Quick spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother coming up after the jump:
There wasn’t much to comment on in most of last night’s HIMYM; I enjoyed the subplot about Marshall’s charts addiction (though shame on the props department for mispelling “Fillmore,” which also kind of ruins the joke), but as I sit here this morning, I’m having a hard time even remembering the other storylines.
Then there was that last second.
I still tend to think that there’s too much evidence that Stella is not The Mother; for instance, there’s the older daughter not accounted for in any of the Bob Saget voiceovers. More likely that Ted’s meeting Stella again leads him to meet The Mother. But I’m not even completely convinced that we are that close to ID’ing her.
Yes, we heard that Ted’s turning left instead of right was a key decision, without which he never would have met his destiny. But the entire show has told us that everything he has done, for years, has led him to the point where he met The Mother. Maybe Stella is The Mom; maybe she’ll introduce him to The Mom next week; maybe it’ll take years. We simply don’t know how long the chain is from the butterfly’s wings to the rainstorm.
Nor do I really care. I’m not sure that viewers of the show really care that much about how the title question is answered, though maybe that’s just me. I do care, though, if we get one fake-out after another, bringing our attention to this question but not resolving it. It might be a more interesting move simply to pair Ted up with The Mother, rip that Band-Aid off, and let the series move ahead from there.
If The Mother is cast well enough, it might be more interesting to dispose of the question and instead show how their relationship develops. My interest could increase exponentially. I have a chart of it lying around here somewhere.