Though the Robin-Ted and Robin-Barney relationships on “How I Met Your Mother” have come and gone, both boys seem to have residual feelings for Ms. Scherbatsky.

The bottom line is friendship and the closeness these five have that often – almost always  – transcends other relationships. That is understandable with Barney, whose relationships last no more than a microsecond. And of course Marshall and Lily are the glue – a relationship that thrives with three footloose friends, except when they are looking for the perfect couple to befriend.

How sad that Robin turns down the job for love – not  necessarily love for Don but perhaps for love of her four best friends. What do you think – was it Don or the gang ? Or both ? I really could nto call this one, could you ?

That said, if it was love for Don, what a blow ! He never said come with me and we will build a life together and a career for you too ! It could be done. I know because my sister and her husband, Pat and Joe Harper, were co-anchors on WPIX in New York City – the first husband and wife co-anchor news team in television history !

Robin chose love over career, Don didn’t – game, set and match. For a moment several episodes ago I thought Don could become part of the gang. Wrong !!  We never got to know Don well, and now I know why – there wasn’t a  lot there. Robin better get a hold of herself and decide what she wants in life. Otherwise she could be susceptible to the next pretty face that comes along and dings her.

Click here to view the embedded video.

According to Michael Ausiello, Marshall and Lily will indeed have a baby – no more of this beating around the bush, “maybe baby” stuff. They will have a baby, and it will be a boy, as was hinted earlier this season when Future Ted’s narration gave the audience this information. Says Carter Bays,

“Every now and then we like to, in a roundabout way, paint a clear picture of who they are at the time that the show’s being narrated from,” he explains. “And yes, we felt like it was time to tell the audience that Marshall and Lily also go on to have kids.”

Bays goes on to say, “a stork isn’t going to drop a baby in their laps in the season premiere…. [Parenthood] is going to be a big chapter in their lives. There are a lot of steps ahead.”

For those of you who are Robin Sparkles fans (and who isn’t?), good news. Footage will surface of the 80′s star’s failed  variety show with Alan Thicke. Carter Bays says,

“It’s inevitable that we’re going to see what that show was all about,” confirms exec producer Carter Bays. “That’s

something to look forward to next season.” Indeed!

In the fourth season ender of How I Met Your Mother, Barney and Robin took center stage as they acknowledged their feelings towards each other and finally hooked up, while Ted landed an architectural teaching job and inched closer to meeting his future wife. This season, the focus of the finale will be completely different as the show puts the spotlight on Lily, Marshall and Robin.

Robin: Though it’s been revealed that Robin and her co-worker Don have been dating for some time now, Don hasn’t exactly been visible since their first date. That will all change pretty soon, specifically in the big season finale where some “bad stuff” goes down with Don and Robin’s portrayer, Cobie Smulders, told us that “he may not be with us for much longer.”

Maybe Baby: Having already reached the 100th landmark episode, it’s only fitting that everyone’s favorite married couple, Marshall and Lily, also take a big step in their relationship. And at this point, “it makes sense for Marshall and Lily, who’ve been together something like 14 years…to be really considering that next rite of passage,” according to co-creator Craig Thomas.

“It’s a great place to end [this fifth year] I think,” says Thomas of Marshall and Lily possibly getting pregnant. “And it feels kind of fun to wrap up the season by putting the focus on Lily and Marshall and what’s coming for them.”

The Love Triangle: As reported previously, two people will be reuniting on How I Met Your Mother this season, sparking discussions on whether Robin will get back with Ted or rekindle her affair with Barney.  Thomas says that this love triangle will unfold in the finale, can only say this: “All I’ll say is, you know, we have a little bit of a triangle on the show. Both Barney and Ted have dated Robin and both were in love with her, so we have a fun moment toward the end of our season where that is acknowledged and explored.”

The Doppelganger: So far How I Met Your Mother fans have already seen Lesbian Robin, Mustache Marshall and Stripper Lily. But before the fifth season concludes, fans will see Ted’s look-alike too.

