How I Met Your Mother season 9, episode 18, “Rally,” just aired, and the gang tried to help Barney back on his feet with some Stinson Hangover Fixer Elixir.

Final seasons of television shows are hard to pull off and How I Met Your Mother has an even higher than normal level of difficulty. Since the end of the show is hardwired into the show’s very title, every moment of the last season has been scrutinized with how much closer it brings fans to the actual endings.

In other words, many viewers have been frustrated with episodes that “stall” and don’t deal with the “meeting of the mother” directly, as though not learning what the Mother’s favorite Wes Anderson movie in any given episode somehow makes it a complete waste of time. (And the correct answer to the Mother’s favorite Wes Anderson movie? All of them, obviously.)

Tonight’s 18th episode, “Rally,” was on the surface a classic “stall” episode. “The gang helps Barney get over a hangover” is a simple premise. And with only a little over two and a half hours until the ultimate end of the show, we’re sure many fans felt some nerves upon reading the synopsis.

But “Rally” was a great episode, turning the idea of “stalling” completely on its head. Sure, the general plot doesn’t deviate far from the gang’s quest for Stinson’s Hangover Fixer Elixir, but in that search it also reveals a lot about these friends and their love for each other with helpful glimpses into the past and future.

“Rally” begins exactly where we left over two weeks ago in “Sunrise.” Ted and Robin have returned to the hotel (and Robin has returned to Earth after floating into the stars, apparently) to find Barney clutching a fire extinguisher, passed out in front of his room. So, it’s a pretty average Stinson morning.

Problematically, it’s 10 hours until Barney and Robin’s wedding, and Barney must be conscious for wedding party photos with Robin’s terrifying father (played, as usual, by Ray Wise). When nothing Ted and Robin do wakes Barney up,* they must enlist the help of Lily and Marshall to reverse engineer one of Barney’s finest achievements: the Stinson Hangover Fixer Elixir.

*Not even telling him his socks don’t go with his shoes!

The Elixir, created in 1941 by Barney’s great uncle Dr. Stinsonheimer, has stopped many a hangover in its tracks. Robin and Lily stay behind with Barney to try to get him awake, and Ted and Marshall head off to gather all the requisite ingredients.

Robin puts Barney through all of her father’s strategies for getting her awake for school when she was a child. These include dunking his head in a bucket of ice water and having a bear scream in his face. Lily gives Robin a hug for her frightening childhood.

Of course, there is only one thing that can wake Barney from the hangover dead – an event nearly nine years in the making. Lily finally convinces Robin to kiss her. It only took Barney being passed out on the day of his own wedding to make it happen. Even when Barney is passed out, he is making the legendary happen.*

*Lily and Robin’s kiss turns up again hilariously in the episode’s tag where Lily is left completely sated from the experience and now Robin is the one weirdly obsessed with kissing her friend.

Lily and Robin have completed their task, but the kiss would be all for naught if Ted and Marshall don’t come up with the ingredients for the Hangover Fixer Elixir. They track down Funyuns and Tantrum* easily enough, but the grease is harder to come by.

*The tantrum joke is probably the hardest we’ve laughed this season. Ted gets Marshall to toss the Tantrum over to him and opines, “Dude, you’re an adult. Stop throwing a Tantrum.” It’s clear this is at least the 100th time they’ve told this joke.

The hotel, being a classy establishment, does not have any grease on hand. They have bacon, but they throw the grease away immediately. Unless they run out of bacon prior to the end of breakfast, they won’t have any more grease.

Ted wants Marshall “Big Fudge” Eriksen to eliminate all of the bacon, but Big Fudge is not about that life anymore. It’s up to Ted to eat all of the bacon. Ted has never had bacon, believing himself to be allergic to it, along with Halloween candy and being impolite. But he decides to step up for Barney on his wedding day and eat a whole buffet tray of bacon for the first time in his life.

The results of a bacon virgin’s exposure are predictably awesome,* but more importantly gets the job done. Ted and Marshall bring the final Elixir concoction back to Barney, where the gang demands to know the secret ingredient.

*Awesome enough for Barney and the buffet chef to break the fourth wall.

The secret ingredient, as it turns out, is: nothing. Barney’s Hangover Fixer Elixir, like so many other Barney stories, is complete B.S. There is no secret ingredient. But unlike so many other Barney stories, the intentions of the the Hangover Elixir are pure.

The gang realizes that Barney gave them the hangover cure during particularly difficult times in their lives. Robin got the Fixer Elixir when she was panicking about going back on live television. Marshall was afraid to take the bar exam. Lily needed to get ready to take her kindergartners on a field trip to the jackhammer and siren museum. And Ted, well, Ted had just gotten left at the alter.

We know that Barney Stinson is a compulsive liar, but the best episodes of How I Met Your Mother this season have reminded us that sometimes Barney can lie for good reasons. And The Placebro Effect is the best of reasons.

Barney telling his friends that he loves them combined with Future Ted giving “The Mother” Stinson’s Hangover Fixer Elixir on New Year’s Day 2022 is a nice emotional one-two punch and gets the final uninterrupted six episodes of How I Met Your Mother off to a strong start.

‘Never doing that again’ – The ‘last’ time each member of the gang drinks that much

At various points throughout “Rally,” the MacLarens gaze upon Barney’s pitiful unconscious body and promise themselves they will never drink that much again. They are all dirty liars. Here is every time in the future Robin, Lily and Marshall drink that much again.

Next week on ‘HIMYM’ Lily and Robin have a fight, and Barney must pick what suit to wear.

What did you think of “Rally?”