How I Met Your Mother, Season 6, Episode 4

I haven’t cried on a subway, stolen a cab from someone who needed it more or seen Woody Allen. I have killed a cockroach with my bare hand, though that was in another state. I guess I am not a true New Yorker.

I have, however, done what anyone who has lived here for any significant amount of time (I’d say a minimum of two months counts) has done: I've tried to find the perfect route to my destination. New Yorkers can be obsessed with the timing of routes, and I’d be willing to bet that at one point or another, many have determined to outwit HopStop.

Episode four of How I Met Your Mother (called “Subway Wars”) addresses this phenomenon. Robin wants to go downtown to a restaurant where a friend has spotted Woody Allen. The rest of the gang tell her she isn’t a true New Yorker if she hasn’t seen Woody Allen and then the litany of “You’re not a true New Yorker until…” items begins. Of course, they decide to go downtown, argue about the quickest way to get there, and then race to see who’s right. Ted takes a bus, Lily opts for the subway, Barney takes a cab, and Marshall, convinced he can beat the machines, decides to run. Typical sitcom antics ensue.

As I mentioned in the previous post on How I Met Your Mother, part of the success of the show lies in the ability of the writers to really get New York life. On the surface, this episode is a little lame. But the episode is not about the race. At various points in the story the narrator, Future Ted, explains why each character really “needed a win” that day. In what has become a staple narrative technique for the show, the plot moves into a flashback to show some struggle that each character has faced in the recent past—Marshall and Lily’s inability to get pregnant, Robin’s lack of recognition at her job and a negative review of Ted’s class from a student.

Transportation is merely a pretext here, for what makes a person a true New Yorker is that he or she has persevered in an incredibly overwhelming environment. You can’t live here without a measure of self-doubt and being a true New Yorker means that from time to time, you’ll need a win. That’s why small things like an open subway seat or a barely read New York Times left behind at a coffee shop become so big in New York.

The other clever aspect of this episode is that the race to the restaurant to see Woody Allen is a metaphor for the whole series. “Subway Wars” shows five characters going different routes to the same destination. At some point, each of them is thrown off course and takes a different route than originally planned. Some don’t even make it to the restaurant, deciding midway to go somewhere else. It doesn’t take a literature professor to see how this mirrors life.

In Season Four, when Ted admits to his ex-fiancé Stella that he just wants to be married, she tells him that his wife is coming and she’s getting there as fast as she can. Ted has always planned his life out. But the series has been about how those plans have been messed up, altered, disappointed and abandoned. We know he will find his wife, but the joy in the show has been seeing life bring him to her in its own comically-twisted way. The end of “Subway Wars” is quite satisfying. Ted and Barney sit at the bar of the restaurant with glasses of Scotch, no longer concerned with how they got there, but just enjoying that they are.