She may not be a former Canadian pop star in real life, but Cobie Smulders plays one on TV. As Robin Scherbatsky on CBS’s Emmy-winning How I Met Your Mother, the Vancouver-born actress plays a morning-news anchor who dabbled in bubblegum pop music in the early ’80s under the stage name Robin Sparkles. And while Robin’s clique of thirtysomething friends — played by Josh Radnor, Jason Segel, Neil Patrick Harris and Alyson Hannigan — have only uncovered two recordings to date, the music videos have been so popular that they have inspired dozens of fan parodies on YouTube. Aside from being a former pop star though, Smulders’ character is also the show’s consummate bachelorette who just this season won the heart of Neil Patrick Harris’ comically machismo bachelor.

As How I Met Your Mother’s fifth season winds down, Cobie Smulders caught Movieline up on her character’s lost variety show with Alan Thicke, the scenes she hated filming this season and her favorite guest star to date.

[Spoilerphobes beware: Smulders revealed a few mild plot twists ahead in the series’ fifth season.]

So when are we going to see Robin Sparkles again?
I don’t know! Hopefully soon. She took a little bit of a respite, didn’t she?

The writers are really spacing out her appearances.
They dropped the idea of Robin having a variety show too.

I wanted to ask you about that. Earlier this season (in the episode “The Rough Patch”) Alan Thicke revealed that he and Robin co-starred in a Canadian variety show together and then Barney ran off to try to find the footage but —
[The writers] never made anything of it, so I am hoping that when we come back for season six that we will get some crazy variety show with Alan Thicke. That would be amazing. Any excuse to bring Alan Thicke back on the show.

Your show gets so many great guest stars — from Britney Spears to Peter Bogdanovich. Did you hit it off with one in particular?
I love — just as a person — Sarah Chalke. She’s now one of my good friends, so I think I am probably biased towards that, but we also had her for quite some time. She was with
us for what, seven episodes or something like that? So it was nice to have someone actually there for a good chunk of time and allow her character to develop and all that stuff.

Speaking of characters sticking around on the show, what happened to Robin’s new beau Don? Even though he and Robin have been dating, we haven’t seen him since their first date.
Well, there is a pretty big season finale coming up where some stuff goes down with Don.

Bad stuff?
Some bad stuff goes down with Don, so I have a feeling he may not be with us for much longer.

Message received. You guys also shot an episode with Chris Kattan and Jason Lewis.

I think that is the episode before the season finale. But I was bummed! I am a fan of Chris Kattan actually and we weren’t on set that day. They actually shot a movie that will be shown within the show, which actually didn’t involve any characters from the show so none of us worked that day. Our crew basically shot a mini-movie while we were at home. I hear it’s pretty funny and amazing and I am excited to see what Chris Kattan comes up with in terms of what his thoughts on Ted Mosby are. He’s playing sort of a cartoon version of Ted.

That’s such a genius casting choice. Chris Kattan really has the Ted Mosby spiky hair.
We have some really good writers who have some pretty awesome ideas.

Can you talk about how the movie within the show fits into the season?
Was it last season that Sarah Chalke was on the show?

Right, season four.
Yeah, so we ended the season with Sarah’s character Stella moving to Los Angeles with Tony (Jason Jones). Basically, he went to L.A. to become a movie writer and wrote this movie that we end up watching and sort of discover is about his relationship with Stella and the whole leaving-him-at-the-altar sort of thing. But it’s not entirely fact-based. It’s kind of made-up — his version of what happened.

Moving on to Robin’s love life, what did you first think when the writers told you that they were conceiving a Robin-Barney romance? As a viewer, it seemed like it would be a complete disaster but it turned out that Robin and Barney had really sweet chemistry.
I was surprised when they decided to do it and then like you, I got on board with it. I love working with Neil. He is so much fun and we just have a really good time on set together. So it was fun to play more intimate scenes together but I think that relationship definitely had an expiration date so it was just a matter of time before they broke up. But it was sort of bittersweet. I feel like it is something that they could maybe touch upon again, but you never know. I think they like to leave things kind of open-ended on our show in case they want to hop back, because the timeline is just so all over the place .

