How I Met Your Mother S03E17 – The Goat

How I Met Your Mother S03E17 – The Goat

Lily brings a goat home from school. Ted celebrates his 30th birthday. Barney and Robin deal with the repercussions from their night together. Barney hires Marshall to help him find a loophole in The Bro Code.

The episode begins with the aftermath of the events of Sandcastles in the Sand. Barney and Robin are in bed together. Robin proposes that they pretend their tryst never happened, and Barney agrees. However, Barney feels quite awkward and uncomfortable around Ted at MacLaren's later in the day. Hoping to find an excuse for his and Robin's actions, Barney seeks out Marshall to help him find a loophole in the Bro Code, a document very important to Barney's life as a bro (including articles placing bros before hoes, banning bros from hooking up with each other's mothers, and banning eye-contact between bros during a Devil's Three-way). Allegedly written by Barnabas Stinson in the 18th century when Benjamin Franklin and George Washington were too busy to write it themselves, the Bro Code proves to be a very tight document that Ted has followed flawlessly and Barney fails in finding a loophole. Though she seems fine with it at first, Robin finds the secret even harder to keep than Barney and eventually admits to Ted that she and Barney slept together. That night, when Barney picks up Ted in a limo to take him to Ted's 30th birthday party, an outraged Ted yells at Barney, telling him how wrong it was to sleep with his best friend's ex-girlfriend and that Barney ahs always tired to use Bro code against Ted but didn't even have the decency to stand by it and that he is the bad Bro and that he always thought hat he was the limit to Barneys ridiculous antics. Ted ends his rant by telling Barney that he not only does not want to be bros anymore, but also does not want to be his friend anymore.

Meanwhile, Lily rescues a goat named Missy when a farmer (played by Alan Fudge) brings it to her kindergarten class and horrifies her students by going into great detail about what will happen to Missy when she visits the butcher. Lily plans to give the goat away to animal control, but becomes attached to the goat while waiting for Ted to arrive at his birthday party. Future Ted reveals at the end of the episode, after hinting at the destruction the goat would do, that he had the story wrong: Everything involving the goat actually takes place during his 31st birthday, at which point — Future Ted also reveals — Robin is living in the apartment.