S0WE26 - Porch Test

"Porch Test" is the twenty-sixth episode of the W-Series. Days after the citywide advisory of "The Call" has been reduced to a single buried paragraph in the newspaper, a journalist telephones ZRS asking for Pawbert. She has spent months reporting on the Vladifrostok reconstruction, and three public documents keep returning the same four names to her.

Synopsis

Robin Scherbatsky of World Wide News calls ZRS for Pawbert. Three public documents have led her to the pack: a Department of External Relations delegation notice, a Vladifrostok newspaper clipping that invented a rank for Nick, and a culture committee panel program that seated the invented rank beside Vladifrostok's Director of Reconstruction. The pack argues it out in the kitchen, Judy deciding it on the grounds that she would rather it be someone who asked first, and Pawbert reveals that he has already had the sitting cleared by the department, ZSI and the ZPD. Luther sets the terms: one sitting, scope agreed before the recording starts, an absolute right of refusal. On Friday they drive out to MacLaren's, a below-street-level pub in Gnu York. Robin lays out her documents and her procedure, naming what she can publish without them, what her reporting already carries, and the redacted interval she will not print, then asks the single question she came with. Pawbert answers that the other three went on the delegation for the crisis response and he went for the debt. Luther refuses a question about the lighthouse and Robin transcribes the refusal by paw. Pawbert then volunteers what ZSI has never attributed and puts on the record that he activated the failsafe. Robin promises to telephone again when the crisis records declassify. Her friends arrive, the evening runs long, and the pack takes the night home to the garden room.

Plot

The city has lost interest in its own near miss by the middle of the week, and Saturday's advisory now occupies one buried paragraph under a headline about a procurement audit. Nick reads the official explanation out over the kitchen table, using the voice he keeps for institutional prose, Judy works a case file across from him, and Luther puts away the last of the dishes. Pawbert arrives home off the ZTA without taking his coat off, and reports that a journalist telephoned ZRS asking for him: Robin Scherbatsky of World Wide News, Gnu York bureau, several months into a story about what the Vladifrostok reconstruction money has actually bought. Three public documents carried her from that story to his front desk. The Department of External Relations published a delegation notice listing a couple of dozen names, four of which belong to the pack. The Novaya Gazette then described Nick as a senior strategic advisor and key architect of the city's crisis response, a rank nobody holds; when Robin telephoned Precinct 1 to verify it, a sergeant laughed at her. The culture committee's own panel program carried the same nonexistent title on a genuine speaker list, seated beside Vladifrostok's Director of Reconstruction. Nick's position is that he accepted a compliment from an arctic fox at a party. Judy's is that his manners have put a reporter on the pack.

Luther objects that everything worth asking about is classified, and that agreeing to talk shows a journalist exactly where the boundary runs. Judy has no appetite for either answer, which she takes as evidence she is weighing it honestly, and Pawbert supplies the argument for yes: somebody is going to write this story, cautious official language invites outsiders to fill the blanks for themselves, and the next journalist will not ask first. Judy decides it on that basis, preferring the one who called. Pawbert then reveals that he telephoned Costa's office before leaving work, that the department and ZSI signed off on the sitting that afternoon, and that Costa's staff reached Precinct 1 while he was still on the line. Nick objects to being told last and is answered that the clearances came first so the telling would not be a proposal. Luther sits down and negotiates instead: a single sitting, the scope fixed before recording begins, and an absolute right of refusal. Robin has already offered a draft ahead of publication, and she wants her own ground rather than a conference room, on the grounds that formal rooms produce polite dishonesty. Luther names Friday.

On the drive the city changes character around them before anybody remarks on it, the avenues narrowing and the brickwork outliving the businesses renting space behind it. Pawbert's old commute arrives block by block: the far staircase out of Whitfield station, the bodega with its lettering done by paw, a laundromat that kept late hours, and the steam-fogged pizza window that fed him for a dollar ninety-nine on class days. Purple banners appear on the lampposts a few blocks north where Gnu York University starts, and that is not where they are going tonight. MacLaren's is down a handful of steps from the sidewalk, a green sign above them and the door standing open to the evening.

Robin has a back table and stands to meet them. She acknowledges that the vote was not unanimous, accepts Luther's condition without haggling, and puts the recorder in plain view. Then, before asking anything at all, she deals out three documents and explains her own procedure. The first category is material she can publish with no help from them: the climate infrastructure Vladifrostok bought from the Lynxley company failed and killed mammals, Icener is dead, Zootopia's own crisis finished at Reptile Ravine, and a confirmed failsafe activation locked him out of the weather walls. The second is what her reporting already carries: the four were no ceremonial addition to a delegation but worked as a unit, and an unnamed lynx and wolf are placed near the sealed ground by the lighthouse. The third is the interval between, a hole in a log flanked by redactions, which she will not print because she could not know what she was printing. The one thing she wants from them is an explanation for four names recurring across three unconnected places.

