“Barney also wants to have kids in a very hypothetical sense…we have to call Barney out on whether he really wants to have kids,” Thomas said. “We don’t look at that as a singular deal breaker…Deep down, Barney doesn’t really know what he wants.”
“And that’s not to take anything away from what Robin and Barney have, because they’re so in love” Bays added. “They’ve sort of been the clearing house for all of us and our romantic dysfunctions and I think they’re doomed as a relationship [right now] in some ways because they’re so messed up, but I think part of the show is them taking themselves apart and rebuilding themselves. Especially with Barney, but also with Robin this season, we’re seeing them learn how to move past everything that has screwed them up in the past to maybe make this work for real.”
Of course, there’s also the matter of Robin’s career ambitions, which in the past have taken her away from New York.
“We’re going to see her career start to take off in a new way,” Thomas noted. “She was always a career girl, and she’s going to start to go that way [again]. There’s going to be a new romantic interest thrown into Barney’s world in the form of Becki Newton. So we’re going to watch them go into different directions for a little while, but those two actors and those two characters have this huge, crazy chemistry that I can’t say we’re done exploring. They inform each others’ lives in enormous ways. We’ll see more of that…before the series is done, we’ll have to address that more. It broke Barney’s heart that she chose Kevin that night. It could have gone either way and she chose Kevin, and he’s still been hurting from that. We’re not going to forget about that.”
