How I Met Your Mother – “Landmarks” – review

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This season of How I Met Your Mother has been very uneven; sometimes impressively brilliant and other times painful to watch. I knew almost immediately from Marshall’s speech ending in a rhyme that “Landmarks” was going to be lumped into the suck column.

The whole Arcadian arc of this season has been up and down almost from the get go. On paper it seems like a great opportunity for Ted to grow in his career and love life, but somehow the execution fell flat. A lot of it is the inclusion of Zoey and the knowledge that there will two more seasons of the show. I’m not one of those people who only care about knowing who the mother is, but because Zoey is without a doubt not the mother, her involvement in Ted’s romantic life seems incredibly pointless. It felt like the writers were forcing them together just to give Ted a girlfriend. Things might have played out better if they just remained friends, because they never clicked as a couple. Jennifer Morison is cute enough, but Zoey is such a manipulative woman it boggles the mind that Ted would date her.

Zoey wasn’t the only part that didn’t work, though. The first half of the show was a mess of scenes with no laughs. Barney and Arthur’s conversation was terrible, along with Robin’s Angry Bird’s analogy. The dialogue was lazy at the best of times, only occasionally getting laughs (Marshall describing Barney’s job as “having a lot of keys”).

Things picked up briefly halfway through when Barney breaks into Ted’s apartment dressed as the Arcadian’s architect claiming to be a dream, only for it to turn out to actually be a dream (Ted: “lighting change!”). Then it all went down again at the landmark hearing. Zoey shows how evil she is, and the two seem to break up. But she’ll be back for next week’s finale to finish up their break-up in a tremendous fashion.

Right now the odds are against the show romantically. Until season eight, every girl Ted dates is doomed to be kicked to the curb. The writers need to find the right kind of girl for Ted to be with or find a satisfactory alternative to fill that gap. If it can’t do either, we’ll end up with another disaster season like season five, and I don’t think anyone wants that.