The 5 Worst Episodes Of How I Met Your Mother, Ranked

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There are 208 episodes of the mystery box-lite CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother," so from a sheer mathematical standpoint, they can't all be winners. The long, meandering story of Ted Mosby's (Josh Radnor) quest for love — during which he's flanked by best friends Lily Aldrin (Alison Hannigan), Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel), Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris), and Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders) — spans nine seasons and many, many years in Ted's life, all of which is narrated in retrospect by an older Ted (the voice of Bob Saget), and not every moment is particularly great. (The ninth and final season is particularly and egregiously bad, but I'll circle back to that before long.)

Alongside all-star episodes of "How I Met Your Mother" like "Slap Bet" (where we find about Robin's past as a Canadian teen pop star), "How I Met Everyone Else" (which presents increasingly silly origin stories of Ted's friendships), "Swarley" (where Barney gets a whole new name), and "Spoiler Alert" (where the gang comes face to face with their most irritating quirks and qualities), there are some episodes that firmly belong in this show's hall of shame. From simply stupid entries to a truly terrible series finale, here are the five worst episodes of "How I Met Your Mother" ranked.

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"Zoo or False" isn't quite as horrible as some of the other entries on this list, but it is really, really, incredibly stupid. This season 5 episode of the sitcom doesn't have a whole lot to do with the show's overall plot, choosing to use the show's framework — that is, the older Ted's narration as he tells his children how he met their mother in a very roundabout way — to show how stories can bend and change over time. Some episodes, like the previously mentioned "How I Met Everyone Else," make this into a fun, engaging exercise. "Zoo or False" simply does not.

The whole deal with "Zoo or False" is that Marshall tells the whole gang that he was mugged at gunpoint earlier that day, sending Lily into an absolute panic where she wants to buy a gun of her own. Upset by this idea, Marshall pivots and says that while he's embarrassed to admit it, there was no human mugger and no gun; he was actually mugged by a monkey without a gun. As he tells Ted, he wasn't mugged by a zoo monkey when he got too close to a cage at the zoo, but he was mugged by a guy with a gun and doesn't want to freak Lily out. When Robin asks Marshall to come on her morning show and tell the story of the monkey-mugging, he doesn't want to lie on camera, and in the end, Ted says nobody ever found out the truth about Marshall's mugging. This episode just sucks! It's not very funny, the entire premise relies on poor Jason Segel performing a ton of lackluster slapstick, and it doesn't even get a good resolution. Skip this in your rewatch.

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This season 9 episode of "How I Met Your Mother" is told entirely in rhyme, so that should immediately explain why it ended up on this list; not even the presence of Tony-winning actor and writer Lin-Manuel Miranda could possibly improve the clunker that is "Bedtime Stories." Rumors have swirled for a long time that the reason Jason Segel spent the first part of season 9 separated from the rest of the cast had to do with a scheduling conflict, but whatever the reason, leaving Marshall on his own for such a long time stunk — and even though "Bedtime Stories" puts Marshall and his infant son Marvin closer to Lily, Barney, Ted, and Robin, we have to endure it first.

Here's the gist: Marshall tells Marvin stories about the gang to calm them down aided by Gus (Miranda), a guy also aboard Marshall's bus to the fictional town of Farhampton (who happens to be a rapper). This was way before Miranda's opus "Hamilton" premiered at the Public Theater in New York, so while hardcore musical theater lovers would have recognized him from "In the Heights," a lot of viewers were probably left scratching their heads — and more to the point, "Bedtime Stories" is a complete filler that accomplishes nothing narratively. Plus, the rhyming is painfully annoying.

