How I Met Your Mother: Landmarks

     How I Met Your Mother is limping towards this season's finally.  After an extremely strong run of episodes mid-season, it is beginning to look like the show runners certainly didn't save their best for last.  Last night was another lack luster episode, short on laughs and totally lacking on any emotional level.  Part of the problem, as far as I'm concerned, was a misjudgment over what should be the season's important storyline.  The writer's struck gold with the death of Marshal's Dad and the search for Barney's father, but once those arcs were wrapped up all they had left was Ted's relationship with Zoey.  Did anyone get invested in this relationship?  Did anyone find it compelling or interesting?  Even outside the fact that the show's structure told us the relationship was doomed, it was quite obvious that the relationship wouldn't work and the writer's really gave us nothing else to like about Zoey.  How could a relationship last where one person finds a gross decrepit building more important then the career of their significant other?  Could there have been lessons to be learned from such a relationship?  Maybe, but all the writer's seemed to want to do with it was waste time.  This should have been a minor story this season, much like Barney's relationship with Nora, and the other two should have wrapped the season up on a creative high note.  All this season seemed to prove is that we need to meet Ted's wife ASAP.  The whole point of the show was to tell the story of how Ted met his wife, but at this point there is nothing more irrelevant, aside from Robin, then Ted's love life.  The other characters and their stories have become much more interesting and compelling.  It's time to abandon the mystery, introduce the wife and get on with the show in a new and fresh direction.
     A few high points... "Zoey has magical lady parts."  A classic Barney line that had me laughing.  "He has a lot of keys."  An attempt to describe what Barney's job is.  I really need to see if someone I know writes for this show.  We used to always talk about how much power a person had at work by how many keys they had on their key ring.  Bob Odenkirk, Barney's boss, was great in this episode.  I've kind of felt like his comedic genius has been misused in this show, but the scene with him yelling at his new dog was great.