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The first season finale for Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger’s Hulu Original/ 20th Television romantic comedy-drama sitcom series, How I Met Your Father, is titled “Timing is Everything”. It is written by Aptaker and Berger and directed by Pamela Fryman.
Plot Summary of the How I Met Your Father Season 1 Finale
The conclusion to How I Met Your Father’s first season picks up almost immediately after where we left off last week. However, right off the bat, the tone of the show takes a drastic turn.
To recap, Valentina (Francia Raisa) and Charlie (Tom Ainsley) break up, Sophie (Hilary Duff) and Jesse (Chris Lowell) split, and after Sophie flees to MacLaren’s where she gets advice from Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders), she returns to Jesse’s apartment only to find him and Meredith (Leighton Meester) embracing, and Sid (Suraj Sharma) and Hannah (Ashley Reyes) elope after coming to terms with the expense of two weddings on separate continents and the difficulty of maintaining a long-distance relationship. However, despite the dour direction this episode takes, it ends on a brighter note with Ian (Daniel Augustin)’s return to the show and the implied resumption of his romantic relationship with Sophie.
Notes on Storytelling and Structure
The term “heartbreak” often evokes the classical image of the non-anatomical, yet metaphorical heart split in two or fractured in some kind of way, and with How I Met Your Father, the writers reflect this structurally with the Season 1 finale. Before getting into things, let’s briefly look back at the season as a whole.
The story starts out with Sophie slowly starting to build relationships with the gang and during the initial episodes of this season, we often see them in separate settings before they eventually come together. In later episodes, we see the gang start off together before pairing off to go on their separate misadventures and reconvene before the episode concludes. With the season finale, we start off with the gang in separate settings.
Sid and Hannah are at The Pemberton mulling over wedding plans and the challenges of their relationship, Jesse and Sophie wake up together, and Ellen (Tien Tran) and Charlie briefly discuss Charlie not wanting to have kids despite Valentina expressing the night before that she wanted to start a family with him. Very quickly, we begin to see cracks, and things come apart at the seam. This was foreshadowed in the final moments of the last episode where Charlie and Valentina embrace and the camera pans on Charlie’s grimace for a few seconds, which foreshadows the upcoming conflict in the season finale. Without delving too much further into the structure of the episode, let’s briefly talk about the circularity of the series’ storytelling.
Circularity is something that, when it is done, it’s either done well or terribly. In this case, the writers pull it off. By the end of the episode, if we are focusing exclusively on Sophie, we are back to where we started with her being single and ready to perhaps pursue a romantic relationship with Ian. However, since this story is about more than just Sophie, things are very different. In fact, the whole dynamic of the gang has changed with Valentina and Charlie having broken up, Hannah and Sid married, and Jesse back with Meredith. What this bodes for the future, I haven’t the slightest clue, but with the return of The Captain (Kyle MacLachlan) and “Aunt Robin”, I am very excited to see what the writers have in store for us. Now, before I get too ahead of myself, let’s take a deeper dive into what happened this week with the finale.
The Lonely Hearts Club, Party of Two
While each of the gang has their own misadventures in this finale, I’d like to explosively focus on two people: Charlie, because I find his character and journey thus far to be incredibly nuanced and rich; and Sophie, because the writers did an outstanding job at differentiating her as a protagonist in this series from How I Met Your Mother’s lovesick protagonist, Ted.
Charlie
Going back to what I had said earlier about Charlie’s grimace foreshadowing the direction and tone of this episode, I had predicted an argument between Valentina and Charlie, although I had not imagined that it would lead to them breaking up. Given the way their relationship had developed since the pilot, I was surprised, to say the least. However, it does not come out of nowhere. From previous episodes, we know that Charlie has been traumatized by his relationship with his mother and family in general, to the point where he spent his youth, quite literally, running away from them. His reaction to Valentina wanting children is not surprising if we take a look at things through Charlie’s eyes.
First off, we know from Charlie himself that having children turned his mother into a bitter woman, something that Charlie desperately wants to avoid. Second, let’s look at Charlie’s off-screen journey. As we know, Charlie comes from an unnamed aristocratic English family and he has probably grown up in that shadow for all of his young life, constrained stringent customs, practices, and beliefs. We see hints of how this has severely affected him in previous episodes, most notably when he and Ellen hosted dinner in their apartment for the first time. While it plays off as funny, looking back at it now, we can view Charlie in a new light; as a man struggling to come into his own after leaving everything he knew, loved, and hated behind.
