How I Met Your Mother review – “Subway Wars”

After what I considered to be a kind of "meh" season 5, so far I've been pretty impressed with the beginning of season 6 of CBS' s How I Met Your Mother. We've been teased by the wedding where Ted (Josh Radnor) will meet the mother (still, a classic HIMYM vague clue, but I'll take it), learned more about Barney's (Neil Patrick Harris) childhood, and now Ted has the chance to design a new Goliath National Bank building to grace the New York City landscape (his dream!). All in all, pretty solid.

But I particularly enjoyed tonight's episode ("Subway Wars") which pitted the five friends in a battle of NYC transportation smarts to get to a restaurant to see Woody Allen — a mark of being a true New Yorker that Robin (Cobie Smulders) had yet to accomplish. Starting out as a fight between subway (Lily, Alyson Hannigan), bus (Ted), feet (Marshall, Jason Segel), cab (Robin) and... ambulance? (Barney), they all dabbled among the various transportation NYC has to offer. Each tried to make it to the restaurant, but more importantly they tried to achieve some sort of unrelated personal triumph regarding: their careers (Ted and Robin), babies (Lily and Marshall) or nothing (Barney’s life is awesome).

The winner (albeit thanks to Barney pulling some strings) was Robin, who had been doubting her position as a "real" New Yorker. Oh, Robin. Things have just not been working out for the character who has grown on me the most since season one. Last season I swore to my roommates that Robin was going to marry her former co-host Don, but between last week's episode, centered on her finding closure with their break-up, to this week’s hints at Barney's perhaps unresolved feelings for his former flame, it's looking like I may have been a bit premature in my prediction. Now, I will be the one to say that I kind of thought things were pretty well resolved between Barney and Robin, although this could easily be attributed to the fact that I found the build-up to their coupledom infinitely better than when they were actually dating. However, knowing about this mystery wedding from the season premiere, it does seem logical that Ted would be best man at Barney's wedding, and is there anyone besides Robin he would even marry? We'll have to see.