HIMYMania: The 30 Best ‘How I Met Your Mother’ Moments

Unlike its spinoff How I Met Your Dad, this series was never able to film in New York, but nonetheless, it often understood the sensibility of the city (except for the one time they depicted a ritzy café near the Smith and 9th Street F station, which we can assure you doesn't exist — yet). The trauma of dealing with invading vermin is a very real signifier of city living, and it foreshadowed some of the other requirements of real New Yorkers in "Subway Wars," like spotting Woody Allen and crying on the subway. No one who's ever lived in the five boroughs would be surprised that this fictional hybrid fucker could fly.

Sure, the audience had been scratching their heads for a few seasons, mystified and a little bored by Robin's ping pong between Ted and Barney. But the characters rarely addressed how weird the situation was until a returning Victoria (Ashley Williams), arguably the most significant non-Robin relationship of Ted's life, puts it bluntly: "There is a reason it didn't work out between you and me. It's Robin. She's so much bigger in your world than you realize." It wasn't news to us, but it crystalized the theory that this show is not so much the story of how Ted met the Mother, but how Ted got over Robin. Honorable mention for Barney's long con to see Lily's boobs.

Prompted by Ted's split with the hilariously obnoxious Karen (Laura Prepon), Lily justifies her excuse for meddling in Ted's love life (planting Creed CDs, etc.) by explaining that her method for evaluating his girlfriends involves considering whether they'll be any fun when the gang is old. The fact that they're all gathered to watch Robin's ridiculously early morning show — Marshall in his Clarence-the-angel-nightshirt that Barney will soon trade in his suit pajamas for — makes everything cozier, but the background action is fantastic: Robin extinguishes the chef in a disastrous cooking segment, resuscitates the weatherman, and delivers a baby, all of which her friends miss. Eventually, Lily admits she planted the seeds that broke Robin and Ted up.  

In one of the strongest episodes of Season Five, Marshall returns to a college bar where his skeeball victories as Big Fudge are first acknowledged. Lily and Marshall then have the very apt "reacher versus settler" argument, while Marshall's cool new colleague turns out to be a woman (the underrated Amanda Peet) and Ted is bummed to discover that his students are bigger fans of Robin Scherbatsky than their own prof. (Ted's pedantry is well underway by now). But when he tells Robin that the kids have created a drinking game out of her low-rent-morning-show filler — she reflexively says "but, umm" between thoughts — she tortures them by overdoing it to the point that Ted and his class are sidelined by a hangover.

Mr. Eriksen's heart attack was the tragic end to an episode that featured a subtle numerical countdown to this life-changing event. Marshall's response echoed that of anybody who's experienced the loss of a parent at his (or any) age: "I'm not ready for this." 

On the night before Thanksgiving, Ted bails early only to wake up and find his friends have had the wildest time of their lives, having already created an in-joke ("The gentlemen!") to commemorate the occasion. Whether it's a symptom of getting older, or just legitimized by the acronym, Fear of Missing Out appears to have become a common affliction. HIMYM was slightly ahead of the times in devoting an episode to it, even if here it was depicted as a curse, and passed on smoke-monster style in honor of guest star Jorge Garcia (Lost). This might be one of the few good things to say about the season that included the carping, sanctimonious Zoey (Jennifer Morrison).

This is the sweetest thing Barney ever did, which is useful to remember during his late-season caricature. Though he acts like he has no time for Marshall's tears, it's revealed that his cock-blocking of Marshall earlier in the season was part of a plan to save him for Lily, which culminates in a trip to San Francisco to buy her a ticket home: "You and Marshall belong together…if you knew what he was going through right now, you wouldn't be here for one more second." The mix-up between Robin's shower gift and Lily's grandmother's in this episode is equally phenomenal. 

