12 Most Rewatchable Episodes Of How I Met Your Mother

Created by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, the CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother," which ran for nine seasons from 2005 to 2014, ostensibly focuses on Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor on-screen and the late Bob Saget in voice-over from the future) telling his children an abominably long story about how he met their mom. (The mom in question, by the by, is Tracy McConnell, played by future Emmy winner Cristin Milioti.) What "How I Met Your Mother" is about in a larger sense, though, is the adventures Ted goes on with his friends in New York City. Alongside his college best friend Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel), Marshall's long-time love Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan), notorious womanizer Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris), and Canadian newcomer and aspiring news anchor Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders), Ted tries and fails to find love in Manhattan ... but the bond between him and his friends is what makes the show truly great.

All told, there are 208 episodes of "How I Met Your Mother," and fans probably rewatch this series whenever they want to hang out with Ted and the gang again — but which episodes are the most rewatchable? In no particular order — and without any episodes from the truly dreadful ninth and final season, which unfortunately concludes with one of the worst series finales ever — here are 12 of the most rewatchable episodes of "How I Met Your Mother."

Because of its narrative framework — specifically, that Ted is relaying these stories to his kids years after the fact — "How I Met Your Mother" is really good at playing with storytelling and misdirection, and this is on perfect display in the Season 2 episode "Slap Bet." At this point, Ted and Robin are dating ... and when Robin has a small freakout over the concept of going to the mall with the whole gang, Ted gets suspicious about why she hates malls so much, especially because she won't stop talking about a friend who got married at a mall and was too young and naïve at the time. The theory that he cooks up with Marshall and Lily is that Robin is married to someone else and had the ceremony at a mall; Barney, however, is absolutely certain that Robin's "secret" is that she used to make "adult" films. That's when the show introduces the "slap bet." If Barney is wrong, Marshall gets to slap him as hard as he can, with Lily overseeing it all as the "slap bet commissioner."

The answer is so much funnier than anyone could have possibly guessed, though. Robin isn't married, and she didn't make adult films — she was a teenage pop star in Canada, and her hit single was called "Let's Go to the Mall." Between the reveal of the music video for that song — which rhymes "coat" with "about" in true Canadian custom — and Barney's reception of Marshall's slap, the ending of this episode is absolutely perfect, and the reveal stays funny no matter how often you rewatch the episode.

In the incredible Season 3 episode "How I Met Everyone Else," we get into the full backstory of all the relationships in the main gang — save for Robin, considering we see her meet everybody back in Season 1 — using a smart framework where Ted is explaining the group's dynamics to his latest paramour. (In retelling the story, Ted can't remember the name of the woman, played by small screen staple Abigail Spencer, so he just calls her "Blah Blah.") This ends up creating an awkward situation when, as Ted tells the super-romantic story of how Marshall and Lily met when the three of them were at Wesleyan College, Lily quietly tells him that she thinks they might have kissed at a freshman party, and she only met Marshall while she was trying to find Ted.

By the end of the episode, Lily, Ted, and Marshall agree to keep the original and romantic, albeit "false," origin story intact, infuriating Blah Blah. Oh, and also, Barney met Ted at their favorite bar's urinal where he told Ted he would "teach him how to live" — and sort of just stuck around from that point on — and Ted and Blah Blah met playing an online role-playing game, just to round out all the details.

Episodes that center around Robin Scherbatsky on "How I Met Your Mother" tend to be pretty great thanks in large part to Cobie Smulders' winning performance, and the Season 4 standout "The Possimpible" is a perfect example. When Robin finds out that she needs to find a job or she'll be deported back to Canada, everybody panics ... especially Barney, who's harboring unexpected feelings for one of his closest friends. In a misguided attempt to help her, Barney helps her make a "video resumé" to sell herself to potential employers, though Robin balks when he asks her to break multiple bricks with her forehead and the fact that he keeps using words like "possimpible" (which he explains is where the "possible" and "impossible" meet).

Forced to audition to be the girl who picks the winning lottery numbers, Robin feels like she's hit rock bottom ... until, inexplicably, Barney's stupid video works and helps Robin get a job. "The Possimpible" is great, and it's made even better by Barney's own video resumé, which makes him look awesome but never says anything specific.

At the beginning of the Season 2 episode "Swarley," Marshall, Ted, and Barney sit in complete silence at a coffee shop before declaring that it sucks to hang out there instead of their usual bar — an extremely funny and affectionate dig at the main setting of "Friends" — and things only get better from there. In this "How I Met Your Mother" episode, Marshall and Lily are temporarily broken up after Lily left a broken-hearted Marshall behind shortly before their planned wedding to study art in San Francisco, and after Barney and Ted encourage him, Marshall asks the coffee shop's cute barista Chloe (Morena Baccarin) out on a date. Barney, however, warns that Chloe has "crazy eyes" and that she could end up being troublesome, a warning Marshall ignores entirely.