And Ted is a totally unreliable narrator —
Yes, we can definitely rely on that, “Oops! Ted told the story wrong, so let’s tell it again the right way.”

It’s funny how that makes for entertaining television, but if someone kept pulling that in real life, they would be one of the most annoying storytellers ever.
Totally.

I know that Ted’s character is based on your executive producer Carter Bays, and Marshall and Lily are based on your other executive producer Craig Thomas  and his wife. Are Robin and Barney based on anyone in real life?

No, I think that they just wanted a character that was female and confidant and sort of a guys’ girl and they came up with Robin. Over the years, the idea of Robin sort of morphed — I got hired and they decided to make her Canadian after I came on the show. I think that over the course of a show, the characters shift in different ways but I think that they probably just probably wanted to have a Robin-like energy in the cast, maybe to help counteract Barney’s machismo. I would love to meet Robin in real life if she existed.

Me too. There were a few scenes this season that seemed un-Robin-like to me though. She was constantly having to listen to Barney brag about all of his conquests post break-up without commenting or seeming hurt. I was glad that the writers finally addressed her feelings about the break-up.
I was glad they did that too because every episode we shot, I was sitting there like, “I am not going to be in this scene, right? Can I please be written out of this scene because this is awkward?” I was really happy when they finally shot that episode. I don’t know if they had been planning it all along and just refused to tell me because they wanted it to be a surprise or if I was just complaining about it so much that they just wrote it like that. But it was nice — it was a very validating episode.

There have been some especially crazy stories this season that have gotten mixed reviews from fans, like the episode where a monkey robbed Marshall. After five seasons with the show, did some scripts strike you as especially out-of-left-field this year?
I think [the writers] take ideas that they think are really funny, and they manifest those ideas however they can. But I feel like every episode sort of molds together, and sometimes we are doing things that feels kind of crazy. But it’s a sitcom we are allowed to push the envelope and try episodes where Marshall gets robbed by a monkey. If it works, it works and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, but I like being on a show where they are trying new things.

What is the atmosphere like in between scenes? When I talked to a few cast members from the Big Bang Theory, they told me that they have these high stakes ping-pong tournaments that last the entire season.
We don’t have any ping-pong. We have scene changes when we move on to the next scene but we are really blessed to have an amazing crew and a great cast that gets along. Basically we hang out and chat and eat food and listen to music being played — there are a lot of live instruments being played but that’s about it.

Who plays instruments?
Carter plays the piano, and Jason plays the piano too. Some other guys play the guitar, and so there are some jam sessions.

Do you ever jam?
I attempt to, but I am never as good as they are. So it’s always slightly embarrassing.

What would you like to see happen to Robin next season? Do you feel protective of her?
Yeah, of course. I am going on six years with this character — which is kind of insane, but I would like to see her get a job that she is proud of. I think that her having this job that she has had for the last five years is a very funny thing, and I love doing the fake news, but it would be cool for her to get a really great job that makes her happy. I don’t think that love is anywhere on the horizon — maybe eventually, but I don’t think in this next season.

Would you like to see her end up with Barney?
I don’t know! I think it could happen. People always ask, “Is it going to be Barney or is it going to be Ted?” And I don’t know. I always thought that if Robin and Barney would get together, it would be at the end of the series, and now we have already had this momentary hook-up and I don’t know. It is always an interesting dynamic having the consummate bachelor mixed with the consummate bachelorette.

Is there one episode or scene that you remember being really fun to shoot?
All the Robin Sparkles stuff for me has been the best stuff to do. It’s the only time I have ever gotten to work in a recording studio, learn choreography and dress in ’80s clothing. It’s so much fun and when we did the “Sandcastles in the Sand” video, we were in Malibu for a whole day with our crew, just hanging out on the beach. There were dolphins swimming and I was thinking, “Wow, this is what I do for a living.” I love doing anything that has to do with Robin Sparkles, I hope the writers come up with more episodes for her.