Robin and Lily's relationship is never as thoroughly developed as the boys' bond, but this was a great example of their connection and a common problem between girlfriends: Single Robin feels shafted out of alone time with her married BFF. So Robin joins Lily and her teacher friends only to discover the ladies (led by Jamie-Lynn Sigler) are that breed of woman who squeal over everything from half-price shots to cheesy songs, and jokingly refer to each other in the most debasing terms. "Maybe she only celebrates the high holidays, like Mardi Gras and spring break," says Robin. "Maybe she's just a cultural Woo." But before long, Robin is hanging out of a stretch hummer in a tiny cowboy hat and swilling from a bottle, leading to a Seussian exchange between her and Lily. Barney's sermon on the importance of Woo girls is priceless, and the redemptive twist is that the Woos are actually smart women letting loose at the bar — which is what Robin needs.

In one of the heavier episodes, Robin thinks she's pregnant only to learn she never will be. It was an interesting decision on the part of the writers, because Robin has claimed never to want kids. But there's nothing like being denied something to make you reconsider, and the episode is framed as Robin's conversation with the son and daughter she's never going to have. She hides the truth from her friends. Ted tries to coax it out of her, and when he fails, he surprises her by turning the apartment into a Christmas light show set to AC/DC's "Highway to Hell." It's gestures like these that continually make it hard to accept Barney and Robin as a couple. 

A rare late-season gem — the fact that everything here is supposed to have taken place five years prior might explain why it's so good. Marshall and Robin's custody fight over the Minnesota Tidal Wave cocktail is merely a memory as Ted sits alone at MacLaren's — everyone else is too busy for Robot vs. Wrestlers, by then one of their most important traditions. Figment Barney channels Nate's parting words to Claire on Six Feet Under when he tells Ted the moment is already gone. This maudlin scene takes on more significance when Future Ted wishes he had those extra 45 days between now and meeting the Mother to spend with her. It's the first suggestion, advanced in the episode "Vesuvius," that the Mother might be dead.

The HIMYM holiday episodes have a great track record. This is the story of the 36 hours in which Marshall and Lily think they're pregnant, and how the other three react, which Ted sums up thusly: "Now, kids, when your friends have great news, you're happy for them — for like a millisecond. And then you start thinking about yourself." At its best, the series was emotionally intuitive about the dynamics between 20- and 30-somethings. Major life changes among friends tend to shake everybody's trees, and this pregnancy motivates Robin and Barney to reconsider their lives, with a little help from the sentimental, pragmatic Ted, forever on the quest to find what Lily and Marshall have.

Barney really needs a list unto himself; his persona propelled some of the greatest plot lines on this show. He gave HIMYM many of its most memorable memes (and a book), and even if he hasn't singularly earned that many moments, Neil Patrick Harris reinvented himself with Barney Stinson. In the spirit of Lethal Weapon's Detective Murtaugh (or, if you're Canadian, someone from McElroy and LaFleur), Ted has decided, after one bad hangover too many, that at 30 he's too old for that shit. Barney decides otherwise: laser tag, crashing on a friend's futon, helping a friend move in exchange for pizza and beer, not seeing the doctor — his rage against the dying of the light is handily encompassed here. Meanwhile, Ted is sending back turkey for not being lean enough and getting up at 4 a.m. Bonus: One of several Wire shout-outs in the casting of McCracken (Robert Wisdom).

Clearly, CBS wouldn't have been too pleased if any of the five main characters were smokers — even though realistically, people who hung out in a bar this much would surely light up every now and then. Once again, the writers cleverly retconned the situation with Future Ted's selective storytelling, obscuring the fact that they had been occasionally smoking all along. Though he tries to fake his kids out by saying Robin was going up to the roof to stand there by herself for five minutes, it eventually comes out that the habit had a domino effect. Marshall starts partaking again to befriend his boss, Lily lights up because Marshall was lighting up, and Ted and Barney join in because they're tired of being left alone while the other three go outside. It's all fairly realistic, including the failed declaration to quit, but Ted's voiceover reveals a lot about the future, when each of them quits for good. For Lily, it's the day she starts trying to get pregnant. For Marshall, it's the day his son is born. For Ted, it's two weeks into dating the Mother.

