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How I Met Your Mother: The Shark Jump Episode?

By
Adam Shaftoe
– November 7, 2012Posted in: TV Reviews

How I Met Your Mother is a perfect example of a series that has gone on too long. Now in its eighth season, it’s hard to tell who among the cast and crew wants to get out the most. Is it the writers, who seem content on recycling old material? Could it be the cast, every one of which is now a bankable big screen commodity? I can’t say for sure, but if there’s one thing to say, it’s that this week’s episode is a strong candidate for the series’ shark jump moment.

This argument begins and ends with Barney Stinson. I used to have this great thesis on how Barney is a modern day Achilles. He’s deceptively simple, but ultimately proves to be one of the few people among the cast capable of genuine character growth. Season seven and eight shot said thesis right in the face. In today’s example, Barney gets a dog; a dog which Barney puts in a suit and uses for a wingman.

All we need now is a little romance, a bit with Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter, and we’ve really got ourselves a comedy, said Mr. Fennyman. If there was ever something which screams, “We’ve run out of ideas.” It’s paring Neil Patrick Harris with a dog.

Of course this isn’t simply about adding a cute factor to a smarmy guy intent on bedding wenches. Indeed introducing Mr. Stinson to a canine best-bro is a means of opening up the once healed, but now festering, wound of Barney’s abandonment issues. For the record, Barney’s now been in one less long-term relationship than Ted. To go down this road with any other character than John Lithgow as Barney’s father is tedious for the audience, retrograde for the character, and a lame excuse to make Robin more involved in Barney’s life. Because, spoiler alert, oh wait it’s not a spoiler because the show has already told us, Barney is going to marry Robin.

So let’s talk about Ted and Robin, or as I like to call them “Harry and Sally without the Rob Reiner charm.”

Ted and Robin are both in relationships with other people; Ted’s involved with his season two girlfriend Victoria, and Robin’s having a thing with an overly sensitive Cylon (Michael Trucco). This week’s episode reintroduces fans of the series to an old friend: the “it’s weird that Ted and Robin are so close” trope. Ted’s and Robin’s friendship ruined Ted’s relationship with both Victoria and Stella, and guess what, now it destroys his second relationship with Victoria when she lays the “It’s her or me” ultimatum at Ted’s door.

I have to admit, I’m starting to have a really hard time sympathzing with the self-sabotaging lovelorn Ted Mosby.

Meanwhile Robin’s low-rent celebrity chef Cylon grows more and more annoyed with Robin’s tendency to drop everything for Barney and Ted. Now where have we seen this before…ah yes, Robin’s relationship with co-anchor Don. Therefore we must ask, what was the point of introducing the Cylon to the show? Did one of the producers owe Trucco a favour? Did market research indicate the ladies and gay men needed more eye candy?

Since we know this is likely to be the series’ final season, and we also know Robin will be marrying Barney in the near future, and we further know Ted will meet his wife after said wedding, it’s pretty hard to view these relationships and their associated story as anything other than a pathetic attempt to stall for time.

Then there’s Lily. I’ve never liked Lily. Time and again she’s proven herself to be a manipulative puppet master bent on influencing her friends into what she imagines to be their ideal life. Perhaps Lily’s most unlikable feature involves her history of sabotaging relationships of which she doesn’t approve. This week, Lily crossed the really creepy Rubicon from shadow master into…I don’t even know what she is now…Jeff Dunham?

Drawing on the slightly effeminate vibe Marshall has always put out there, Lily takes it upon herself to turn her husband into a comically inept version of her perpetually advice giving self. In doing so, Marshall channels the voice of his inner goddess, a matronly, z-snapping Southern woman. Granted the freelance advice Marshall gives at the bar is hilariously inept, but it’s also a pointless gimmick which can be interpreted as the coup de gras in Marshall’s regression into an adolescent “I’ll be who the girl I love wants me to be” mindset.

Where Marshall began the series a focused and dedicated law student, he has gradually slipped further from that point. In the wake of his father’s death, perhaps the audience could accept his temporary retreat to the safety net of his family’s Minnesota home. But now that Marshall has everything he wants in life, a job as an environmental lawyer, a child, and a wife, he should be self-actualized. Instead, he retreats from any sense of self into the machinations of his wife, thus demonstrating all the substance of a ventriloquist’s puppet.

My wonderful partner Rebecca was quick to point out this week’s episode does see a return to the winning narrative format of How I Met Your Mother. There were no flash forwards to the future followed by a single plot thread of filler material. Rather, the writers gave us three distinct, but connected, story lines. Moreover, there was no focus on the “hard” life of being new parents (barf) as seen through Lily and Marshall. Despite this, I don’t know if these changes will be either consistent or meaningful enough to pull the show back from the edge of the abyss.

