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"It turns out I was emotionally unprepared for the 200th episode of HIMYM (retitled, for the night, How I Met Your Father, with cute new credits to boot). Having felt, along with most HIMYM fans, like we never get enough mutha this season, I was really excited for a whole episode starring Cristin Milioti and devoted to the Mother&amp;#x27;s backstory. I pictured Andrew Rannells antics and goose-bumps-inducing near misses with Ted and the gang. All of which we got. What I didn&amp;#x27;t expect was the sadness. On his road to meeting his future wife, Ted has certainly met some obstacles that feel like real perspective-shatterers: He got left at the altar, for crying out loud, and all of the Robin business, cumulatively, definitely screwed with his views on love and fate. But what we saw unfold on the Mother&amp;#x27;s 21st birthday felt more like the setup to a romantic comedy than a decade of randomized twists and turns: The boyfriend she felt was the love of her life died tragically, and she didn&amp;#x27;t recover for years, pressing the same halting concerns about having missed her chance on guy after potential guy. There&amp;#x27;s a lovely sort of symmetry there: The guy who&amp;#x27;s been searching for love so earnestly it becomes his primary character trait, matched at last with a woman who voluntarily took herself out of the game. It&amp;#x27;s also as good an angle logistically as it is poetically; from what we saw last night, we can assume that the Mother comes to Ted free of problematic exes. She never got close to the man who proposed to her; she rejected most dudes out of hand before that. I don&amp;#x27;t think we&amp;#x27;ll be seeing the male version of a Robin popping up to mess with the Mother&amp;#x27;s head at the last second. On paper, this is all good stuff&amp;amp;#8212;great stuff, right down to the pitter-pattery prelude of her buying the Scotch, him listening in on &amp;quot;La Vie en Rose.&amp;quot; But I still left the episode feeling a little less amped for the Mother and Ted to meet than I thought I would&amp;amp;#8212;I guess because death was the (yellow) umbrella theme of the episode, it was hard to come away feeling anything but somber. (What&amp;#x27;s up with all the death on TV this week? Between this and Girls, I&amp;#x27;ve obviously had nightmares about most of the people in my life passing away.) I also came away feeling a little freaked out. We&amp;#x27;ve officially discussed the Mother-is-dead theory at length at this point; I know I&amp;#x27;m looking for connections. But the whole &amp;quot;You only get one&amp;quot; thing? The morose look on Ted&amp;#x27;s face as the Mother strummed away? The unease-inspiring disappearance of Barney? It all seemed so ominous. I&amp;#x27;m choosing to take comfort in the fact that the writers seem to be hitting this note so hard now, it&amp;#x27;s probably just a red herring. In any case, though it was a moving episode, I&amp;#x27;m hoping for a little more lightness and cream in the next one. Like maybe Barney just went to go pick up the &amp;quot;ring bear,&amp;quot; and everybody laughs and shakes their heads. What did you think of &amp;quot;How I Met Your Father?&amp;quot;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/entertainment/blogs/obsessed/2014/01/himym-recap-season-9-episode-1>