The Mother is a divisive topic among fans. For a time, the early seasons were knocking it out of the park, so who cared when we met her? As the series started to drag, however, it became more of an issue, so the 100th episode was crucial in terms of offering up some more information about her, even if it unfolded vis-á-vis Cindy (Rachel Bilson). She likes the band the Unicorns and the work of T.C. Boyle, and she plays bass (Ted loves Kim, Deal or Gordon). It's a scant bio, yes, but after four-and-a-half seasons, it was better than nothing. And Ted leaves behind the yellow umbrella he picked up in "No Tomorrow."

For so long, fans worried Ted wouldn't meet the Mother until the very last scene of the series; in a smart, ballsy move, the writers decided to unveil her in last season's finale. Cristin Milioti was recognizable to some from Broadway's Once and a brief stint on 30 Rock, but she was a total surprise, and showing her to the audience first brought us in to the monumental weekend ahead. We had the bird's eye view of everyone here, and the compressed time frame amplified the drama (as did the Shins' "Simple Song"). Milioti's Mother has tested well with fans. Our only complaint is that we wanted more of her.

Marshall and Daphne's Season Nine road trip harked back to Marshall and Ted's first journey home from Wesleyan. But unlike the song, the joke didn't make as successful a comeback, because the punch line — that the Proclaimers' hit is the ne plus ultra of songs that are as annoying as they are catchy — struck a chord only once (yeah, we did). College versions of the characters are a fan favorite — here, pedantic, frizzy-haired Ted (aka Doctor X) gets his ass kicked in Zitch Dog by Marshall, a champion game player even then. More important, the two form a life-long bond. 

A long cold opening of Barney straining to impress his dad Jerry (John Lithgow) has him improving the identities of his friends to make them cooler: Marshall is a womanizing drunk; he and Lily are in an open relationship. About six minutes in, he adds one final embellishment: "We're also a band." Cue the credits, with the quintet performing the Solids' theme song (Robin on drums, of course) — a surprising beginning to a really good episode. While we're at it, maybe it's time to mention how well the standard credit sequence nailed it, too. The brief, pre-Instagram collage of candid bar photos perfectly set the tone of this show, and took on the significance of a time capsule as the cast aged.

On his 31st birthday, Ted is savaged by the goat that he initially remembered being at his 30th surprise party the previous season. This caps off a pretty bad year, so when Lily tells Ted to "take the leap" and quit designing a building he doesn't care about, she inadvertently inspires something else entirely: Marshall running to the roof and jumping to the adjacent one, with each of his friends following suit. This could be a callback to the pilot, in which Ted refers to taking the leap to pursue Robin (in the wake of her news report about a guy who didn't jump off the George Washington Bridge). In any case, this (and the goat) is an impressive bit of continuity, since Ted referenced those ill-advised five words — "I can jump that far" — much earlier in the season. HIMYM had a knack for stitching melancholy endings onto mediocre episodes, making them that much more memorable. Also, kudos for setting the moment to A.C. Newman's "Prophets," which might be the best use of a song in the whole series. 

After a successful intervention for the boozy Stuart (Matt Boren), the gang starts holding interventions for minor trespasses — Robin's spray tans, Lily's fake British accent, Ted's pretentious pronunciations — until they eventually hold an intervention for the interventions. But when Ted discovers a banner in the closet that his friends planned to use for his fast-moving relationship with Stella (Sarah Chalke), he gets cold feet about the future. Worse, his trepidation is contagious: Marshall and Lily don't want to move to Dowisetrepla; Robin doesn't want to go to Japan for her new job. Their freakouts capture the anxiety of the characters' ages, and the pressure to move forward and grow up and change while at times feeling nothing but resistance to just that.  