Chloe does end up doing a few bizarre things — all of which are due to Lily, who's basically stalking the "new woman" in Marshall's life out of sheer jealousy — but she doesn't really let her freak flag fly until, after Lily and Marshall reunite, she basically destroys Marshall and Ted's apartment. So what's the deal with the episode title? In one of the show's best-ever running gags, Chloe calls Barney "Swarley," which isn't even a name ... but the gang capitalizes on it, ordering him magazine subscriptions to his new name until he goes completely insane.

Barney Stinson, despite being a truly absurd and heightened character, faces a few personal crises throughout "How I Met Your Mother" — but the silliest is undoubtedly the one he faces in "Girls vs. Suits," the landmark 100th episode of the series that airs in Season 5. When Barney finds himself entranced by a beautiful new bartender at the gang's regular haunt McLaren's — Karina, played by Stacy Keibler — he tries to seduce her like he does with every other woman he covets, only to hit a major obstacle. Karina, as it turns out, hates men in suits after dating a series of rude finance bros, so Barney is forced to pretend he also hates suits. This goes about as well as you'd expect, and all culminates in the phenomenal musical number "Nothing Suits Me Like a Suit," performed by Broadway veteran Neil Patrick Harris and the rest of the main cast (and which was nominated for an Emmy for outstanding original music and lyrics in 2010).

Amidst this wonderful silliness, Ted goes on a date with an awesome girl named Cindy — "The O.C." veteran Rachel Bilson — but faces a major issue when everything he thinks is cool and interesting in her apartment belongs to her unseen roommate. The roommate is Cristin Milioti's Tracy, but we don't get that reveal for a while; still, "Girls vs. Suits" manages to feature a great musical number and bring us closer to the "mother" of all reveals.

Traditions and running gags are a huge part of "How I Met Your Mother," and one of the very best is that the gang holds interventions any time one of them is acting out of line — no matter how big or small the problem at hand might be. This is introduced in the aptly titled Season 4 installment "Intervention," where Ted and Marshall prepare to move out of the apartment they've shared for decades — Ted is set to move in with his fiancée Stella Zinman, played by Sarah Chalke, and Lily and Marshall have purchased a new apartment as they plan to start a family — and find their trusty intervention banner.

That's when we get a deeply fun look back at some of the interventions staged by the gang over the years. There's the time Marshall wouldn't stop wearing a stupid hat, the time Lily stubbornly adopted a British accent after a "James Bond" movie marathon, Robin abusing self-tanner, and Barney refusing to give up his magic tricks, especially ones involving fire (which is the reason that the intervention banner has a big scorch mark on it). Things get serious, though, when the rest of the gang admits to Ted that they meant to intervene over Stella, worrying that the two are getting married too quickly ... giving "Intervention" some real emotional heft despite its silliness.

A relatively simply structured episode as far as "How I Met Your Mother" is concerned, the Season 5 installment "The Playbook" centers around Barney's titular Bible, which he wrote himself ... and which contains all of his various ploys, scams, fibs, and flim-flams he's ever used to pick up a woman under false pretenses. Variations include dressing up like a genie and telling women they can make their wishes come true if they rub his "magic lamp," pretending to be a wealthy humanitaran named Lorenzo von Matterhorn (which Barney uses to trick Lily's colleague Shelly, played by Eva Amurri), and an unknown one called "The Scuba Suit," which the gang — along with Barney's latest target Claire, played by Sarah Wright — try to figure out throughout the episode.

Barney's schemes are nothing new on "How I Met Your Mother," but devoting an entire episode to them is brilliant ... so brilliant, in fact, that the series released a physical copy of the playbook for fans to purchase. Don't try any of his ideas at home, though.

The Season 4 episode "Three Days of Snow" plays with time in a way that's clever even for "How I Met Your Mother" — and every time you rewatch it, you'll fall even more in love with Lily and Marshall's enduring love story. As Marshall explains to a skeptical Robin, whenever either of them travels, the other waits at the airport. Despite this, Marshall confidently tells Robin that he and Lily have decided to ditch their tradition while Lily is away during a historic, three-day New York snowstorm; regretting that, he decides to go get her at the airport anyway with Robin in tow. At first, the episode tricks the viewer by making it look like Lily and Marshall both showed up at different times only to feel disappointed — but the reveal that Marshall shows up to the airport with a full marching band to greet Lily is well worth it.

