How We Kissed The Blarney Stone | S3E12 "No Tomorrow"

In the spring of 2008, Josh Radnor got punched in the face twice outside a bar in Columbus, Ohio. He was drunk, trying to sleep with a nursing student named Sarah who had a boyfriend. The boyfriend was waiting in the parking lot. Radnor’s nose swelled up, his mother had to apply makeup under his eye for a fundraising event he was co-emceeing with his dad, and his father put a bag of frozen peas on his face. Months later, the cast shot an episode called “No Tomorrow,” in which Ted Mosby wakes up with a black eye after a night of identical moral chaos. Radnor watched the scene and realized: he had been living the episode before the writers wrote it.

“No Tomorrow” was the first episode aired after a three-month Writers Guild strike, and the production team had to shoot and produce nine episodes in roughly ten and a half weeks. Craig Thomas calls it “the hardest we’ve ever worked in our lives.” The episode is built around a philosophical experiment: Barney convinces Ted that St. Patrick’s Day is the last night of existence, so karma and consequences do not apply. They act accordingly—abandoning women at a bar, running up a massive tab, and Ted making out with a married woman. The premise is a rebellion against the show’s own moral architecture. “The whole idea of there’s no tomorrow is almost against the philosophy of the whole series,” Thomas says. “The series is there is a tomor