The series went to the women-be-crazy well a little too often, but Blah Blah made history. Her forgotten name ("Please, call me Blah") exposed Future Ted as an unreliable narrator, which gave the writers a lot of room for retroactive continuity (or "retcon"). Perhaps realizing just how much fun they could have with Ted's subjective storytelling, the idea of "eating a sandwich" was born; henceforth, this would be the awesomely PG euphemism for smoking pot. Anyway, Blah Blah (Abigail Spencer, whose character's name was recently revealed to be Carol) becomes agitated when she realizes the origin story of everyone else's relationship with Ted is better than hers, and she plummets below the Vicky Mendoza Diagonal. To make everything even more meta, the story of Marshall and Lily's meeting is, like Future Ted's ongoing narrative, massaged by time. 

This Season Four episode had everything: warped chronology, weather-related bonding, drunken ideas, not one but two great moments and a sentimental ending, at which point we realize each plot unfolds on a different night of a blizzard. When Carl leaves Barney and Ted the keys to MacLaren's, it checks off a box on Ted's list of ill-advised five words that every man utters in his life: "We should buy a bar." (Also on that list are flashbacks and -forwards: "I can jump that far" from the season's finale "The Leap," and "I'm gonna win her back" from Season Eight's "Weekend at Barney's.") Their Cocktail dreams of running the bar — now renamed "Puzzles" — go hilariously awry; meanwhile, Marshall and Lily agonize over whether to part with their cutesy ritual of airport pickups. After Robin and Marshall share a funny scene together in a stranded car, they end up at the airport on the wrong night. When Lily arrives two days later, she thinks her hubby has forgotten her — only Marshall has asked the bar's best patrons, the Fighting Hens, to gradually serenade her at the airport. Was there a dry eye in the house/apartment?

Before Barney's caddishness became problematic (and his character only salvageable thanks to Neil Patrick Harris's breakneck delivery and sublime gift for physical comedy), it was actually very funny, especially in contrast with his friends' disgust over such wanton womanizing. When a jilted ex takes revenge, Barney borrows the March Madness blackboard and lets the gang duke it out over which ex has more cause to be upset: the woman who slept with him when she thought he only had 12 hours to live or the one he fake proposed to? (Ted: "It's 12-hours-to-live girl — she flew them both to Paris!" Robin: "She only bought him a one-way ticket!") The continuity of Barney's sexual history is impressive, and the gang feels increasingly defiled. Bonus: The nod to Doogie Howser's journaling, with Barney typing his blog in DOS to the theme's dopey synths. Also, the real culprit turned out to be Abby, played by a surprisingly funny, post-meltdown Britney Spears.

One of the best tropes of the series is Ted's faith in the universe, an example of both his romantic notions of fate and, sometimes, his abdication of responsibility. Despite his friends' fatigue, Ted believes he and Robin are meant to be together. So he enlists one of Barney's former bedfellows to teach him a rain dance so that Robin doesn't go on a camping trip with her co-anchor, Sandy Rivers (Hannigan's real-life hubby, Alexis Denisof). The heavens unleash at the same time that Marshall and Lily find themselves — in another memorable technique — pausing and un-pausing their fight over her San Francisco fellowship. The season ends on the stoop in a downpour to the strains of Bloc Party's "This Modern Love," with Ted overjoyed and Marshall sadly holding Lily's engagement ring.

Obviously, the greatest development of this beloved season-two episode is Marshall and Lily getting back together, but the greatest moment has to be the butchering of Barney's name when the boys try hanging out in a coffee shop instead of a bar (a clever nod to how this series improved on the one that started it all). The running joke carries the episode as Swarley — aka Swarlos, aka Swarles Barkley, aka Swarhili — explains his Crazy Eyes theory; Marshall examines his new date for signs of lunacy; and Lily, like Billy Joel in the song that Chloe (Homeland's Morena Baccarin) sings moments before, "just can't take it anymore" and interrupts their rendezvous on the couch. The Cheers credits were a bonus. Surprisingly, Swarley wasn't referenced again until the final season's episode "Vesuvius."

