That’s what I think too.
The actress who plays the Mother was most recently on Broadway playing the role of “Girl” (yes, really; it’s the female lead and is named “Girl.” The male lead is “Guy”) in Once. I recognized her really big eyes immediately.
I also think that the last episode should be “How I Met Your Father” and be super short and to the point like how normal people would explain how they met someone.
And then three seconds after the “I Dos,” Ted and The Mother have to conceive Ted’s daughter for the timeline to work.
Hmm . . . who to do her voice? 
I’m betting that we won’t see any of the dating or wedding except as a coda to the series finale. I think that they won’t have Ted meet the mother until the final episode. They need to give us a reason to care that these two get together. Right now, we don’t have a reason. Ted is fairly unlikeable and the mother is a complete unknown. They’ll spend the final season showing us what the mother was doing while we were watching the shenanigans of Ted and his friends. We’ll see the near misses from the other side. Somehow they’ll make us root for them to get together. At least they’ll try - I’m not confident in their ability to pull it off at this point.
That would be really dumb. The show hasn’t really been about the mother for a long time, and I’m fine with that…but now that she’s here, they need to not try and bring it up to that point. They’re two days from the wedding…you can’t draw that out in this show for a season. The only way I’ll care about her is if I see how she is with Ted. This last season needs to be the ups/downs/thrills of courting each other and getting married.
Probably my favorite moment from the entire series was when Ted was talking to his dad (Michael Gross):
Dad: "I never told you how I met your mother?
Ted: “No!”
Dad: “Oh, great story! At a bar.”
Ted: “That’s it? That’s what passes for communication in our family? When I have kids, and I tell them how I met their mother, I’m gonna tell them everything. The whole damn story.”
Dad: “I think it was an Irish bar.”
According to this article, no. It will indeed be a whole season of the 56 hours of the wedding: “Our ninth season will tell the epic story of the longest wedding weekend ever”
Notice how they have to use old clips of the kids now? That’s because they got bored and left years ago.
Anyone know where in Westchester Ted’s house is supposed to be?
Oh. I like that even better.
I saw that. I’m hoping it’s just the framing device…such that they do a minute or two of the wedding weekend stuff, then several flash-forwards to her with Ted during their dating, etc. Perhaps a few flashbacks of hers to get some of her backstory.
If it’s all just the final 56 hours crammed in…that will totally blow. I can’t imagine they’d do that, though…there was an in-depth article with an interview where he talked about the casting process, how they needed to make sure she read well with Ted, and how they were going to work her musicality into the series, and how important the casting was. If they only show her for 3 minutes at the end of the series, none of that would make sense.
That’s simply incorrect. There has been a lot of filler to stretch the story out for several seasons but it has always been about Ted’s path to meeting the mother. You might not find that part of the story as interesting as the filler parts but that doesn’t negate the fact that they have never wavered from telling the story they set out to tell.
I know that the writers had said that the story structure would change next year (perhaps even doing something like Community or even ModernFamily/Office), but this isn’t quite what I was anticipating. I figured maybe adopting some other sitcom style, not pulling a Jack Bauer. And we already know the locket is going to cause some of the 56 hours of angst. Barney’s Father in Law (The Devil and Father Peter Westley from Reaper and Psych, respectively) will also cause two episodes of hilarity.
But I have to say that I am most disappointed in how incredibly wrong I was: My frontrunner was Maggie Gyllenhaal with Natalie Portman and Amy Adams trailing behind. If the Mother is only going to be in two scenes (my theory unless she is in the background during dancing scenes), they should really have gone bigger… or never shown her.
Thanks for the link. The idea of stretching that weekend out over a season is weird, as is the idea in this bit from the article. If they’d only done eight seasons, that might have been all we saw of her.
I think that was their original plan. They decided to only show her for a few scenes and a big name actress was the ticket. When the season 9 renewal came through, they had to change and hire an unknown. I take it she will be in several episodes next season.
The thing is that Ted’s character has been going nowhere for several seasons now. Early on, you at least wondered whether xyz woman was the mother and it made the show enjoyable. But, for the last several seasons, since Stella left, we have seen him with women who we know cannot be the mother, plus the endless and pointless rehases of Ted-Robin.
In retrospect, this should have been called the Barney Stinson show.
Or “How I finally stopped pining for your Aunt Robin.”
It’s very common for a secondary character to dominate a sitcom.
Yes, and in this case Ted is the central character in an ensemble cast. Those characters often do not dominate the episodes, Jed Clampett on the Hillbillies and Alex Rieger on Taxi as examples.
The finale was one of the better ones of this season, but that’s not saying much.
I don’t expect to be around next year. I would have watched 56 hours taking up one season back in the day, but unless the plots are really tight, it’s just going to go off the rails and/or be incredibly boring except for little teasers here and there. Yawn.
That, frankly, sounds terrible. There’s nothing new to learn of the main characters. We already know how everything’s going to end; Barney and Robin will get married and Ted will meet his wife. The only thing left to explore is the mother and how she’s the one for Ted. If she’s just a glorified cameo at the end of next season then what’s the point?
Marshall a judge? Oh, how will he ever break the news to Lily? Yawn.