Overall, I’m not impressed. When asked “Why do you keep watching the show, Adam?” my only answer makes me sound like a media Meth addict. Simply put, I can’t help myself. After seven years I’m too deeply invested to walk away from it now. Even though the quest to find Ted’s future wife has become so convoluted as to make the very act of revealing her meaningless, I want to know who she is. In spite of this sadistic compulsion to stay with the show, it’s hard not to look at this week’s writing and see How I Met Your Mother as anything but a sitcom which has run out of gas.


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5

Second Person Narratives: I’m not your monster.

By
Adam Shaftoe
– May 23, 2012Posted in: Books, Criticism, The Daily Shaft

As a reader, critic, and occasional writer, I don’t much care for the second person narrative style. That isn’t to say that I think it’s a pointless thing that needs to die an eternal death in the darkest foulest bowels of hell’s antiquated septic system, not at all. Second person can be quite useful. Choose your own adventure novels demand a second person narrative structure. Decades of Dungeons and Dragons DMs have forged elaborate worlds using the second person. Within more “conventional” storytelling (novels, short stories, modern video games) second person seems like a problematic thing.

First, a quick refresher for the benefit of anybody who doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

First person narrative: I couldn’t stand the sound of his voice for another minute. The way he went on and on, and the way everybody listened as if he was god’s chosen prophet. So I did what any coward would do; I kicked him in the nuts.

Note that the narrator is telling the story from their own perspective. FPN is life as you live it every day…or this.

Third person narrative: Adam’s practiced poker face was about to shatter. For three years he listened to his boss drone on and on about a managerial style that increased ROI each quarter. For three years Adam watched his colleagues genuflect to the pontification of a blowhard who outsourced his work to unpaid interns. At exactly eight minutes into the 10am meeting, Adam stood up from the boardroom table, walked to the front of the room, and smiled as he kicked his boss in the balls.

Notice here that the story is being told from a perspective external to the character in question. Both first and third person perspective should be quite familiar to anybody who has ever read a novel. Now things get weird.

Second person narrative: You can’t stand listening to him any longer. He’s taken so much credit for other people’s hard work. Everything he’s done is built on the backs of people half his age but twice his intelligence. You didn’t go to business school for this. You know going to Human Resources won’t solve anything. You don’t think about your next action, really. All you do is stand up, square yourself to the man who has stolen your life, and drive a size ten-and-a-half wingtip firmly between his legs.

Hilarious as crotch shots may be, these vignettes illustrate an essential problem with second person narrative. “Adam” might be the sort of guy who kicks his boss in the junk, but what if “You” are not?

What if the story is about something less cathartic than avenging one’s self against a boss? What if a reader is being told that they are standing at the feet of a dead body, licking a blood stained knife as a crimson pool slowly wraps around their feet. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I don’t feel like giving up who I am to become somebody else’s monster.

A narrative built in the more conventional first or third person style can safely assume that a reader wants an experience removed from their own world. To read Dune, or The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is to ride on a worm behind Paul Atreides or follow along in the cab next to Holmes and Watson. At no point does the story ask the reader to do anything other than maintain their suspension of disbelief. Who the reader is, is irrelevant to the issues at hand. Second person narratives depend on a reader’s willingness to abandon their sense of self. If you, the reader, are not willing to become the serial killer, the half-demon spawn of a fallen angel, or the sexy horse vampire, then the story falls apart.

I live in fear of this moment every time I see a play

So what’s the problem? For my part, I hate audience participation (save for choose your own adventure novels, especially the ones that offer a hierarchy of endings [Hierarchy of Endings is the name of my next band]) in printed text just as much as I do in theatre. As a reader, I’m looking to be entertained. As a critic, I’m looking for subtexts and themes. As a writer, I’m looking to see what I can learn from the words in front of me. How can I do any of those things if I’m spending the lion’s share of my mental energy turning myself into someone who is compatible with the narration?

What am I gaining by undertaking this effort? Who is the writer to make me think I would even want to become this person? After all, the reader is the consummate and professional voyeur.

When evaluating recent encounters with second person narratives, the reader in me invokes Benedict Cumberbatch as he sighs “Bored”, the Jay Sherman in me says, “This is weak character construction masquerading as high concept bullshit”, and Adam, the scribbler of words, desperate for the approval of his peers, moves on to a new teacher as the story appears to be the ultimate form of telling without showing.

So to the writers of the world, I would offer these words, for whatever devalued Hellenic currency they are worth: it is infinitely easier to appropriate a concept, culture, historical figure, political ideology, or religious doctrine than it is to bank on your reader’s desire to abandon their sense of self as to give your story its necessary cohesion. If a reader is unable, or outright refuses, to participate in what you, the writer and possibly your editor and publisher, think is a transcendent experience, then all of the deeply layered metaphor and allegory in the world won’t amount to jack.


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