Heart...Wait For It...Break

I haven't cried at TV in a long time, Freaks.

If you discount weddings, deaths, or series finales, I can count the number of times on one hand.

But the end of last night's How I Met Your Mother had me bawling like a baby.

It's hard for a half hour comedy to pull off simultaneously funny and heartbreaking. That's not a lot of time to swing your audience's emotions so drastically, and though HIMYM has always been really good at it, last night's episode was absolutely the best they've done.

The episode is framed by Einstein's theory of relativity (that time moves at different speeds), a conceit that works just beautifully with the A-plot, Barney and Robin dealing with the repercussions of a night together, and the well-done B-plot, in which high (after "eating sandwiches"- great job with continuity, guys!) Marshall and Ted freak out about getting older. If those two things seem incongruous, I promise, they are not, and were a great compliment to the "relativity" theme of the show. It's an episode full of great moments, big and small (shout out to Lily eating the trash nachos and the "cloves and mediocrity" line) and the perfect tone.

I could talk about a lot of things from this episode, and I will, actually, in just a second, but let me say first that this episode succeeded in large part because of the superb talent of Neil Patrick Harris. He acted the hell out of every moment of it, and it was really spectacular to watch.

And heartbreaking.

This show has always been about the theory of relativity, because it has always been about perspective. Ted is telling the story of his life with the benefit of hindsight; he's willing to share the worst of himself, the terrible things that happened because he knows that everything turned out OK in the end. This show is about the mistakes that we make in life that get us to where we are going, which means they weren't mistakes at all. It's about knowing, at some point, that all the heartache, all the turmoil, all the pain, is leading to a place that we wouldn't have gotten without it. Future Ted already knows this, and sometimes even Current Ted (in his better moments) understands, but Barney doesn't. Or he didn't, before this happened. He saw, for a moment, that this awful thing that he and Robin had done, could be not "the story of how [they] both made a horrible mistake...but the story of how [they] got back together."

It's about perspective.

Robin is too insecure to trust that. She needs to know why Barney would want to be with her before she can consider taking a risk with her heart again, even though he, this previously scared, distant, emotionally avoiding playboy stepped up and offered his to her. He told her it was because she was almost as much of a mess as he was, and everyone watching smiled in agreement. It's why we believe in these two and why we want so badly to see them find their way to each other.

He was ready, when it was his turn, to take a step towards Robin by telling Nora the truth, about not only what he'd done, but what it had meant to him. This was a perfectly crafted scene, from the great montage moment to the clock ticking in the background, and we cheered because Barney Stinson was ready for a real relationship. The show has done a really great job with developing Barney's character slowly and realistically, with the occasional two-steps-forward-one-step-back feeling, which I think serves to make us only more invested when we can see, like in this episode, how clearly he has changed.

Unfortunately, Robin hasn't quite followed suit. (Pun!) Robin asked Kevin, too, after he told her he loved her, why he wanted to be with such a mess. His response was filled with compliments and romantic flattery, and a picture of herself that she wanted to believe, so she listened to him instead. Kevin's answer was perfect (Worst. Therapist. Ever.), and Barney's was real, and Robin is too damaged, too scared to deal with that. So she stayed with Kevin, the one who says he loves her, even though she knows that she lied when she promised him she was just as in their relationship as he is, because she wants to be who he sees.

It's about perspective.

Barney is left standing in MacLaren's, waiting for the happy beginning he isn't going to get. There's a moment, when she walks in, that he thinks she's alone, that she's coming to begin with him. You can see his world shatter when he sees Kevin behind her, when he looks at her with this mix of heartache and hope to silently ask if she still wants him.

She just shakes her head.

As Ted voiceovers, it was the longest moment of Barney's life. From his perspective, everything is over. This is a man who promised himself he'd never care again, after the last girl he loved hurt him enough to turn him into the callous, detached, suit-wearing lothario he became. But he did. He couldn't help himself, he fell in love. And he owned it, he stepped up and said, (even if it came at the end of a joke), "Let's start a new life together." And she said no.

In reality, I don't think a guy like him comes back from that.

Luckily, this is TV, so it doesn't work like that.

It's all about perspective.