Cereal Monogamist

How I Met Someone Who is Definitely Not Your Mother

Lots of debate going on about Monday’s episode of How I Met Your Mother, specifically about whether or not the show revealed the “mother” of the title. I’m here to say that it’s not true, they did not; on the contrary, the show executed a massive misdirection, a maneuver entirely in keeping with every other episode of this show, ever.

Cases in point:

The Pilot – How soon we forget. In the first episode of the show ostensibly all about how a guy named Ted pursued the mother of his future children, Ted meets a cool lady named Robin, takes her out, tells her he loves her on their first date, and steals a blue French horn from a restaurant to give to her as a gift. (Events did not necessarily occur in this order.) In the last few moments of the episode, Ted in voiceover reveals to his children the major twist of the show: “That’s how I met Aunt Robin.” Who is not the mother of the children. You’ll watch this episode again, and realize, like rewatching The Sixth Sense, that we were never explicitly told the information we were inferring. Of course Robin’s the mother—she’s a girl, she’s there, he’s pursuing her. Of course Bruce Willis is alive. People in movies are alive unless we are told otherwise.

Need more examples?

Season 1: Ted Mosby, Architect – Perhaps my favorite use of the last-minute twist ever. Ted gets annoyed that Robin never seems jealous and decides to go out with the guys, without her. She follows him to the party he went to and, from other guests there, learns that Ted “the architect guy?” went to a club with some girl. Robin struggles with her newfound jealousy, only to find out that Barney decided to masquerade as Ted, and every action attributed to Ted the architect was actually perpetrated by Barney, up to and including skipping out on the girl he brought home. (Who returns a season later as the moderator of popular website TedMosbyisajerk.com.)

Season 2: Swarley – Barney warns Marshall that his girlfriend has “crazy eyes,” and he gets worried when, almost immediately, she begins spinning crazy tales of hump-backed stalkers. It turns out that the hump-backed stalker really exists, and it’s Lily. (Further twistiness: the girlfriend actually is crazy.)

Season 2: Slap Bet – Ted is dying to know Robin’s secret, which is assumed first to be a secret marriage, and then a past as a porn star. Barney retrieves her video and they begin watching it, assuming it’s obscene. In fact, it turns out to be this.

Season 2: First Time in New York – Ted didn’t skip out on the first girl he slept with, borrowing twenty bucks and then never calling her again—everything happened the way he claimed, except with reversed roles (the girl ditched him).

Season 3: The Bracket – The gang spends the entire episode trying to determine who is slandering Barney about town. Barney delivers a heartfelt apology to a woman who…is not the right one. We wait until next week to find out that the slanderer was Britney Spears (should’ve known).

Season 3: The Goat – Ted describes (in great detail) the events surrounding his 30th birthday, teasing that there was a goat at his party, who did something INCREDIBLE. He oversells the unbelievability of the goat incident up until the very last second, when he says, “Oh…I guess that was my 31st birthday. Never mind.” (Worth noting that Ted’s 31st birthday will occur in the episode airing in two weeks. For those of you who've spent the last year wondering about the goat.)

Season 4: Intervention – Ted, Marshall and Lily all get freaked out about vacating the apartment they’ve all shared for ten years. Ted makes a big speech about how they have to face their fears and move on. The show cuts to a year later, where the group is their favorite bar hangout and dialogue reveals that one or all of them did not, in fact, move out.

Season 4: Three Days of Snow – Things that we thought were happening in one day were actually happening in three separate days.

AND FINALLY:

Season 4: Shelter Island – AKA, the episode where it was conclusively proven that Stella is not the mother. This episode covers the days leading up to Ted and Stella’s doomed wedding. Near the close of the episode, Ted tells his kids that things don’t turn out how you plan them, and the show cuts to the kids sitting on the couch, but instead of the two brunette kids whose boredom and impatience we’ve grown familiar with, we see two different, blond, children, and Stella walks into the frame. “Aren’t you done with the story yet?” she asks. The message here is clear, isn’t it? Ted’s marriage to Stella would have resulted in these hypothetical blond children, not the ones he actually gets.

If there’s anything the producers of How I Met Your Mother love, it’s a trickster narrative—“you thought I was talking about this, but actually…” They’re also not afraid of nonlinearity, complex interconnections, subtle callbacks to things that happened three years ago, etc. That’s why I like this show. It keeps me on my toes. And if that history means anything, it means that Ted’s ex-girlfriend Stella reappearing at the end of the episode in some capacity OTHER than the mother is more likely than her being the mother, representing as it would a massive lack of continuity.

Ted never said he was going to meet the mother that day. He said he was leading up to a great moment. He said his whole life was going to change that day. The theme of the episode (which was titled “Right Place Right Time”) was about how seemingly insignificant events all conspire together to make the significant events happen. (Actually, that’s the theme of the entire show.)

Stella approaching Ted on the street is certainly a catalyst for Ted meeting the mother. But she's not her.