I never watch ‘How I Met Your Mother’.
I just never got into the habit of a half hour donation of my time to the show.
But I finally saw an episode because my nephew Stu thought that I would like it, and it turns out that he was right.
The episode was a rerun that aired a few years ago, and it was about one of the character’s first car.
It was a 1985 Pontiac Fiero that the character in the show inherited from an older brother; a familiar plot line for me from real life. I am not certain of the guy’s name or role in the show, but I do know that he wasn’t the Doogie Howser guy.
The Fiero was the guy’s first car and it had served him loyally and well for many years. He had bridged the gap between adolescence and adulthood behind the wheel of the Fiero. He had celebrated milestones and misadventures in the car, and now he was poised to break the 200,000 mile barrier in the car.
The show had been a series of anecdotes from the main characters about their experiences with the car. The producers were clever enough to include an odometer at the bottom of the screen to mark the occasions.
Doogie Howser’s experience in the Fiero was limited to a clumsy sequence in which he had an exaggerated incompetent driving episode. That was a very weak part of the half hour.
A funny running gag in the episode was a stuck cassette tape that played only ‘500 Miles’ by The Proclaimers over the entire life of the car in the show. Anybody who has owned an ancient cassette or eight- track device will laugh at that concept.
Fate and the writer have dealt the Fiero a very bad hand as it approaches the 200 grand mark on the odometer- the owner wrecks the car in typical sit-com complication fashion. So the episode is a eulogy for the Fiero as the owner faces a tough decision to fix or crush the car. He crushes it after a fair amount of soul-searching.
That bad decision is the main reason that this episode eventually crashes and burns for car guys. He was looking at about 2 grand to fix the car and he decided to pass up the chance to hold onto a vital car from his past. There is absolutely no way that a real car guy would crush his first car if an opportunity to save it for 2000 bucks was available to him.
And if he didn’t have 2 large, he would hold onto the car until he could fix it. That is the car guy way. The writer did a great job of assembling the life experiences found in our first cars, but he failed to connect the dots on the final solution when he had the car crushed for beer money.
That is too cold an ending for car guys. It was the automotive equivalent of shooting Old Yeller and then throwing him on the BBQ.
But the reasons for attaching to our first car were well-scripted by the writer- he just has to learn a lot more about car guy/car relationships for his next script.
Jim Sutherland
More real life car stories with happier endings at https://www.mystarcollectorcar.com/2-features/stories.html
