The ninth and final season of “How I Met Your Mother” debuted with a special one-hour premiere Monday night on CBS.
How I Met Your Mother – “HIMYM” – follows the life of Ted Mosby and his four friends: Barney, Robin and married couple Lily and Marshall, living in New York City. The show is essentially a story within a story: Ted recounts to his kids in the year 2030 the long, detailed tale of how he met their mother.
The show begins with the time set to 11 a.m., 55 hours before Barney and Robin’s wedding. According to the show’s website, the entirety of season nine will be the final days before the wedding, in an effort to tie up loose strings for fans and finally get acquainted with Ted’s future wife, which has been the whole point of the show since the beginning.
Lily is the first one to meet Ted’s future wife and it was pretty hilarious to see the two future friends interact for the first time. Both women have an extremely similar sense of humor, which gets hopes up about how their relationship will grow in the future.
Another great ad-in was discovering a lot of nerdy connections that the “Mother” and Ted share, which plays into the final scene where the show fast-forwards a year into their relationship. After all, with nine seasons behind them, fans are hoping for the perfect Mother.
Viewers will remember that Marshall accepted a job as a judge in NYC and still hasn’t told Lily. He ventured out to Minnesota with Marvin to tell his mother, where the pair get stranded and try to make it back home in time for the wedding.
Meanwhile, Barney and Robin discovered that they both have a Cousin Mitch and feared they might be related, but we soon discover the cousin is not a blood relative. The show also dropped a shocking bomb when Barney’s brother, James, announced he was divorcing his partner.
Another carry-over from season eight was about Robin’s locket.
Viewers learned that Ted doesn’t have the locket because he lost it when he was moving in with then-fiancée Stella.
However, the show rewound four days previous to show him getting on an airplane to L.A., where Stella lives possibly going on a quest to find the locket.
Besides the excitement stemming from the Mother’s premiere, the other plots fell a little flat.
The humor was consistent with the previous seasons, like the Mother nicknaming Ted “Lady Tedwina Slowsby” for his knack of slow driving and the possible wildcards at Barney and Robin’s wedding, like Racist Uncle Rick and Braless Aunt Shelly.
But it did feel weird for Marshall to be so far away from the other characters. Also, the whole ordeal with Cousin Mitch was a tad odd.
Overall, the episode was a pretty mediocre premiere. It seemed to be filled with a lot of meaningless filler scenes.
Only about a quarter of the episode actually carries over into the actual whole plot, which may be to keep fans interested.
And while it did deliver its usual “HIMYM” humor, it lacked a bit in overall design. A fairly decent way to start the show, but hopefully, it will pick up quicker in future episodes.
SAMMIE JANIK