So just to clarify, we will not see Robin Sparkles in season 5?
Nope. Unfortunately, no.

Hopefully Robin will quit her day job next season and return to Canada for a Robin Sparkles mall tour.
[Laughs] It’s possible. Anything is possible.

1. Scooter (played by David Burtka), AKA the guy on Lily’s hook, is Neil Patrick Harris’ real-life, long-term boyfriend.

2. HIMYM creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas are members of the band The Solids, who perform the show’s theme song “Hey Beautiful”.

3 During one episode, Robin freaks out in a restaurant when she mistakenly thinks Ted is proposing to her after she receives a champagne glass with an engagement ring at the bottom. When Ted tells her “That’s not mine”, another gentlemen at the table behind them says “It’s mine”, then proceeds to propose to the woman at his table. The proposal between the man and woman was real. The man set up the whole scheme with the show’s producers, and told his girlfriend that they won a contest and got to be extras in a HIMYM episode. Instead, he proposed on camera, and the proposal will live on forever as part of the episode.

4. Before “How I Met Your Mother” began, Neil Patrick Harris and Josh Radnor had already acted together, as lovers in a Los Angeles production of the Jon Robin Baitz play “The Paris Letter”.

5. Alyson Hannigan’s character on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, Willow Rosenberg, once mentioned that she wrote “Doogie Howser, M.D.” fanfiction as a girl. She now stars with Doogie himself in HIMYM!

Any other fun facts you want to share? Leave us a comment!

Click here to view the embedded video.

The plot of this episode is fairly simple: Marshall gets mugged, Lily wants to buy a gun to protect them, Marshall freaks and says a monkey mugged him to prevent Lily from going through with it. Did he really get mugged by a monkey? We will never know, and that’s not the point. The lying about it is the point.

What else is the point of this episode? I’m honestly not too sure. Maybe the writers thought throwing in an adorable animal would distract the viewers from realizing that they had been waiting two weeks for a new episode about nothing (i.e. the Carrie Underwood teacup pig tactic). Now, that monkey was adorable, and I’m okay with an episode of only subplot if it makes me laugh (as “Say Cheese” did a few weeks ago), but the only thing that had me crack a smile this time was Marshall screaming “There WAS no banana!” And maybe when he punched Lily in the face in the flashback sequence outlining his accidental violence towards his wife.

Barney again wasn’t front and center enough in this episode, and only seemed to serve as a contrast to Marshall’s greater good type of lying – Barney lied strictly to get women in bed and to serve his own selfish needs. Nice moral touch there. Lying is only okay when it’s done to protect someone.

This episode wouldn’t have left me disappointed if I hadn’t been waiting two weeks for it, but I had been, and I was. Hopefully this is leading up to a huge, surprising, shocking finale, as cast members have been hinting at lately. At this point, I couldn’t even tell you one important thing that has happened this season. Can you?

AND NOW HERE IS YOUR CHANCE TO WIN!

What do you think REALLY happened to Marshall when/if he was mugged?

So, we were left hanging at the end of the episode as to what happened with Marshall’s wallet. Tell us what you think happened, and post it as a comment below!  The most interesting storyline will WIN a FREE How I Met Your Mother DVD, season of your choice.

Good luck!

In the fall of 2009, fans of  “How I Met Your Mother” heard future Ted Mosby (aka Bob Saget) tell his kids how his friends quit smoking, mentioning that Lily (Alyson Hannigan) dropped the habit when she started trying to get pregnant and Marshall (Jason Segel) followed suit when his son was born. There was no date given as to when that whole deal might go down. But, having just visited the set, I can tell you that the topic of “maybe baby?” is about to hit Marshall and Lily in a major way.