Matt D

I bet you're going to really like it. You would very much like the source material. Brubaker's Captain America run is down your alley.

Once again, I actually have no problem with Ted ending up with Robin. It's very much in character for both of them and follows both Ted's character development and Robin's lack of development. It didn't feel like Ted let Robin go so much as he accepted that he would move on, despite his feelings. And he did. Those feelings didn't go anywhere though. He just found peace with them and with the situation at large. That's what allowed him to find love elsewhere. To me the big issues are structural, in the actual execution, and most especially The Trouble With Barney.

Sometime in the late 80s, I'd think? Coming off of Dynamite Kid and Tiger Mask and what have you. I know as a kid I hated Hogan because he only did two or three moves and I loved the Rockers. Then you got first the rise of Junior Heavyweight Wrestling between New Japan. Either you needed head drops and big bumps and stiff shots or hardcore shots or you needed lots of Moves and spots. "Action." This all culminated in the late 90s with the SAT/Brian XL/Quiet Storm match and led into early ROH and the Kurt Angle/Chris Benoit WWE Main Event style. And with the rise of older footage being easily available in the 00s, people in our community getting older in general, and the tragic loss of Guerrero/Benoit/Misawa/a dozen other guys in part due to that crazy all action style, a lot of us that had felt that way started to learn to appreciate different aspects of wrestling, etc. etc. There's a pretty direct narrative if you pull it apart and put it back together. I might not be completely right on all of it, but I think it's really the story of our community in a lot of ways, when it comes to watching wrestling. EDIT: It's a narrative I always come back to and no one else ever latches on to too much, but between reading old Observers/Herb's Tidbits, and remembering living through this place in 99-00-01, and even see people like Tim or Resident Evil (I'm sorry for associating you with RE, Tim) who are sort of like perfect relics from that era, it's all just very interesting to me.

We're in really tricky territory here, because some of this is the character of Ted Mosby (or Barney) and some of it is the necessities of the nature of the show. I really and truly lost my ability to suspend my disbelief when it came to Barney in this episode. I was watching writers write a TV show and an actor playing a character and both of them were trying to get out of a creative knot they put themselves in. Period. I had less of that problem with Ted. It's hard to hold against him the fact he didn't talk that much about someone who wasn't really introduced until season 9 of a 9 season show. You can hold that against the writers. You can hold that against the nature of the show. Ted as a character? That's tricky. It's why I don't take much of what Barney did in the finale as a testament to him as a character. I just choose not to. I can't reconcile it with his character development. It's easier to reconcile Ted being Ted with him not mentioning the mother more. How old were the kids when she died? Also, how much does he talk about the mother that we don't see? Two things about Ted that WERE established: 1.) He talks a lot. We know this. 2.) He had told the mother EVERY SINGLE STORY HE HAD within just a matter of years. We only saw a hint of that. Very likely Marshall knew every story Ted had within a year or two of college before they started to make more. I think it's safe to say that he does talk about "my life with your mother before you remember her" with the kids, and we just don't see it so much? But I've written way too many words about that.

It's not that Ted is likable. He's not. It's that Ted is relatable. Most of us aren't likable either. There's a bit of Ted in most of us in this conversation.

See, some of this is because Ted Mosby is a pretty shitty person. He's overblown and arrogant and self-conscious about his status and yeah he's also loyal and dedicated and cares about grand gestures but some of that is to get recognition for them.Ted's complicated. At best, he's a good person for all the worst reasons. He's gotten better in some ways, but they're mainly due to life beating some of this out of him. Acceptance. A level of peace. I just said the show was full of two dimensional characters, basically, or worse. Ted's the exception. It's entirely believable that he would tell this story to his kids, about how he met the mother but more than that, about his love not even for Robin (because what about Robin does he even love other than the fact he can take care of her and that she needs him?) but about the IDEA of Robin. That's Ted Mosby, folks. That he grew to deserve someone better than Robin actually says more about Robin than Ted. Barney Stinson, if you look at the last season or two, is a genius. They built him up to be the guy who managed the last page of the playbook, who was able to pull an amazing long game to screw his evil boss at work, who invented twenty or thirty twisted brilliant things to put in his apartment, and who got through every bit of jitters and accepted a ton of really difficult things in his life despite a messed up childhood. It's not just how he acted after the divorce but the fact that they got to that point over such little things in the first place about travel they knew about, about just the boredom that came with three years of marriage. Maybe that's real. Maybe people deal with that everyday and weddings end over that, but they built him up into something sort of special and then they just ignored all that and he took the first convenient off-ramp he could because it suited the story. He's the guy whose whole point is that everything is legendary and that every day with Barney is an adventure. He's stuck in all these exciting cities and he just hangs out in a hotel room instead of having adventures. They, maybe, could have built to it in some way that worked (though not in any way that wouldn't make him look even worse than he did in that last episode) but they sure as heck didn't do it well over the span of five minutes or whatever they gave it.

