The Barney Stinson Detail From How I Met Your Mother That Makes No Sense
"How I Met Your Mother," which ran for nine seasons, focuses on a central group of five best friends living and loving in New York City. But — with the utmost due respect to Josh Radnor, Cobie Smulders, Alyson Hannigan, and Jason Segel, who played Ted Mosby, Robin Scherbatsky, Lily Aldrin, and Marshall Eriksen, respectively — Barney Stinson may just be the most memorable series lead. Played with wit and charm by Neil Patrick Harris, Barney is a lothario who uses increasingly deranged and outlandish tactics to get women into his bed, and while some of the jokes about his womanizing ways don't always hold up (he does make a joke about trading a woman for a car at one point, which has some seriously disturbing implications), a lot of it is still pretty funny.
Harris played Barney from the show's very first episode, which aired in 2005, all the way through the series finale in 2014. Across 208 episodes, we learn quite a lot about Barney's history, the fact that he actually has a really big heart, and his quirks and idiosyncrasies. (In Harris' installment of Vogue's "73 Questions" series in 2016, he correctly points out that he gave Barney a particularly funny trait: he can't use chopsticks. If you watch carefully whenever a pair of chopsticks is on screen, he really can't.) Still, one of Barney's funny traits involving driving creates an enormous plot hole on "How I Met Your Mother." In one episode, we're told that Barney is both terrible at driving and absolutely terrified of it — so why does he drive normally a bunch of other times during the show?
Despite being scared of driving, Barney sure does drive a lot on How I Met Your Mother
In the 17th episode of "How I Met Your Mother" season 2, titled "Arrivederci, Fiero," the gang comes together to mourn the loss of Marshall's beloved Pontiac Fiero, which is finally dying ... at which point Ted regales everyone with the story of the time he tried to teach Barney to drive using the Fiero. Even though he and Ted never even leave the parking lot where he's teaching Barney how to operate the vehicle — and they never surpass a mere 10 miles per hour, or even get close — the whole thing terrifies Barney to the point where he develops a lifelong aversion to and even hatred of the Fiero.
This is definitely a funny bit in the episode, but it also doesn't make any sense, because Barney ends up driving elsewhere in the series with no problem at all. In fact, in the episode that immediately follows "Arrivederci, Fiero," titled "Moving Day," Barney steals Ted's moving truck to prevent him from moving in with Robin, and he does so by driving it! In the show's fourth season, Barney tells Ted that he drove to the airport to pick up Ted's mother (there's a frequent insinuation that something, uh, happened between Barney and Virginia Mosby, played by Cristine Rose). And in the season 5 finale, "Doppelgangers," the gang sees a cab driver who looks exactly like Barney as they try to find their respective doppelgangers in Manhattan. Turns out, it is Barney, and he sometimes drives a cab in a disguise to meet women.
The fact that any of these New Yorkers ever drive is wild enough, but the inconsistences in Barney's history as a driver are pretty glaring.
Plot holes aside, Barney was a great character — until the series finale of How I Met Your Mother ruined him
Look, I get that some details slip through the cracks on long-running sitcoms, even if it's pretty egregious that Barney is afraid of driving in one episode and steals a moving van literally one episode later. Still, it happens! The worse thing that "How I Met Your Mother" did to Barney's character, though, is make him into an entirely different person during the series finale, "Last Forever."
People complain about "Last Forever" because it kills off the titular mother (Cristin Milioti) in a montage so Ted can end up with his ex-girlfriend Robin after all is said and done, but they're overlooking the fact that Barney's character is assassinated beyond repair during the two-part episode. First of all, the entire final season of "How I Met Your Mother" centers around Barney and Robin's wedding in the fiction town of Farhampton, only for the series finale to split them up pretty unceremoniously in the first fifteen minutes of its runtime, shafting Barney right from the start. Then, Barney finds out one of his paramours is pregnant (we do not learn this mother's name) and when he becomes a father to a baby girl, he starts running around New York and telling women to wear more clothing. It's a bizarre and completely out-of-pocket turn for Barney, who, we come to learn, really does love Robin and wouldn't start shaming girls for their attire whether or not he had a daughter.
Obviously, the way the series finale treats Barney just totally stinks, but that driving thing Is also really fishy. If you want to track this plot hole for yourself, "How I Met Your Mother" is streaming on Hulu now.