The Bracket

"The Bracket"

"The Bracket" is the 14th episode in the third season of the television series How I Met Your Mother and 58th overall. It originally aired on March 31, 2008.

Plot

Barney attempts to track down and identify a woman who is stalking him in order to warn women he picks up from sleeping with him. He narrows down a list of 64 women most likely to want revenge, then has the gang help him eliminate possibilities tournament style. Lily, the only person who has seen the stalker, forces him to confront his "final four," none of whom is the stalker, although the woman from "Ted Mosby: Architect" started tedmosbyisajerk.com, under the impression that Barney's identity is Ted's. Lily is irked by his refusal to apologize to the women he's hurt, Barney reasoning that they were consenting adults, he showed them a good time, and remembered each and every one, even going so far as to scrapbook each experience. Barney finally apologizes to a woman when he thinks that she is the avenger but he does not recall having slept with her. This turns out to be a case of mistaken identity, and Future Ted tells us we'll learn the rest of the story later.

At the end of the episode, Barney writes of the experience in his oft-mentioned blog. After glancing over at another conquest he snagged through deception, he concludes that the lesson to all this is, "I'm awesome."

Music

• "One Shining Moment" performed by David Barrett

Continuity

• The montage of women that Barney has slept with includes a picture of Madeleine Albright that is visible if the montage is viewed frame by frame. In addition, Madeleine is one of the names on the upper right side of the bracket. Then, when looking at the scrapbook of all the women Barney has slept with, Lily mentions "one government official." This follows from "The Yips", in which Barney implies that he slept with the former Secretary of State. Later, in the same episode, Barney states that he once sat next to Madeleine Albright at a benefit and he "did not intend to hit that." She is beaten out by Anna, better known as the kickboxing instructor "resident" from "Ted Mosby: Architect".
• It is surprising that Anna is listed as "Anna." Barney did not know her name in the episode in which he slept with her.
• Meg re-appears, last seen being left by Barney in Marshall and Lily's new apartment in "Dowisetrepla".
• The identity of the saboteur is revealed in "Everything Must Go". Oddly enough, despite being one of Barney's recent hook-ups, her name is not present in the bracket. This is explained later when she explains what Barney did to her and he replies, "That's it?"
• Barney uses the statistic 83 percent as how much he can see when he was acting as a blind man. In the episode "Brunch", Ted states that Barney always uses 83 percent when he makes up a statistic.
• Barney claims that he doesn't have a list of his sexual conquests. In "Little Boys", Barney clearly says "You've seen my list", and in "Right Place Right Time", he reveals a list of 200 conquests.
• Wendy the waitress, Stacey from "Little Boys", and Shannon, Barney's college girlfriend, all appear on the bracket, and all lose in the second round.
• Penelope, the raindancer from "Come On", appears on the bracket, and loses in the fourth round to Holly. Her presence on the list is also surprising, as she has brown hair, when Lily identified the mystery woman as a blonde.
• The mystery stalker tells Lily the man she is speaking to is "Barney Stinson" but Anna only knows him as "Ted Mosby". Barney realizes this before he can apologize, and instead further besmirches Ted's name.
• Ted claims that Robin is a terrible liar, but in "Definitions", Robin says that she is a great liar.
• Before facing one of the girls on the bracket, Barney asks Lily to go into his room and throw a metal case that he owns off into the East River if the girl kills him. In a future episode Barney gives Ted a similar case which contains all of his porn.

Cultural references

• In Ted and Marshall's NCAA tournament bracket, they picked the Washington State University Cougars to win the national championship. The bracket was similar, but not identical to the actual 2008 bracket.
• Near the beginning of the episode, Barney is trying to remember the name of Alan Alda, who played Hawkeye Pierce in the TV series M*A*S*H.
• When Barney and Lily visit Holly, the restaurant across the street from her place is the Nolita Bar & Grill, the same restaurant featured in short-lived sitcom Kitchen Confidential, which premiered in the same time slot as How I Met Your Mother.
• The sequence at the end of the episode where Barney types an entry for March 21, 2008 into his blog is an allusion to Doogie Howser, M.D., a TV series where the title character is also played by Neil Patrick Harris and wrote journal entries on his computer at the end of most episodes.
• Oprah Winfrey appears in the bracket as one of Barney's conquests. She is the last name in the 4th region and loses in the first round.

Production

The tie-in website http://www.tedmosbyisajerk.com was initially bought to prevent it being exploited by cybersquatters, then a simple website was added. Associate producer Carl MacLaren had the idea to do a song for the website, which sprawled into a much longer twenty-minute work. The song syncs up slightly with the episode a la the alleged Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz sync, which can be seen on the season 3 DVD. The vocals were performed by Charlene Amoia (Wendy the Waitress).

Critical response

The AV Club gave the episode a B rating.

IGN gave the episode a rating of 7.6 out of 10.

Omar G of Television Without Pity rated the episode A+.

External links

• Template:Tv.com
• The Bracket at IMDb