The episode's B-plot is also great, which sees Ted and Barney answer a question asked by drunken friends many times throughout history: "Should we open a bar?" After "taking care" of McLaren's for a night during the storm, they turn the apartment into an impromptu bar, which goes as well as anyone might expect. "Three Days of Snow" is emotional, profound, and hilarious — and a great episode.

Remember that slap bet made in Season 2 of "How I Met Your Mother?" Well, by the time we get to "Slapsgiving" in Season 3, the bet has taken clearer shape to the point where Marshall gets to slap Barney five times whenever he chooses and without warning (the first of those five technically does take place in "Slap Bet," so there are four left in this episode). Though Lily, in her position as slap bet commissioner, insists that no slapping happens on Thanksgiving, Marshall absolutely delights in tormenting Barney with cryptic countdowns, driving Barney into an increasingly frantic state as he awaits his red-faced fate. 

As far as Ted is concerned, he's irked that, after his breakup with Robin, she brings her older boyfriend to Thanksgiving — and even though the guy is a completely normal age to be dating Robin, Ted envisions him as an elderly man (played by Orson Bean), so that's how we see him too. Between Robin and Ted dusting off old inside jokes to become friends again and Marshall's incredible original song "You Just Got Slapped," this episode is a perfect holiday installment ... and a perfect half-hour of "How I Met Your Mother."

If nothing else, the Season 7 episode "Trilogy Time" is the one where three versions of Ted and Barney do an acapella version of Billy Joel's "For the Longest Time." It's also, however, an important version of "How I Met Your Mother" in that it introduces a handful of alternate timelines into the mix, sort of like a short-form version of the Gwyneth Paltrow film "Sliding Doors." Every three years, as per their tradition, Ted, Barney, and Marshall get together to watch the original "Star Wars" trilogy together and wonder where they might be three years in the future; in 2012, Ted reminisces about previous outings and realizes they all keep hoping for the same things. 

Marshall, for example, wants to start a big family with Lily — and in some versions of this, he has a mustache. Ted wants to be a successful architect and either marry Robin or someone just like her. Barney wants nothing more than to keep bringing new girls to meet his friends who won't last past the first date. The end of "Trilogy Time" sees a flash forward to a happier time for Ted, though ... in that we meet his baby daughter Penny, giving audiences a taste of Ted's actual future.

The Season 3 episode "Sandcastles in the Sand" combines two of the best elements of "How I Met Your Mother" — the romance between Robin and Barney, and Robin's time as a teenage pop star — and features an incredible guest turn from James van der Beek. When Robin's former flame Simon (van der Beek) comes to New York, she's incredibly nervous about seeing him again; he turns out to be a schlubby loser, but because Robin is still infatuated with him, she can't see past that fact. As she moons over the absolutely useless Simon, Marshall discusses a concept he's dubbed "revertigo," which is where you revert back to a different version of yourself when you're around specific people (and uses Lily's college friend Michelle, played by Ryan Michelle Bathe, as a prime example).

The highlight of "Sandcastles in the Sand," though, is the music video that gives the episode its title. After a lot of badgering and being rejected by Simon — for the same girl he ditched her for years prior, in fact — Robin relents and lets Barney watch the music video for the power ballad, which features Simon. When the two start kissing on Robin's couch, though, it sets up a big future for this pair.

Even when it's at its silliest, "How I Met Your Mother" is extremely good at highlighting common human experiences and making them incredibly entertaining, which is precisely what happens in the Season 3 episode "Spoiler Alert." When Ted starts dating a new girl named Cathy (Lindsay Price), he thinks she's perfect ... but after he brings her to dinner with the whole gang, they break the spell by telling Ted that she talks way, way too much. (The way they show Ted experience this realization — and a gag they use throughout the episode — is a sound effect of glass breaking to show that his worldview has been shattered.) 

That's when the whole gang realizes all of their own annoying habits: Robin uses words wrong, Ted won't stop correcting people, Lily chews loudly, Marshall sings made-up ditties while doing mundane tasks like laundry, and Barney? Well, Barney has a laundry list of problems that he brushes off. During this airing of grievances, though, Marshall, who's waiting to find out if he passed the New York bar exam, realizes his password is hidden in one of his made-up songs ... and finds out, amongst his friends, that he's going to become a lawyer. "Spoiler Alert" isn't just relatable and funny, but incredibly sweet as Ted concludes that you can forgive people's small flaws when you really love them.

"How I Met Your Mother" is available to stream on Hulu.