Use stream of consciousness to answer the following. 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. 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.

Answer this question based on the passage: what does the countdown mean in how i met your mother?
To answer the above question, the relevant sentence is: 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. Final answer: an early signal to the audience that something big was about to happen at the end of the episode.