Five Drinks Into How I Met Your Mother Final Season Episode 17 "Sunrise"

Tom's Take:

This episode definitely felt like a last season episode.

By that I mean that there were a lot of callbacks to things from the early seasons, Barney’s lessons to Ted now being left in the hands of these two young blades, Ted recounting his Top Five List, and Marshall recounting his fight with Past Lily over San Francisco.

So ultimately this episode was nice in doing what it was supposed to which was to provide us with those callbacks while also advancing the main plot. But while this episode was certainly serviceable, I don’t know if I can say it was a particularly good episode. After all, HIMYM is ultimately a comedy, so shouldn’t it be judge on whether or not I laugh during the episode?

I appreciate callbacks, and I understand that HIMYM has always been more serialized than your traditional sitcom, so we have plot elements that need to be dealt with this season. But I still want the show to make me laugh.

I know a lot of people who stopped watching HIMYM a long time ago, because it stopped being funny for them. I was not one of them, because I cared too much about this characters to just give up on the show, but I do understand their point and I wished this episode could have been funny instead of merely serviceable.

Episode MVP: Robin

This one is probably a surprise, but I thought Cobie Smulders looked good in this episode, and she reminded me of why Ted initially fell in love with her.

Rating: 6.0 out of 10.

This episode did not fail, because it ultimately accomplished what it set out to accomplish, but I was definitely left wanting more.