Last night’s episode of How I Met Your Mother was called “The Goat”, and mostly dealt with fallout from the Robin/Barney coupling of the previous week. While I liked how freaked and nervous Barney was about the whole thing (such a drastic change for that character), I was disappointed that Robin and Barney had very little screen time together and barely discussed their actions after the teaser. The secondary story, that of Ted’s 30th birthday party and the goat was pretty boring, IMO, but that’s probably just because I wanted to see more Robin/Barney stuff!

Plot summary (with possible spoilers): The show opens with a “morning after” scene where Barney and Robin are going through some awkward conversation after sleeping with each other for the first time. They both agree that it would be best to pretend that the whole thing never happened, and above all, they agree that Ted should never find out.

Robin seems perfectly fine with this plan, and does a great job of acting normal later at the bar with the rest of the gang. Barney is the one who acts very nervous and guilty, taking references about “hitting it” and “Xbox” to somehow relate to what happened to Robin. Later, though, Robin ends up telling Ted, who says he’s not mad at all because they’ve been broken up for a whole year already, etc.

Barney can’t feel good about what he did because he knows he broke the Bro Code. He hires Marshall as his lawyer and tells Marshall to comb through the code and find out if there’s a loophole whereby Barney’s actions wouldn’t be considered sleazy. But Marshall can’t find anything of the sort. In fact, he just goes and points out all the ways Ted has adhered to the Bro Code over the years, making Barney feel even more miserable.

Meanwhile, the gang is planning a surprise 30th birthday party for Ted, even though he already knows about it. One unexpected guest is a goat that Lily’s class of kindergarten students begged her to save from the slaughterhouse. She brought it home where it hast to stay for a few days until an Animal Rescue place can pick it up. FutureTed makes a big deal out of this goat, and keeps trying to tell his kids what the goat did, but backtracks and puts it off until finally revealing that he had the birthdays mixed up and the goat wasn’t there until his 31st — at which point Robin was also living in the apartment.

Later, as Barney is driving Ted to his party in a limo, Ted reveals that he knows that Barney slept with Robin. At first, Ted said he wasn’t mad, which of course made Barney feel relieved. But then Ted’s true feelings show, and he tells Barney exactly what he thinks of him. Barney has always done some horrible things to other people, but Ted thought that there was a line, that Ted was a line Barney wouldn’t cross. Since Barney did cross that line, Ted doesn’t have any use for him anymore and doesn’t think they should be friends. Not even a free punch to the groin can fix this situation.

My Reaction: This episode failed to live up to my expectations of what the post-Barney/Robin coupling would be like. Actually, that’s not fair on my part, since I’m not even sure what I wanted — I just know that this wasn’t it.

First of all, while I can understand Ted being angry and hurt by what Barney did, the least he could have done was listen to what Barney had to say. He asked how it happened, but then didn’t give Barney a chance to explain. Had he done so, he might have realized that Barney did NOT take advantage of Robin (as Ted seems to think) and that since Robin and Barney are ok with what they did, then Ted should be too. After all, it has been a year. I know there’s that whole bro code thing, but… there’s got to be a point in time after which it shouldn’t matter who’s sleeping with whom.

I didn’t get the goat stuff at all. I read on some message forums that it was a callback to Season 1 when the goat was mentioned in a previous episode, but honestly, I don’t watch this show as closely as that, so the goat meant nothing to me. And since they didn’t explain its purpose in this ep, it felt like even more of a waste of time.

I know that Barney and Ted eventually reconcile; there’s no question about that. I’m just wondering when and how this comes about. Hopefully Robin will play an instrumental role in that, since she was the reason they broke up in the first place. I also hope that this isn’t the end of Robin and Barney because I still think they are awesome together!

There are just a few more eps left in the season. I’m praying that they’re good ones!