Kids: always wear your seat belt! / Eric McCandless/CBS
SPOILER ALERT: Before you break the date-time continuum by reading this post, watch last night’s How I Met Your Mother.
So… is she or isn’t she?
I don’t know, but I sort of wish HIMYM would just hurry up and settle the question of whether Stella is The Mother already. Not because I’m so anxious to know, but because the more the show calls attention to the finding-the-mother conceit, the more distracted I get. The way I see it, the mystery was a hook to draw viewers (and CBS) to a quirky relationship comedy. I’m fine with it as an occasional background question, but the more it’s foregrounded, the more it seems like a gimmick that gets in the way of the characters’ stories.
In any case, I suspect that, with Ted pulling out a ring, it will be some time until we find out definitively. (Quite some time if the earlier hint that Ted and Robin are back together in a year, in time for the Goat Incident, holds true.) But on the bright side, it appears that we have Barney back in the fold. If he had to get hit by a bus to make that happen, why so be it! Drop a bomb on him if necessary, just make it happen!
Anyway, we have a long summer ahead of us, so let the debate begin as to whether Stella is, or isn’t, the Mother, and if so, how many seasons until we find out. Does HIMYM need to pick an end date like Lost so it can work out its endgame?
And now a brief hail of bullets in honor of the strike-shortened season…
* …speaking of which, this episode did have a bit of the feeling of strike compression about it—the need to break up and un-break up Ted and Stella and to force the reconciliation with Barney. On the other hand, if Barney would have been solo even longer without the strike, consider that an unintended benefit.
* And speaking of Barney, I don’t know how well everyone liked his and Robin’s fling, but I’m glad to see we’re not done with that story—the one-time-and-forget-about-it approach would have been very un-HIMYM.
* Not the funniest of HIMYMs, but I liked the overwrought rush-to-the-hospital scene, followed by Ted happily eating Jell-O; Marshall’s Kumar-like moment at customs returning from Amsterdam (“Float on through, brother!”); and Barney’s injured insistence on following through with his high-five.
* It’s a fine line with Robin and the Canada jokes. Bruce Springsteen as “the American Bryan Adams”? Beautiful. The dog named “Sir Scratchewan”? Screams, “Remember! I’m Canadian!” a little too loudly. (The story about the dog’s “miracle” surgery changing him into a turtle, though—classic HIMYM.) Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go feed my cat, New Hampshpurr.
