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Plot Summary
How I Met Your Father starts out much in the same way How I Met Your Mother did, with the 2050 version of Sophie (Kim Cattral) speaking to her son about how she met his father. This setup is quite familiar to fans of its predecessor but despite using the exact same narrative formula and structure as its HIMYM, How I Met Your Father stands apart from its parent in the way the story is set up.
Let’s begin with the basics.
The Nuances & a Speculative Portrait
Starting with the future version of Duff’s character, the pilot begins in 2050 with Sophie telling her son how she met her father. Instead of the camera centering on her son, as How I Met Your Mother centered on Ted Mosby’s children, the camera is centered on Sophie. This may have been done for a variety of reasons, but I have come to believe that this indicates that How I Met Your Father — the story of how she met her son’s father — is only the frame and the portrait is some larger development. Only time will tell. But here is where we can have some fun. Allow me to speculate.
Moving onto the 2022 version of Sophie (Hilary Duff) and the main cast of characters, we see a striking difference between HIMYM and this latest iteration of that story. In HIMYM, we are introduced to a cast of characters that already have preestablished years-long relationships with each other, except for Robin, who is new to the group and is one of Ted’s love interests throughout the series.
In HIMYF the longstanding relationships we initially see are between Sid (Suraj Sharma) and Jesse (Christopher Lowell) who are best friends, Sid and his partner Hannah (Ashley Reyes), Jesse and his adopted sister Ellen (Tien Tran), Sophie and her roommate Valentina (Francia Raisa), and Valentina and her partner Charlie (Tom Ainsley). We are essentially presented with two different groups that are unacquainted with each other at the start of the episode but become acquainted through a series of romantic misadventures that take them from an Uber cab to the Rosewood bar, Sophie’s apartment, the Pemberton bar, JFK International Airport, the Brooklyn Bridge, and finally Jesse and Sid’s apartment.
The Linchpin & Final Thoughts
The linchpin, loosely defined, is a central part of a mechanism. The pin keeps the mechanism together. Looking at this episode, I had to ask, what was the linchpin?
In HIMYM, what kept the show going was Ted’s journey to meeting and marrying Tracy. In How I Met Your Father, we see something different. While Sophie’s story of how she met her son’s father is the central story element and Sophie is the person that brought these two groups of people together, there is an additional element to the story here: the story of how Sophie met the people who will be her primary set of friends for the next decade and perhaps the rest of her life.
Whereas the linchpin in HIMYM was Ted’s romantic misadventures through New York that led him to Tracy, the journey Sophie embarks with this pilot is quite different. What HIMYF presents us is a different kind of coming-of-age story. The story of how Sophie met her child’s father is the frame that encloses a portrait of Sophie’s romantic misadventures, her maturation, and how she forms genuine relationships between strangers online, in cabs, and in bars. Between the loved and unloved.
Also, read our non-spoiler review on How I Met Your Father Season 1 Episode 2!
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