This is hardly the first time HIMYM cleverly executed a plot point by manipulating the chronology of events — "The Pineapple Incident" might've been the original example, and to this day, we wonder how Ted came to possess that fruit — but the three-episode arc that concludes Season Two was pure genius. At the beginning of "Showdown," Robin and Ted enter the apartment covered in red sauce on the heels of Lily's freakout about the upcoming wedding, so they decline to explain. We won't find out for two more episodes that they had been at the restaurant where Ted stole the French horn and got into a fight about marriage that broke them up. In between comes the introduction of Barney's father issues and his fantastic winning stint on The Price of Right; the fodder for Ted's toast to the happy couple; and part one of the wedding, where everything goes wrong and Marshall and Lily end up exchanging vows in a heartwarming ceremony under the tree. In fact, you almost forget about the saucy mess until Barney overhears Robin and Ted talk about their "news" at the reception and spends the rest of the finale trying to get them to spill. It was a bittersweet development handled beautifully.

Once another person's flaws have been pointed out to us, they're impossible to ignore — this is one of the smartest conceits of this particular episode. Here, it applied to Ted's new girlfriend, Cathy (played by Radnor's one-time girlfriend Lindsay Price), whom the gang can't stand because of her motor mouth. Ted, however, only notices how rude they are to her in return. When his friends finally spoil her for him, they turn on each other to point out everyone's annoying habits: Lily's loud chewing, Robin's misuse of the word "literally," Ted's pretentious tendency to correct everybody, and Marshall's penchant for narrating everything he does with nonsense songs "like a stroke victim." The friends burst out in unison, "Apple orchard banana cat dance 8663," which reminds Marshall of his password for the bar exam results — which of course he passed, and celebration ensues.

Another great conceit, and maybe one of the rare instances of true wisdom from Barney, even if it's based on his misunderstanding of the Bible: "Never, ever love thy neighbor." Basically, he means don't shit where you eat, but it's a chance for the gang to take turns telling Ted about their own experiences of getting too close to people who were (literally) too close to them. Marshall and Lily made friends with the neighbors and soon couldn't leave the apartment without them. Robin dated a coworker who became too needy. Barney slept with Wendy the Waitress, thereby endangering MacLaren's as the go-to bar. It was superb storytelling that broke with the standard format of A, B, and C plotlines and gave each timeline equal weight — the episode unfolded in the 20 minutes it took Ted to playfully muss his hair.

This episode was so strong that the slap bet is only the second best thing to come out of it — although both plot points are brilliantly intertwined. When Robin refuses to go to the Willowbrook Mall, the gang speculates as to why. Marshall thinks she probably got married in one; Barney's sure she used to be a porn star. The resulting tape proves neither are true: Robin was a bedazzled, acid-washed-denim-wearing Canadian pop star named Robin Sparkles, and the video for her hit single "Let's Go to the Mall" is a pitch-perfect send-up of neon revelry, synchronized dance, bad rapping, and corny, faux-candid close-ups á la Debbie Gibson ("The eighties didn't come to Canada till, like, '93," explains Robin). In the midst of this awesome embellishment of her backstory, Marshall points out that Barney violated the terms of their bet with his "premature slapulation" and, out of nowhere, delivers the first of many awesome retribution wallops. 

Begin at the beginning: It took no more than five minutes of the pilot for Ted to meet the woman he thought he was going to marry — and for fans to start conspiring as to how, one day, he would. She hates olives, she drinks Scotch, she can quote Ghostbusters, and Ted stole a blue French horn for her, providing the perfect anecdote for Marshall's future wedding-day toast. Except for one thing: The episode concludes with Ted telling the kids that this is the story of how he met their Aunt Robin. Perhaps forgotten now, but this was a shocking (and brave) twist. The writers immediately ditched Robin as the titular love interest, even if she would persist as an option for the next decade. Many of us, like misunderstood lemmings, fell for Robin then and there. We refused to believe she wasn't The One.