So what does this have to do with having kids, you ask? Well, for Charlie, it represents the return to that trauma he lived through, but this time he believes he will become the bitter and distant parent. As he realizes this, he knows he cannot continue on with Valentina if it means sacrificing what he had worked so hard to run away from. Now having said all of this, where does this leave Valentina? Broken-hearted and perhaps disillusioned. She loves Charlie, and with this sudden breakup, I can’t help but wonder how her character will cope with this sudden loss.
Sophie
Now, turning to Sophie, let’s start with what I’ve taken to calling “echoes” from How I Met Your Father’s originator, How I Met Your Mother. At the start of the series, it is made very clear that Sophie is very much that naïve protagonist searching for love. From her conversation with Jesse and Sid — who were complete strangers at the time — to her triumphant walk across the Brooklyn bridge, Sophie, despite it all, is looking for that grandiose romance that we rarely see, let alone experience. So, if we briefly return to Ted’s first major relationship in How I Met Your Mother with Robin, we know that he had told her he had loved her on their first date, and we all remember how that went.
Sophie is put into a similar situation here, but instead, she is on the receiving end. After Jesse confesses in his sleep that he loves her, she freaks out and flees to MacLaren’s. There, she meets our old friend Aunt Robin who advises Sophie to embrace Jesse wearing his heart on his sleeve and to not be afraid of what that potential romance could bring. This is great advice, but the timing was terrible since Jesse decided to reunite with Meredith after Sophie rebuffed him for telling her he loved her in his sleep.
Writing Out the Growth of the New Gang
Up to this point, I have refrained from commenting on this, but the best thing that the writers of How I Met Your Father have done for the series is created characters that are not direct copies of the gang in the previous series. While the gang faces similar situations, challenges, and has somewhat mirrored relationships we saw in the previous gang, this is a much different story than befits an expansion of the “How I Met Your Mother universe”.
While we can all look fondly at Ted being head over heels for everyone he was in a relationship with, we can also acknowledge that his naïveté was frustrating at times. Whereas with Sophie, while she is a hopeless romantic, we get the sense that she is much more grounded than Ted was and the writers illustrate this beautifully with how she reacts to Jesse confessing his love to her. Not only is it refreshing, but it breathes new life into the story.
By creating a more grounded character, the stakes in the show are higher, in the sense that they are more real. While this is a show about how Sophie meets the father of her child, it’s also the story of her potential claim to fame as a photographer. In addition, a story of the nuanced dynamics of the gang and how they find love, get heartbroken, recover, and mature. This is how the writers have set apart HIMYF from its originator, and I wait with bated breath to see how the rest of the story unfolds and the various journeys that the gang takes together and individually.
How I Met Your Father Season 1 in Review: Final Thoughts
Despite the run time of each How I Met Your Father episode, there was a lot packed in this finale. With the writers laying down the foundation for the finale over the last three weeks, the plot of the story accelerates at a breakneck speed. However, despite the momentum, this episode picks up, they never lose sight of the classic storytelling techniques established in the show’s predecessor.
While the scope of the How I Met Your Mother “universe” has been expanded, the writers have made it clear that HIMYF stands apart from its originator while still bringing back location settings and prominent characters from HIMYM. Not only does this further connect the two shows, but it also gives fans of How I Met Your Mother a chance to further reconcile with its highly contested ending.
Differences
Now, returning our focus solely to How I Met Your Father, there are two striking differences in storytelling between HIMYM and HIMYF that are very important to note. The first is the introduction of Sophie’s son. Unlike the children in HIMYM, Sophie’s child is off-screen. This changes the audience dynamic significantly by creating a more immersive experience for viewers who can share in Sophie’s unnamed son’s experience of hearing his mother’s grand romantic tale for the first time.
The second striking difference we have in storytelling is the way the writers chose to go about framing the mystery of who the father of Sophie’s son is. Unlike HIMYM, where we had no idea who Tracy was until the final season and only knew that Ted was sometimes in the same room, building, or setting as her throughout the series, the father in HIMYF is a member of the gang or possibly Ian and Sophie is constantly surrounded by them. Speaking for myself, this did remove some of the magic of the mystery but so far, the writers have managed to keep me on my toes, especially in this season finale with Jesse returning to Meredith, Charlie recently breaking up with Valentina, and Ian returning from Florida to New York. The writers are free to move in multiple directions.
However, having said that, it seems that Sophie is on a direct path to getting back together with Ian. Now, on one hand, this is a wonderful return to what began in the pilot, but it is a very obvious path for the writers to take. Now, I am not saying that this was predictable; I certainly did not see this coming and with Sophie’s multiple potential partners now single, it will be very interesting to see how the writers play around with this. I expect to be kept on the edge of my seat next season and for the story to continue to surprise me. With this season behind us, I have full faith in them and trust that we are all in for a fascinating and captivating story of romance and maturation for the next few years.
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