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I'm sorry to say this, but any episode of "How I Met Your Mother" that centers around Chris Elliott — as Lily's estranged dad Mickey Aldrin — is sort of a dud, and that's especially true for "The Burning Beekeeper," a season 7 clunker that also features a guest turn from Martin Short. (Not even Short, game as he is to do literally anything, can turn this whole ordeal around.) "How I Met Your Mother" did take an impressive number of big swings for a sitcom that aired on CBS, and using "The Burning Beekeeper" to chronicle various disasters that happen room by room at Lily and Marshall's housewarming party is, at the very least, a clever thought. It doesn't work, though. (The episode isn't helped, by the way, by the fact that it takes place during a storyline where Marshall and Lily move to the suburbs for a little while; you know how I feel about splitting up the gang.) 

The entire episode takes place over a span of five chaotic and disastrous minutes, and while this gambit isn't quite as stupid as the fact that "How I Met Your Mother's" ninth and final season takes place over a single weekend, it's still pretty bad! Basically, Lily and Marshall are trying to throw a party without incident, impress Marshall's new eco-conscious boss Garrison Cootes (Short), and also, there's a guy in a beekeeper suit who's on fire, hence the title. (The guy is Mickey.) I could not stand the conceit or the execution of "The Burning Beekeeper" when I watched the episode live, and in a rewatch, I can confirm it's still unbelievably grating.

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This episode of "How I Met Your Mother" is really racist. That's why it earns the second-place spot on this list — to say nothing of the fact that it takes one of the show's best running gags, the "slap bet," and ruins its entire legacy with the season 9 stinker "Slapsgiving 3: Slappapointment in Slapmarra."

The slap bet originates in the season 2 episode "Slap Bet," where Barney and Marshall make a bet over Robin's past — Barney is certain that she performed in adult films because he's a complete pervert, and Marshall thinks she's secretly still married to someone who's not Ted — and when it turns out that she was a teenage pop star in Canada, Marshall basically wins the bet by default. This allows Marshall to dole out a series of slaps unto Barney in perpetuity, leaving Barney clueless as to when these slaps will arrive. This idea is incredible and leads to some unbelievably funny moments earlier in the series, but in "Slapsgiving 3," we're forced to watch as Marshall goes through a lot of really offensive "kung-fu training" in order to complete his mission of slapping. Robin and Lily play characters named Red Bird and White Lily, respectively, which feels gross, but the worst aspect is definitely Ted's Fu-Manchu mustache (which really feels like "yellowface"). 

During a Reddit AMA in 2013, Carter Bays, one of the show's creators, was asked if he had any regrets about the series, and he was quite blunt: "I regret the unfortunate moments of cultural appropriation in 'Slapsgiving 3.' There are things about that episode I really loved — the storytelling structure, Boyz 2 Men, the opening slow motion shot, all the slapping — but I think we all regret Ted's Fu Manchu mustache very, very much." At least he gets it.

Much has been written about why the series finale of "How I Met Your Mother," the two-part episode titled "Last Forever," absolutely stinks ... and if I got into every single detail about this complete and utter letdown of a finale, I'd ramble for just as long as the Bob Saget version of Ted talked at his poor kids. The bottom line is that because Carter Bays and Craig Thomas made a decision back in the show's second season — namely, that Ted would end up with Robin even though she is pointedly not the mother — the finale took the entire premise of the show and threw it in the trash just so Ted could show up at Robin's door again with that stupid blue French horn (the same one he brought her in the pilot as a romantic gesture).

Barney and Robin's wedding took up the entirety of season 9, and early in the finale, we find out that they're already divorced — making the entire season's arc a complete waste of time. Lily and Marshall barely even get a storyline in the finale except that Lily is pregnant again. Then there's the Mother, Tracy McCormick, played winningly by Cristin Milioti — who does at least get a standout episode in season 9 titled "How Your Mother Met Me" — who unceremoniously dies in a montage sequence just so Ted can get back together with his ex-girlfriend. The whole endeavor stinks to high heaven, and years later, fans still definitely wish that Bays and Thomas had changed course; there's even an alternate ending out there that simply ends when Ted and the mother meet, so we can all pretend that's the real one.

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