How I Met Your Mother - Season 9 Premiere - Recap: Love and Marriage

So we've met The Mother (Cristin Milioti), and now we get to know her, as the story of "The Locket" focuses on the journey to Barney and Robin's wedding. Though both episodes function as sort of a single, continuous unit, there are clear story arcs that separate the two. In the first, we have Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and Robin (Cobie Smulders) freaking out about their wedding once it becomes apparent that they might actually be related, owing to a distant relation in both their families: a weirdo cousin who frequently gets beat up by truckers as a result of his choice to hitchhike with his middle finger due to his lack of thumbs. In another subplot, Lily (Alyson Hannigan) and Ted (Josh Radnor) have a disagreement over his refusal to let the Robin issue go. Ted feels that he needs to recover Robin's locket for her so he can give it to her as a wedding gift, a task that could involve reaching out to ex-fiance Stella. In separating from Ted, Lily ends up on a train where she meets The Mother and spends the duration of the episode using her as a sounding board for her own issues. Meanwhile, Marshall (Jason Segel) gets into it with a woman named Daphne (Sherri Shepherd) over his ruining her travel plans. In attempting to help his mother remove a photo from the internet, things go completely awry as the plane can't take off until Marshall gets off the phone. Basically, this sets up the inevitable road trip, in which Daphne agrees to purchase a car seat for baby Marvin so they can travel to New York together, but only if Marshall hands over the rental car he purchased.

Of the two episodes, "The Locket" is the weakest from a story perspective, though I felt it was the funnier episode. Ted's nerdy excitement about an alleged historical figure named Dr. Florian van Otterloop, who revolutionized the buckle industry. There's also a lot of mileage gotten out of Ted's pretentiousness, as he luxuriates in wearing driving gloves. Meanwhile, Barney and Robin wrestle with their attraction to one another despite possibly being related (they aren't, of course, as we later learn). There's also a pretty funny bit that features Lily snapping after the cookies that The Mother has offered her run out. The Marshall storyline struggles a bit, in the comedy department, as there's not much comedy to be found in his attempts to delete a silly photo of himself and baby Marvin from the internet (although I did find it amusing that Marshall was worried about future alien civilizations seeing the photo, in which he pretends to be a judge and uses a banana as a gavel). However, the story works much better from a story perspective, as we get to know The Mother a bit more and see that she already gels pretty well with the group so far -- she shares a natural, easygoing chemistry with Alyson Hannigan's Lily, and this certainly bodes well for the season to come. Also, the series looks to bookend the final season with Ted addressing the lingering Robin issue, so that he can finally let her go, once and for all, and know that he's ready when the time comes for him to meet The Mother. In many ways, it's been the story of the series, the way Ted has slowly gone through experiences that have prepared him for just this moment. And as we'll see at the end of "Coming Back," it will have been worth all the trouble.

The story of "Coming Back" mostly centers on Barney discovering that his brother James (Wayne Brady) is getting a divorce, calling Barney's faith in the institution of marriage into question, since he has no other models of a strong marriage -- well, except Marshall and Lily, but they aren't there together at the moment, as Marshall is embarking on his road trip with Daphne, and Lily is busy getting "The Kennedy Package" from the local bartender (basically, anytime she's without a drink in her hand, he makes sure she has a drink in her hand). In other developments, Ted is constantly being pitied by Curtis (Roger Bart), the front desk clerk at the Farhampton Inn, who misinterprets Ted as a painfully lonely single who's drowning his misery at having to witness the happiness of others. It's pretty amusing, especially when Ted inevitably flips out on Curtis and asserts that he's perfectly fine seeing other people happy, though Curtis refuses to believe it. But it's a relatively small portion of the plot when set against what seemed to be one of the primary objective of the premiere: to reaffirm Barney and Robin's commitment to one another, while bringing Ted further along in his journey to definitively get over Robin (in a unique touch, Ted ultimately ends up gifting Robin the picture from the opening credits instead of the locket).

As the episode winds to a close, we flashforward a year later, and we get our first real instance of Ted and The Mother interacting, as they're now in the throes of love and show themselves to be a pretty splendid match for one another. They're back at the Farhampton Inn, sitting at the same table at which Ted sat alone the year earlier, doing a crossword puzzle for his own amusement. The Mother rightly predicts that Ted was being pretentious and showy about solving the puzzle, and we see this to be the case, as Present Ted is overlaid on the scene alongside Future Ted and The Mother, so that it looks like three people sitting at the same table together. Ultimately, Ted affirms his love for The Mother, and while it might seem a bit early in the season to get this particular scene, it's been nine years in coming. Radnor and Milioti have wonderful chemistry from what little we see of them together, and I think the strength of her performance justifies the structural conceit of the season, since it could actually be rather charming to see everyone else grow to like, if not love, this woman before Ted even gets the chance to meet her. There's a lot of love to go around on this show, after all (hell, Barney saying "Legendary" and then rationalizing the lack of a "wait for it" to Robin by saying "I've got you. I don't have to wait anymore" is corny as hell, but it works within the context of a show that privileges high romance). With this premiere, the season is off to a pretty great start.

"The Locket" and "Coming Back" are two solid installments that give me tons of confidence in the approach to this final season for How I Met Your Mother. Will it be perfect? Almost certainly not. But even though it's taking a considerably different structural approach, it still feels like classic HIMYM, and there's really no better way for the show to end its nine-year run than by going back to its roots, but with a twist.