what does the countdown mean in how i met your mother
Bad News (How I Met Your Mother) Throughout the episode, numbers appear on ordinary objects counting down from 50 to 1. This is a countdown from the beginning of the episode to the eventual bad news, which is told right after the "1" is shown. As the final scene of the episode closes, a parking meter is in the background displaying a red 'expired' state. The countdown was an idea taken from the 1988 film Drowning by Numbers; through the course of that film, the numbers 1 to 100 appear in order, sometimes seen in the background, and sometimes spoken by the film's characters.[3] According to Bays, the countdown was used to give an early signal to the audience that something big was about to happen at the end of the episode.[2]