I know Phil has concerns, but to me, the issue isn't the mother at all, it's Barney. They DID give us clues all along and I think everyone felt a bit iffy on the Ted/Robin stuff of the last few weeks. I can't say enough that I thought Ted DID grow, but not to the point where he was past Robin, just to the point where he could finally successfully have a relationship with her. I know people who refused to watch the show because it was on CBS and had a laugh track and I think ultimately, that's what the show proved itself to be last night. Another comedy with goofy characters with a laugh track. Barney reverting and flippantly joking about how he hadn't changed at all and it was just a big joke makes him Big Bang Theory level when it comes to that sort of thing. Or Two Broke Girls or whatever. I think they'd accomplished something a little more and maybe that was their own folly. They put a big tree in the middle of their road and they cut it down but we still had to drive over the stump and it was pretty damn awkward.

Ahhhh. I see what's going on here. This is a trap. If I post a Cole Twins video today.... Look, Davey's really athletic and crisp in his execution, etc. Instead of watching actual matches, people may be better served by spending their time looking at these. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vixQ9tN4hE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNsWpQqY3kY

I had heard about the HHH video last night and thought it was an amazing idea, but when I saw it this morning, I hadn't realized that it was Steph doing the voice over, which makes it a thousand times better.

I don't think so. Actually, let me rephrase. I think a lot of media outlets are picking up on that because it's an easy story and you don't really need to be invested in the show to understand it. I don't think the fans are really feeling it. I think people are more upset with the execution and the russo-tastic swerve where you take something of substance that has weight and worth behind it and sacrifice it for a flashy twist.

I don't have a problem with Ted ending up with Robin. That felt like it had to happen on some level, even a couple of episodes ago. It was going to be bittersweet that he didn't, but ultimately alright because we liked Barney/Robin and they did such a masterful job getting there with the playbook last page, etc, and because after spending years of watching Ted, we're happy that he got someone that was actually a good match for him. With Robin, she was permanently damaged goods in a lot of ways and he'd be spending his life taking care of her, which was fine, since it's what he wanted to do more than anything else in the world, but in some ways she and barney deserved each other and Ted, now that he's gone through this character development, which still didn't make him perfectly functional, but did make him a lot better, deserved something better. The biggest problem to me, is that they erased not just the wedding, but Barney's entire character development throughout the show in a matter of minutes and then tried to toss us a consolation prize with the baby, which was a messed up situation in a hundred ways. It's not that they made the mother too perfect. They could have spent the season developing her, which would have made her sickness matter all the more instead of just a gimmick and then we could have been okay with the Robin thing because that's what T.M. (I don't even remember her name) would have wanted for Ted, to be happy. The problem, even then, though, is Barney.

Summer, and to a greater extent, Sasha, sometimes comes off as playing a heel instead of being one. The hand motions and things are just way over the top. It kind of worked with Laycool since they were like something out of a cartoon, like Skeletor, but I think I Summer is more effective when she's not trying to ham it up so much.

Paige had some "personal problems" which kept her off NXT for a few months. I assume that might be why Emma got called up before she did but that's just guesswork. Neither here nor there but why the hell aren't they using Summer Rae's NXT music. It's so good.

Power of the punch.

Volkoff: 1) has a really awesome origin story in how he escaped to the West. 2) great in mid south in 83-84 3) was absurdly over as a babyface in 90 4) legitimately hated the Soviet Union and felt like he was attacking them by portraying his bad guy character 5) is pretty touching in his HOF speech.

Ted was honestly telling them that story for years. They probably asked sometime early on and Ted just told the world's longest story. I'm going to say that there were a hundred things they did wrong there (though, the end still got me). First and foremost is this: The whole episode should have been this season. they could have gone over all the years in a season instead of going over two days in a season. The only reason why this worked was that it was so unlikely (and a little disingenuous) after the really satisfying "last play in the playbok" thing they pulled last season.

I'm going to go with: "We were the children all along!" because frankly it's too embarrassing to say that with two minutes left on the episode I was going to call in my donor rights, my "one", and ask Phil to just lock the note so we could all move on.

Watching all these mid-episode commercials, I assure you that the best thing about this being the last episode is that I'm never going to have to watch CBS again.

Are there other interesting things out there from lawsuits. Anything in Ventura's or the Charles Austin lawsuit or the WWF suing WCW over Hall and Nash having the WWF mannerisms (which I think would be most interesting) or the Raven independent contractor one?

So... one of the side effects of moving the baby's bedtime has been sleeping on the floor next to her crib and having weird dreams where my parents were getting married again, but at the Oscars, and Brock Lesnar was there.

I fully believe that *I* called it that in 1990. I've just never heard it called that in a match proper before 1994. Did they call it that in the old WWF Superstars mag that came out every year?

Find me an example. Anvil calls it the Hart Attack in their SummerSlam 90 pre match promo. Are we sure he's not just babbling nonsensically? Vince never called it that. Ventura never called it that. Monsoon never called it that. I want to see a match where an announcer called it that while it was happening.

December to Dismember