Pawbert answers, and the others let him. Nobody appoints a social worker to a diplomatic delegation on his professional qualifications; the department sent a Lynxley to a city his family wrecked, because the name was the only thing Zootopia had that Vladifrostok could not get elsewhere. The other three went for the crisis response. He went for the debt. Robin follows with what the grid engineers gave her: the original specifications, tolerances selected rather than economized, and a system no contractor outside the family could repair. Pawbert contests none of it. His childhood, he tells her, contained money and no explanation of the money, and he found out what Vladifrostok meant while somebody who had found out earlier was dismantling Zootopia over it. The name and everything it bought him are not conditional on what he knew. Whether an apology is his to offer is not for him to decide. The work he does now is what he has.

Judy's account is that they worked together, that she can describe her own actions and observations, and that she cannot supply who gave the orders or where the intelligence came from. Robin turns to Luther with a single question and an advance offer to let him refuse it: was he held with his husband inside the restricted ground. He refuses, and Robin transcribes the refusal in full by paw, which tells Pawbert it will appear in print. She then changes subject with no transition at all, and the readiness with which she drops it completes what Luther's condition began. The interview becomes shop talk about the reconstruction, aid announced against aid delivered and the blocks still off the grid, with her questions aimed at crews and trained paws instead of budgets, and Judy stops sounding like a witness.

Pawbert speaks before Robin can check her recording level, and tells her to ask about the failsafe. She notes that his husband has just closed off the ground it sits on; he answers that the ground is Luther's and the code is not. Luther goes still and leaves it to him. Robin asks whether he knows the identity ZSI has never released, and he answers that it was him, on the record. His stated reason is that a piece naming him only over the contracts leaves his family's construction as the whole account, and that one member of that family eventually put the machinery to its proper use. Robin shuts the notebook and switches the recorder off. She will send a draft to be checked for accuracy rather than approved, refusals stay out, and the hole stays a hole. The conclusion she has arrived at pairs the Lynxley who built what destroyed Vladifrostok with the Lynxley who triggered what preserved Zootopia. Stowing the documents, she adds that the crisis records sit on a declassification timetable, and that she intends to telephone again the day they open.

By then the table has already relaxed into an evening. Robin's phone lights up beside her drink with two messages stacked on the screen, one announcing that a friend is on his way and one from a contact she dismisses unread. Her friends never check ahead, she says, and the booth will stretch; Luther authorizes one round. Barney comes through the door first, in a suit on a weekday, and places Nick's shirt as a discontinued limited-run Furioni before he has finished placing Nick. The two of them recognize each other immediately. Nick observes that Barney dresses like a mammal about to sell him something, and Barney accepts the description with the tense corrected. Marshall Eriksen, Lily Aldrin and Ted Mosby arrive behind him, and the seating sorts itself out unassigned. Asked how he and Judy came about, Nick says she almost arrested him, which prompts Barney to declare the whole table a product of accident; Marshall disputes that with the room number he handed Lily at orientation. Ted insists she had come looking for him, Lily informs him he has always remembered it wrong, and Barney silently recites the closing lines along with them.

The bartender pushes a second table up against the first unprompted. Marshall, in the corner, works backwards from how carefully Robin has handled the table all night to the mammal who must have refused her, and remarks that a reporter who argues has not got the story yet. He describes his own work, environmental remediation, largely litigation against city agencies for records they are already obliged to hand over, and Luther gives him the method he uses from a chair between two agencies who each assume the other holds the files: request the retention schedule first, put it on the docket, then ask for documents in the schedule's own terminology. Marshall rates that the best professional advice he has ever been given. Further down, Barney and Nick argue over whether everyone reads a room, until Judy asks about the room's consent and Barney concedes aloud, which pleases him more than a win would have. Nick then calls his own four a pack without noticing he has done it. Lily surveys her own table of two snow leopards, a leopard and a lion, Marshall offers "pride," and Lily adopts it.

Lily asks what Pawbert does for a living, and reentry work and kindergarten prove to be one job under two names: a client weeping three quarters of an hour over a transit card that was never the issue, a collapse over the wrong crayon that was never about crayons. Ted has been drawing throughout. He asks where the pack lives, takes in stone and timber, three floors and a later addition, and produces the mansion on a napkin in a dark bar, having deduced from the roofline that the wing was never in the original plan. He puts it on the wrong side, is corrected by somebody who lives there, argues briefly that occupancy is not the same as orientation, and restarts on the back. As he draws he describes the house he has kept redrawing since school, whose roof and stair change while the front does not: broad steps, with more chairs standing on them than anybody would ever have to fetch. Lily asks leave to explain what she once did with those steps. She imagines the whole table grown old with every chair still occupied, and each time Ted produced somebody new she placed her in the image and assessed it honestly. She declines to call the practice kind, since it cost Ted a relationship and once involved planting an earring of Robin's in his bed, but she was frightened they would all become mammals who had once known each other, so she built a test and ran it on strangers who had never agreed to it, and she would do it again. She tells Pawbert his expression is the one her class wears when they have the answer and have not settled whether to put a paw up. He leaves his where it is.

