How he finally met the mother (Season 9)

This season has been surprisingly good. At first I thought having the entire season at the wedding would be uneventful, but they have kept it interesting.

Also, if I were Ted, I would have taken the blonde. She was pretty cute.

 

Blonde was bad news. Ultra-religious and seriously anti-vampire.

 

I never thought Ted and Robin were a good match, so I don't have this problem.

 

Okay, Trilogy Time aired 2012. At this point in the HIMYM timeline, we're sitting right at two years before Ted appears, baby in tow. So conceivably, Ted has the kid at some point in (I'm guessing) early 2015. The end scene said "not 2 years later". So we don't have an official date that he popped the question. For all we know, it was one year later, right after the earlier scene with Ted and the Mother. So if he asks in May 2014, they get married later that summer (because we all know Ted has his wedding planned out in his head, right down to the china pattern) and 10 months later, hello, baby.

It's a very tight timeline but not implausible.

Here's a huge blog post about it and some theories.

As for the talk about wanting more time with Ted and the Mother before seeing the proposal...this whole show is supposed to be about telling it to Ted's kids. They know how amazing their mom is and how their parents are together. So telling their story a bit out of order doesn't bother me.

 

See, that's where this show loses me. I can buy telling your kids a super-long story about how you and their mom got together. And I can buy talking about all the failures before that but in no way do you drag your kids through this long a story, going into great lengths about previous, ultimately worthless relationships, and then end it with a "And then I met your mother."
The more believable approach would have been if Ted met the mother at the end of last season and this entire year was about nothing but them getting together and then the series finale was Ted and the Mother's wedding. From the premise of this show, that a dad is telling a story to his kids, that would have made the most sense.
As it is, though, the writers here seem to have painted themselves into a corner by creating an interesting but ultimately flawed premise that they don't know how to get away from in order to write an emotionally satisfying end that honors and pays off the time viewers invested. It's so much like Lost, it's not even funny.
And I'm sure ultimately the same people who tried to defend Lost--by saying the "answers" didn't matter and the show was about the characters--will be the same one insisting this show delivered on it's ultimate promise when, deep down, objective viewers can't help but wonder how much better it could have been.

 

I think a full season of getting to know the Mother would have been a train wreck.

 

It could have been awful.

I think the concept of using the wedding weekend as a pivot for flash forwards and typical HIMYM flashbacks is an interesting idea. My issues are: 1) the Marshall drive has been boring (and I don't like the Marshall not telling Lily about the job as a judge); 2) the need for the wedding crisis each episode makes me hate the idea of Barney and Robin as a couple; and 3) so far, and it is early, the mother has been in the show far too little.

Maybe they will build momentum and stick the landing. Maybe a shorter season would have made more sense. But right now, it isn't working for me.

 

How's that? If we're to believe that this is the girl of Ted's dreams and we're to believe that she's as awesome as he says she is--or, at the least that she's worth telling such a long story about--than more time with her should have been awesome. As stated above, we sat through half-seasons with awful women knowing the story was going nowhere and at times it was fun. Just in the little we've seen of the mother thus far, she seems awesome. It would have been great to see her integrated into the group rather than just assume she's as great as the writers tell us she is.

 

Do you think they would have met your standards?

I've never seen this show as being about the mother as much as about the adventure to find her. I prefer this tack.

 

The whole "story of how he met the mother" thing is a cute gimmick. But there's a continuum that runs from "Slavishly devote yourself to the gimmick" through "grow beyond the gimmick and ignore it completely." No matter where the show settled on that continuum, there would have been people complaining that they clearly should have picked a different point.

 

The more I think about it, the more I think the writers have a swerve coming up for Ted and the future Mrs. Ted Mosby.

I just don't know what it is but my theory is that the mother is dead and the whole story is told before they have to get ready for the funeral. Boom, sad.

And wasn't the Segel in a car stuff, a way to get him in the episodes but not have him on set as he was busy with other projects?

I thought I had read that but I'm probably confused.

 

I read somewhere that he was filming a movie in Boston during the summer, while they were doing the first half of the season.