it also initiated a master revenge plan in which Barney got hired by Greg and became the company’s P.L.E.A.S.E. man, all so that he could secretly work for the Fed all these years and ultimately bust Greg and the company…set to happen two months after his wedding.
And we are not yet done with the big stuff yet. Marshall and Lilly finally begin their massive fight over their conflicting dream jobs, after lots of serious banging, of course. Well, HIMYM went pretty raw and deep with this confrontation. When Lilly says how selfish Marshall’s behavior is, he brings up seven years ago when Lilly broke off their first engagement and moved to San Francisco. It is really tough to watch these two fight like this, because you just love them so much as a couple. But kudos to HIMYM for letting them get ugly and serious on this, because really, there is no fair ending to this dilemma where feelings don’t get hurt. And now we must also wonder—who does Lilly call and leave the hotel with in order to get away from the fight?
Ted is not left out of the big reveals tonight either, except for him it isn’t technically tonight, but 2017. Yep, we have often heard Ted quote his mother: “nothing good happens after 2 am.” There was even a whole episode about it. But this notion took on whole new meeting as we flashed forward to 2017 at a Farhampton babymoon weekend for Ted and a very pregnant Mother. At the beginning of the episode they are being adorable, riding out the early contractions of labor. By the end of the episode it was time to get to the hospital in the middle of the night. Just as I was about to complain that their daughter had to already be at least one or two years old, we do see that she is …and that they are in fact headed to the hospital to have her baby brother. And that is how little Penny will get her baby bro, Luke, after 2 am…when good things do sometimes happen. It’s nice to meet you by name, Penny and Luke, after all these years.
Show and Tell 