“We know this woman is the one; now she just needs to prove it to Ted – and more importantly, to us.” —Kelsey Hughes

For eight years, we have been leading up to this moment. We know who the mother is; we know where she and Ted will meet; now all we have to know is how. And that is what this season will be dedicated to: the three short days between when the gang leaves for Robin and Barney’s wedding and when Ted meets The Mother.

In true HIMYM fashion, this does not indicate we will stay in the present or follow any sort of chronological storytelling. We’ve already seen some intense foreshadowing, flash backs and flash forwards that have begun to form the many branches of the story that will be developing outside the main plot of the wedding.

Last week, I wrote about some of the major things that I wanted from this new season of How I Met Your Mother. In one fell swoop during the first two episodes of the series, one of my pleas was answered and one was completely and totally ignored – Ted will be going to Los Angeles to meet up with Stella (something that should happen for Ted to get closure on his most serious relationship) yet he’ll be going there to find Robin’s locket as a last attempt to woo her (oh God, no).

I know that Robin is an important part of Ted’s life, and unfortunately, I must resign myself to the fact that their storyline will be a major part of this final season. I foresee a recurring flashback of Ted going to some serious lengths to get the locket (which I’m sure will not be an easy find in Stella’s storage unit), followed by a massive declaration of love from Ted to Robin at the wedding (which would be a seriously jerky move, considering she’s marrying his best friend), leading to a serious heartbreak when Robin rejects him. From here on out, I’m going to stop complaining about the storyline because I know there’s nothing to stop the Ted and Robin tale from unfolding.

Ted’s not the only one who has a long journey before getting to the wedding. Marshall and Marvin are having trouble getting back to New York from Marshall’s mom’s house in Minnesota after Marshall is kicked off the plane for talking on the phone to his mom, whom he is trying to help remove a picture from the Internet. The photo reveals that Marshall has taken the job as a judge and Lily doesn’t know yet. (“Just click options!” he yells. Later, when trying to do it himself and finding it’s a lot more difficult than he imagined, the entire airport terminal is there to offer the same advice in unison.) Instead, he finds himself and Marvin riding to New York in a huge Hummer-like gas guzzler alongside an irritated and sassy woman named Daphne, played by Sherri Shepherd, in what will probably be a funny but standard plotline.

Barney and Robin have their own struggles through the two episodes, which are indicative of how far they’ve come and how far they still need to go before they can get married. After all, their relationship was troubled from the beginning. While I fully support and pray for their marriage to happen, Robin still needs reassurance that Barney has moved on from his womanizing ways. In the first episode, the two are horrified to find out they might be related after learning they share a cousin Mitch in Canada (Barney is one-fourth Canadian, but he is so awesome this fact can be disregarded.) Though they soon realize that Mitch was adopted into the family, and thus indicates no blood lines between the two, it’s a huge red flag that things could still go wrong before the wedding can happen. In the second episode, Barney finds out that his brother’s marriage is ending in divorce, and Robin worries that this fact will ruin Barney’s faith in their own marriage working out. However, Barney seems to be totally unaffected by the news and reaffirms Robin’s faith in their pairing.

Most excitingly in this episode, Lily was the first to meet the mother, after abandoning Ted on the road trip that he dubbed “Lil and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” because she was irritated by all of his quirks. Example: wearing driving gloves (“99.9 percent of all highway accidents occurred while the driver wasn’t wearing gloves,” Ted declares. To support his case when Lily insists that no one wears them, he responds with perfect Ted-like snobbish idiocy, “Then why’s it called… the glove compartment?”) When Lily gets on a train, she runs into the mother, who consoles her with delicious cookies called som’bitches and insults Ted’s nerdiness (though narrator Ted points out that she has her own pair of driving gloves and also thoroughly appreciates detouring for quirky roadside attractions on road trips.) It stands to reason that all of the gang will be meeting, and probably falling for, the mother before Ted, which is fitting, because we’ve learned that Ted’s friends sometimes know better than Ted himself who is right for him. 

This is also good because it seems less and less likely that my other desire for this season – an episode completely from the viewpoint of the mother – is going to happen. At the very least, we can learn more about the mother through the eyes of Ted’s friends.

And in a way, she needs to win us over, too. After all, we’ve been there with Ted since the beginning. We’ve seen him through the best and the worst of his relationships, and we want to see him succeed in the end. As much as Ted has been looking for her, we have been right there with him, getting angry when we disagree with the person he’s with and getting upset when a pairing we’ve loved hasn’t worked out. We know this woman is the one; now she just needs to prove it to Ted – and more importantly, to us.

Tidbits (so many great things this week!):

– A great bit: Robin getting more and more upset each time Barney pronounces ring bearer as “Ring Bear,” worried that the large furry animals will have a part in her wedding

– Ted denouncing the speedy way to Farhampton: “The expressway is for gloveless amateurs.”

– Major plot hole: I loved the use of the dial-up connection noise as a joke about Mama Marshall living in the dark ages of technology and being the cliché technologically inadept parent, but you can’t use dial-up and the phone at the same time! Come on, How I Met Your Mother, get it together.

– I just want to make my love for Neil Patrick Harris public here. I don’t think an episode has gone by in the past 20 episodes where I haven’t written down a Barney bit as being exceptionally delivered. This week, it was Barney’s deadpan about cousin Cecil getting fired from his skydiving job and then jumping off a bridge. See also: Robin’s and Barney’s extremely awkward kiss.

– “Well you have certainly piqued my incest… interest!”

– The present Ted gives Robin that Lily thinks will be the locket? The picture from the opening sequence. So many feels!

– Everything was great about the hotel receptionist’s pity for Ted’s singledom. As my friend pointed out, we don’t spend that much time making fun of Ted for being alone — it’s mostly just pity for him. This episode had some great jokes, like when Ted says he needs just one key and he responds, “Oh… well hang in there.”

– The Stinson curse begins in Moscow in 1807 when the Stinson carriage hit an old gypsy woman who cursed them to be hornier.

– Gotta love horny Lily, who describes Marshall as a man with “calves that launched a thousand lady boners.”

– “Vesuvius, BOO YAH!” – Ted being showboaty about his crossword. “Oh wait, it doesn’t fit.”