How he finally met the mother (Season 9)

Re-watch the part about her telling him you can't live in your old stories. That she's worried he'll be unable to make new stories.

Despite my sneering "I told ya so!" comment, I suspect what really happens is The Mom is diagnosed with something bad, but pulls through. So Ted in 2024 just thinks he's going to lose her.

 

But when paired with the mom's fear Ted will get stuck in his stories, I took it to mean she's dying.

 

According to Wikipedia, the Ted talk is happening in 2030, six years after the snowstorm at Farhampton.

 

Why would it be Ted getting choked up and his wife having to comfort him if it was her mother?

 

Because Ted is a big baby. Old theme there.

They definitely want us to think the mom is dying. The fact that it was such an obvious conclusion makes me think they are going another way.

 

I'm reminded of the naive Harry Potter fans who spiked the football on "Snape is Evil" after the sixth book.

It's a feint.

 

That would have explained it if he was the one to cry, but to actually have her comforting him even though it was her mother? Ted may be a douchebag, but that is a new level of douchbaggery, even for him.

 

They could definitely be trolling the mom is dead theories. Certainly not unprecedented for these writers to swerve

 

I *hope* that's it, because the mother dying is stupid and leaves major plot inconsistencies for all the reasons always brought up when fans put forward the theory.

 

Another thing about last night is it reminded me I don't like Stella, since she let her husband make that movie about Ted.

 

Definitely. Maybe that's why she and Ted worked for a little while. She's even more of a jerk than he is.

 

There have been a couple of lines through the show that make me believe the mom is still alive at the telling of this story. The one that comes to mind is how Ted describes the mother singing opera (or something along those lines) with English muffins using the present tense (I believe the line is "to this day, your mother's rendition of *some aria I'm not remembering* is one of the most hauntingly beautiful things I've ever heard.").
I'm wondering if he was crying over the loss of his mother who would have then missed his sister's wedding making the mother's line about a mom missing her daughter's wedding a reason for Ted to cry. I wonder if that is what led Ted to want to bolt to the train station where he meets mother, or I could just be over thinking this because I don't want mother to be dead.