One round runs to one and a half. The pack leaves at the night's high point, with Lily's number added to a corner of Ted's napkin and the napkin folded into Pawbert's paw, and Robin keeping hold of that paw a moment longer to put the draft at two weeks or three. Outside, Pawbert stops beneath a green sign he spent years walking past en route to somewhere else. At home the four of them pass the key hooks without stopping and halt instead in the garden room, the one they normally only cross to reach the patio: Luther on the broad ledge beneath the rear windows, Pawbert on the floor at his shoulder, Nick on the ottoman with Judy on its arm, and the Meadowlands sky deepening from blue to violet behind the glass. Pawbert offers them Lily's test, and then his own revision of it, that the question is not who sits beside you but who remains in the frame after everything else has ended. Nobody replies. They look at one another instead, and Nick identifies why none of them can answer it honestly: not one of them had to imagine anything. Luther's paw crosses the gap and covers Pawbert's, and the last light of the day finds both rings together.

Key Moments

• A journalist working the Vladifrostok reconstruction telephones ZRS and asks for Pawbert by name
• Three public documents lead Robin to the pack, one of them the fake rank Nick accepted in Vladifrostok
• Judy decides the argument in favor of the journalist who asked first
• Pawbert reveals that he cleared the sitting through Costa's office before bringing it home
• Luther sets the terms: one sitting, scope agreed in advance, and an absolute right of refusal
• Pawbert passes the pizza window and the university on the drive through the neighborhood he commuted into as a student
• Robin deals out three documents and explains her procedure before asking anything
• Pawbert answers the delegation question with the debt, and contests nothing about the Lynxley contracts
• Luther refuses the lighthouse question and Robin transcribes the refusal by paw
• Pawbert volunteers the failsafe unprompted and puts his own activation on the record
• Robin stops recording, states the conclusion her piece has reached, and books the call she will make at declassification
• Robin's friends arrive and the two tables are pushed together
• Marshall gets a records-law method out of Luther and rates it the best advice of his career
• Nick calls his own four a pack without noticing, Marshall offers "pride," and Lily adopts it
• Ted draws the mansion on a napkin and puts the guest wing on the wrong side
• Lily explains the test she once ran on Ted's dates, and refuses to call it kind
• Lily's number goes into a corner of Ted's napkin and the napkin goes home with Pawbert
• Pawbert stops beneath the green sign he had spent years walking past
• The pack halts in the garden room for the first time instead of crossing it
• Pawbert revises the test to who remains in the frame after everything else has ended, and gets no answer

Key Lines

Characters Introduced

Locations

• Pawthorne Mansion — The kitchen for the opening, and the garden room for the close: the glass wall onto the grounds, the broad ledge beneath the rear windows, and the ottoman nobody has found another place for
• Gnu York — The neighborhood Pawbert commuted into as a student; Whitfield station, the hand-lettered bodega, a late-opening laundromat, and the steam-fogged pizza window that fed him on class days
• MacLaren's — Below street level beneath a green sign, low-ceilinged and long unchanged; the back table for the interview and two tables joined afterward (first appearance)
• Gnu York University — Passed on the drive in, announced by the purple banners on the lampposts
• Precinct 1 — Where Robin telephoned to verify a rank that does not exist, and where Costa's staff called before Pawbert was off the line

Items

• Ted's napkin — The mansion drawn from a spoken description in a dark bar, guest wing on the wrong side, redrawn on the back; Lily's number is added to a corner at the goodbye and Pawbert takes it home (first appearance)
• Robin's three documents — The delegation notice, the Novaya Gazette clipping and the panel program, dealt onto the table before she asks anything and stowed at the end
• Robin's recorder and notebook — The recorder sits in plain view; the refusal is transcribed by paw; both are put away before she states her conclusion
• Robin's article — In progress, offscreen; a draft is promised to the pack to be checked for accuracy rather than approved
• The wedding rings — The closing image, both found by the last light of the day at once

End Credit Song

"Heaven" (From 'How I Met Your Mother'), The Walkmen

The Walkmen's song closes How I Met Your Mother itself, playing out the 2014 series finale "Last Forever," which makes it the one cue this crossover could hardly avoid. What it carries into this episode is the group reading rather than the couple one. Lily's test asks who is still in the chairs when everything else is finished, and the song is about holding on to the mammals you already have as the years run on, rather than about any one pairing surviving them. The garden room ends before anyone answers out loud, and the cue answers for the reader what the four of them no longer have to say to each other.

Notes

• The pizza window Pawbert lived on as a student, at a dollar ninety-nine a slice, is Gnu York's version of New York's 99-cent slice, the below-street-level steam-window institution that feeds broke students. Nick calls the price a crime scene.
• Two messages are stacked on Robin's phone, and the one she dismisses without opening comes from a contact stored under the name FURY. Robin Scherbatsky's actress, Cobie Smulders, also plays Maria Hill in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which gives this Robin a Nick Fury in her contacts and a habit of ignoring him.