How I Met Your Mother: Definitions

At the end of last season there were a few threads left untied on How I Met Your Mother. One was that they revealed that the mother was in the class that Ted would be teaching. The second was the undefined relationship between Robin and Barney. I had visions of the show dragging out both story lines just to keep people watching, but thankfully they were the center piece of the premiere.

Robin and Barney clearly have feelings for each other, but are so afraid of a relationship that they refuse to define it in any way. This sends Lily over the edge since she wants to be able to go on double dates with them. She even has everything all planned out (it must be a teacher thing) when she says she wants to go camping and take cooking lessons with them. So, in her usual conniving ways, she locks Robin and Barney in a room until they have “the talk” and figure out what they are.

The dance between Robin and Barney when they try to talk about how they feel is hilarious, so I was happy to see them be forced to do it. I love how Lily and Marshall were incorporated into the situation too. Marshall’s “NOT GOOD ENOUGH” with the whip cracks were great.

The other half of the premiere was about Ted having his first day as an architecture professor (or is there two f’s?). They played this out perfectly. He had the cliche nightmare the night before of showing up to teach with no pants on, but on the actual first day he had a whole different set of problems. The first was deciding what kind of professor he would be. Would he be Professor Mosby, or T-Dawg? The second problem was that he was in the wrong classroom trying to teach a bunch of economics students about architecture. So in the end the mother isn’t in Ted’s class, she’s just in the same school. I thought that was a great move. This likely won’t be the last season of the show, and we know that the mother likely won’t be revealed until the very end, so to narrow it down to Ted’s own class now seemed a bit premature. We know he’s getting closer, but it doesn’t seem so immanent.

I thought the premiere was a great episode of How I Met Your Mother. All the characters had something interesting or funny to do, and the story lines from last season were kept going. The line at the end where Ted, Marshall, and Lily admit they know Robin and Barney were lying about their relationship, only to say that Robin and Barney don’t know they were lying, summed up everything that is awesome about this show. I’m excited to see where this season leads and if we get any closer to finding out who the mother really is.