Wait For It…

The thing about a lot of mysteries is that once the mystery has been solved and the questions have been answered, the source of the mystery isn’t fun any more. For five years now, we’ve been waiting for the mystery of Ted Mosby’s wife to be solved. We’ve looked for clues sifting through red herrings and yellow umbrellas, all the time waiting for any information that might bring us a step closer to finding out who The Mother of Ted’s children is. But How I Met Your Mother isn’t about the mystery and it isn’t about the answer. It’s about the story and it always has been.

The original idea behind HIMYM (I’m lazy so I’ll be using the abbreviation from here on) “was let’s write about our friends and the stupid stuff we did in New York” and the mystery behind who the titular Mother is grew from the central idea of telling funny stories. The mystery element of the show that has become such a big part of what the show is will never out shine the fact that HIMYM is a show about a guy telling his story to his kids, and a few years from now when the mystery has been solved and we know all the answers we’ll still be going back to watch re-runs because the story of How is more important and more entertaining than the mystery of Who.

But a little speculation never did anyone any harm and the easiest thing to speculate about (in my opinion) is the timeline. Old Ted is telling the story to his kids in the year 2030 and his kids look as if they are in their mid to late teens. Some of the stories that Old Ted tells his kids are pretty explicit and he does seem like a pretty liberal father but I can’t imagine that he’d tell the story of Barney’s “Perfect Week” to kids any younger than that. So if we take it that Ted has his first child no later than 2014, we can safely say that his first child is conceived somewhere in 2013 or early 2014. Upon the return of HIMYM to our screens later this year, that’ll give Ted roughly three years to meet The Mother, court her, get married and conceive a child. Assuming that Ted doesn’t have a shotgun wedding, it’s very possible and indeed likely that Old Ted will at least get to the point in his story where Ted starts dating The Mother in the upcoming season. And unless Ted gets his storytelling style from Will Hayes in Definitely Maybe, he won’t try to disguise the name of The Mother. But even if he does, the famous yellow umbrella will (I assume) be a dead give away.

At the start of Season Three of HIMYM, Old Ted tells the kids in voice over that although they know the short version of how Ted met The Mother, the one involving the yellow umbrella where we see a visual of the umbrella blowing in the wind down an empty street, there is a longer version of the story which details how Ted became the man he needed to be in order to meet The Mother. Or to put it another way… Ted is actually the least interesting character in the show.

It seems at times that Ted’s sole purpose in the show is to observe his friends’ shenanigans so that he can tell the sometimes inappropriate stories to his kids years later. Like Xander Harris in Buffy, Ted is “the one who sees”. But Xander gets better dialogue. Ted is basically the sitcom version of an “everyman” and though he does have his fair share of wacky shenanigans, the people around him do manage to provide most of the laughs and the emotional core of the series. We already know what happens with a lot of Ted’s story; he meets someone, he gets married and he has two kids.

Now that’s not to say that Ted hasn’t had his fair share of shenanigans, namely the Pineapple Incident and the night of the Paddy’s Day party, but they both involve a lot of alcohol and the encouragement of Barney. On a side note, even though he’s a fictional character, Ted’s vomit-free streak from ninety three up until he puked on himself in “Jenkins” is very impressive. That’s the kind of thing that an Irishman really appreciates and it does make me wonder exactly how much of the characters are based on the real life experiences of the show’s creators.

One aspect of the show that is definitely based on the creators’ real life experiences that is also impressive to this Irishman is the fact that the main hang out for this show’s group of friends is based on a real life pub in New York City. It always seems more realistic than another group of Friends who hung out in a coffee house outside Central Park. The pub in HIMYM, McLaren’s, is based on a real life pub in New York City called McGee’s and McGee’s even gets name checked in the show by Marshall near the end of Season 4 when he produces a bar graph of his favourite pies and a pie chart of his favourite bars. It may seem like a silly scenario, but it’s just one of many, many silly scenarios that the writers put Marshall Erickson into… but more on that later. On the pie chart, McGee’s was listed as Marshall’s second favourite bar. I’ve been lucky enough to have been to McGee’s twice, and given the fact that it’s just around the corner from the office of DC Comics, I think I’d agree that it’s my second favourite pub in New York too. From the time I spent in McGee’s I could tell that it’s just the kind of place where someone in their late twenties would accumulate a lot of stories with his close friends.

As he’s observing the lives of his friends, each of the four people in the world that ted is closest to have an impact on his life in different ways. They say that we are all the product of the people in our lives, so it makes sense that the four people in the world that Ted spends most of his time with would have such a profound effect on him.

