Bad News (How I Met Your Mother)

"Bad News" is the 13th episode of the sixth season of the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother and their 125th episode overall. It aired January 3, 2011. TV Guide listed "Bad News" in its list of 2011's Top TV Episodes.^[1]

Plot

Future Ted tells his kids that Marshall and Lily are anxious and worried about their chances of having a baby. After several months of trying to conceive without success, their doctor refers them to a fertility expert. As they tell Ted the news at MacLaren's, Barney arrives and announces to Ted and Marshall's dismay that he needs a partner for a laser tag tournament.

Lily goes to her appointment with the fertility expert, Dr. John Stangel (Neil Patrick Harris), only to discover that he looks exactly like Barney, save for a beard and dark brown hair, raising her immediate concern that he is in fact Barney in disguise. When Lily confronts Barney, Marshall vouches for Barney, saying that they spent the whole day together. To convince her that Stangel and Barney are not the same person, Marshall attends Lily's appointment and also immediately assumes Stangel and Barney are the same person. Barney shows up, acknowledges the similarity, and leaves. Lily still thinks Dr. Stangel is Barney in disguise upon hearing him say "Scoot up", mistaking it for Barney's catch phrase of "Suit up." After getting Barney and the doctor in the room together throughout the procedure, Lily is convinced that they are in fact two different people.

When Lily's tests reveal that she is extremely fertile, Marshall is about to call his father with the good news, but stops when he considers that his sperm may be the problem. He admits only talking about good news with his father and decides to get his sperm tested before calling him again. When Marshall is unable to produce a sperm sample at the doctor's office, he returns home to produce the sample, only to find that his parents have dropped by for a surprise visit. He eventually reveals to his parents his concerns about possible infertility, to which they reassure him that they love him regardless of whether he and Lily will give them grandchildren and suggest other options, such as adoption and sperm donors.

Meanwhile, Robin's new job at World Wide News has started badly, beginning with the revelation that the network's lead anchor is her old Metro News 1 colleague Sandy Rivers. He promptly tells the entire office that they had sex and continues to harass her in front of her new co-workers with increasingly embarrassing stories from Robin's past. The group tells Robin to play along with the mockery, insisting that it will only get worse if she resists it. However, after an especially humiliating day, Ted decides to help Robin by confronting Sandy at his apartment. Ted learns that Sandy is bald and wears a toupee; he snaps a picture, and tells Robin to use it to put him to shame. At work the following day, Sandy takes another shot at Robin. Instead of showing the office the picture of him, however, she pulls out her old Robin Sparkles denim jacket, embracing the mockery and moving on (with Future Ted telling his kids that while Robin never shook off the nickname of 'Sparkles', she went on to do great things while working for World Wide News).

Having spent the entire day anticipating bad news, Marshall receives good news about his fertility from Stangel (after a failed impersonation by Barney attempting to trick Marshall into becoming his laser tag partner). While at MacLaren's, he tries to call his father about his good news, but Mr. Eriksen does not pick up the phone. At that moment, Lily pulls up in a taxi and tearfully informs Marshall that his father has been rushed to the hospital after having a heart attack, and that he did not survive. Shocked and grief-stricken, Marshall embraces Lily, and begins to weep, repeating the words, "I'm not ready for this."

Production

The twist ending of Marshall's father's death was the result of show co-creators and producers Carter Bays and Craig Thomas' desire to explore the issue of the characters experiencing such a loss.^[2] Bays said that "these kind of moments happen when you don't expect them. We wanted to shock the audience the way the characters were shocked. So much of what we love about the show is the relatability of it, and we try to create characters and stories that people see themselves in. As we've ticked off every milepost of young adulthood, sadly this is another one of those mileposts".^[3] Segel and Hannigan themselves were kept in the dark about the final scene. Segel said the original script had Lily saying she was pregnant, but on the scene's actual shooting day, the producers revealed that the scene will turn out differently. He and Hannigan worked out a plan wherein Segel would only know that his cue to react would be on Hannigan finishing her line with the word "it". The scene was done in only one take.^[4]

Throughout the episode, numbers appear on ordinary objects counting down from 50 to 1. This is a countdown from the beginning of the episode to the eventual bad news, which is told right after the "1" is shown. As the final scene of the episode closes, a parking meter is in the background displaying a red 'expired' state. The countdown was an idea taken from the 1988 film Drowning by Numbers; through the course of that film, the numbers 1 to 100 appear in order, sometimes seen in the background, and sometimes spoken by the film's characters.^[3] According to Bays, the countdown was used to give an early signal to the audience that something big was about to happen at the end of the episode.^[2]

Critical response

Donna Bowman of The A.V. Club gave the episode a C rating.^[5]

Robert Canning of IGN gave the episode a rating of 9.5 out of 10.^[6]

DeAnn Welker of Television Without Pity graded the episode at A.^[7]

Ratings

This episode achieved the second highest ratings of season 6 so far, bringing in 10.15 million viewers,^[8] just behind the episode "Last Words" which attracted 10.51 million viewers.^[9]

References

External links

• "Bad News" at the Internet Movie Database