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The seventh episode of How I Met Your Father Season 1 is titled “Rivka Rebel”. It is written by Karen Joseph Adcock and Ria Sardana & directed by Kelly Park.
Plot Summary
This week’s episode of Hulu’s How I Met Your Father follows from last week’s.
Valentina (Francia Raisa) masquerades as Sophie’s (Hilary Duff) assistant to help her with an unexpected career opportunity while Jesse (Christopher Lowell) and Sid (Suraj Sharma) struggle with procrastination. Meanwhile, Charlie (Tom Ainsley) attempts to salvage his reputation as The Pemberton’s lone British Bar Tender after receiving a nasty Yelp review.
Whistle While You Work
With the summary aside, let’s dive into the episode. There are two arcs of interest to follow this week; Sophie’s new career opportunity and Sid and Jesse’s plight against procrastination, with each further developing prospective characters while illustrating some of the struggles of working as an artist.
Up until now, we are not given much insight into the work lives of our titular gang, except for Sid and Jesse. This week, we are treated to each of the gang’s ruminations on their work. For some, like Sophie and Jesse’s work is entwined with play, as each considers their medium art. As a street photographer, Sophie is working toward creating photos that depict her inner world and Jesse attempts to do the same with music. All portraits of artisans, greater or lesser, are founded upon the struggle to “make it” and this is what we begin to see with Sophie and her photography in this episode of How I Met Your Father.
With this new career opportunity, Sophie is confronted with an unpleasant and seemingly insurmountable task that must be completed for her to move up in the photography business. This unpleasantness is threaded throughout the episode as Valentina, Jesse, Charlie, and Ellen (Tien Tran) confront unpleasantness in their careers or lack thereof.
Waiting for Something to Happen
What I enjoyed about this episode is that the How I Met Your Father writers hit members of the gang with a bit of realism, breaking the spell, shifting the focus from how Sophie meets her child’s father, to how Sophie and the rest of the gang manage to confront unpleasant working situations and how we can either weasel our way toward success.
The second arc of interest in this episode revolves around Sid and Jesse. Remaining on the thread of work, let’s focus solely and Charlie. As we learned from Charlie as he played therapist, Jesse’s public proposal rejection left him without the desire or drive to continue creating music and in this episode of How I Met Your Father, we find out why. Through Jesse and Sid’s misadventure with procrastination, we see Jesse begin to heal the wound from that traumatic event.
Final Thoughts on This Week’s How I Met Your Father
What I’ve come to look forward to in each episode of How I Met Your Father is the different ways the writers develop these characters. Breakthroughs often come at the end of the episode with some kind of epiphanic conversation between characters, but in this episode, we see something quite different. Episode 107’s ending is without an epiphanic conversation or epiphany. It ends instead on silent but not somber triumph. It is quite different from what we are used to seeing so far, but it is a refreshing change of pace and tone and I hope to see more of this in future episodes of How I Met Your Father.
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