You can say a lot about Barney Stinson, but what he gives to Ted is the idea of getting as much joy out of life as possible. Barney’s not afraid to take chances in life, and that inspiration might be just what Ted needs in order to take the chance that leads to a life with his future wife. Barney’s character has to walk a very tight line in his constant pursuit of sexual partners. There is an element to his character that’s not a million miles away from the sub-human “writer” Tucker Max. Part of what makes Barney’s character so likeable is the way he’s portrayed by Neil Patrick Harris who makes Barney appear as roguish without ever coming across as evil or cruel. Also, Barney does have a heart and he shows every once in a while that he cares a huge deal about his friends, whether he’s trying to reunite Marshall and Lily, fighting off tears at their wedding or rushing across town to see Ted after he’s hit by a taxi. By his own admission, when Barney gets sad, he stops being sad and starts being awesome instead (true story), but much like Dr House, when Barney does display his honest emotions it usually hits home. And if you’ll allow me to return to a bit of speculation, it’s entirely possible that before the end of the series, we will finally see Barney follow his heart and end up with the one woman he’s truly loved in his life, Robin. In any of the scenes of the gang in the future, we never see Barney and we never see Robin, we never hear about how either of them ended up but we do know that they are part of the kids’ lives as Old Ted refers to them as “Uncle Barney” and “Aunt Robin”.

Since Robin was introduced to the show and to the group of friends, her primary focus has always been on her career. She’s never been afraid to try her hand at anything that she thinks would forward her career from fluff news to working a job that required her to start at four in the morning. While Robin has occasionally made sacrifices in order to be with her friends, she’s never given up and she’s never backed down from a job. This is what she gives to Ted, apart from occasional “benefits” that is, she teaches him that anything in life that’s important is worth fighting for. Even though we never see Robin in the future, Old Ted tells us that she has travelled the world and has lived in many different countries. This is another dream of Robin’s that she never gave up on and presumably it’s one that links in with her career as a reporter. I’m also assuming that, even though we don’t see her, Robin is a part of the kids’ lives despite the amount of time she has spent overseas.

During the second season of the show, the producers wisely decided to film a scene with the future kids that is directly involved with the big reveal of who The Mother is. Whether the filmed scene actually reveals who The Mother is or whether it is just a scene of the kids reacting to the information that Old Ted gives them isn’t known yet but nothing stays a secret forever and there’s a very good chance that even though there was a minimal crew on hand for the actual filming something will eventually leak out before the big reveal is aired. The logic behind filming the kids’ reaction to this part of Ted’s story was that the kids had to look the same age at the start of the story as they do at the end of the story as the telling of the story can’t realistically take any more than a few days and at this stage, the original footage of the kids is well over five years old. Lyndsey Fonseca who plays Ted’s daughter has certainly got older looking over the past five years and this year has had….a lot of exposure in two hit movies, Hot Tub Time Machine and Kick Ass. But you can be sure of one thing, whoever The Mother is and no matter when the reveal is made, The Mother has passed Lily’s Front Porch Test.

Lily has always been the mother of the group, trying to get Barney to admit his feelings for Robin, helping Ted stand up to his boss, and going as far as acting as Slap Bet Commissioner. Even in her professional life, she manages to be an authority figure as a school teacher, often bringing in her friends to give (often ignored) life lessons to the kids in her class. Lily shows Ted how to be a parent, long before Ted becomes a parent himself. Lily really steps up as the parent of the group after she accepts Marshall’s proposal of engagement, and it’s Lily’s engagement to Marshall that prompts Ted to begin his search for a wife.

Jason Segal’s Marshall Erickson is the heart and soul of the show. Marshall loves Lily without question or doubt and is never afraid to show that. There’s no other woman in the world for Marshall, and even when he tries to fantasize about other women, he has to kill off Fantasy Lily before Fantasy Marshall can be with another Fantasy Woman. Despite any protestations from Barney, Marshall is Ted’s best friend and in a lot of ways, he’s Ted’s conscience. Marshall is open to everything that life has to offer him and sees the world in an open, honest, accepting way, which means that the writers can get Jason Segal to do almost anything and make it seem plausible. Over the years, we’ve seen Marshall give a lecture about The Cock-A-Mouse, sing his way through paying his bills, get addicted to visual aids, struggle to “read a magazine” in work, dance to such a degree that he gets iliopsoas tendinitis (or Dancer’s Hip), and on one occasion he nearly made me cry when he got rid of his Fiero. Nearly. More than any of the other characters in the show, Marshall has the biggest influence on who Ted will become, on who he has to become in order to meet The Mother. Marshall is loyal, trusting, romantic, and will go to the ends of the earth for the people he loves, even if that means knocking out Doug the bartender despite his initial reluctance.

None of the characters in the show ever seem to be really stuck for money, and it seems like Old Ted has been able to afford to give his kids everything that they need in life. But he knows that one of the greatest things that he can give his kids is the story of his life and of how they came to be.

Old Ted has learned that people will leave you, money comes and goes and that things that you own end up owning you. But stories last forever, all you have to do is tell them.

– Simon Fitzgerald

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