HIMYM Guidebook

SUMMA

ARY Introduction - Series Synopsis Chapter 01 - Cast

Chapter 02 - Season 1

Chapter 03 - Season 2

Chapter 04 - Season 3

Chapter 05 - Season 4

Chapter 06 - Season 5

Chapter 07 - Season 6

Chapter 08 - Season 7

Chapter 09 - Season 8

Chapter 10 - Season 9 Chapter 11 - Objects Chapter 12 - Ex-girlfriends Chapter 13 - Trivia Chapter 14 - Special Guest Chapter 15 - FAQ’s

INTROD seriessynopsis

UCTION The year is 2030. Ted Mosby is relaying the story of how he met his wife to his daughter and son. The story starts in the year 2005, when then twenty-seven year old architect Ted was spurred on to want to get married after his best friends from his college days at Wesleyan, lawyer Marshall Eriksen, who was his roommate at the time and kindergarten teacher Lily Aldrin, got engaged after nine years of dating each other.

Ted’s new quest in life was much to the dismay of his womanizing friend, Barney Stinson. But soon after Marshall and Lily’s engagement, Ted believed that his life mate was going to be news reporter and aspiring news anchor Robin Scherbatsky, who, despite having had a romantic relationship with her after this time, ended up being who the kids know as their “Aunt” Robin. As Ted relays the story to his kids, the constants are that their Uncle Marshall, Aunt Lily, Uncle Barney and Aunt Robin are always in the picture and thus have something to do with how he got together with their mother.

01

CHAPTER

Cast

TED

MOSBY

Portrayed by: Josh Radnor First appearance: Pilot Last appearance: Last Forever - Part Two Full name: Theodore Evelyn Mosby Also Known As: T-Dog, T-Mose, Teddy Westside, Schmosby, Prof. Brosby, Doctor X, Teddy Bear, Galactic President Superstar McAwesomeville, Jed Mosley, Teddy Boy, Sex Architect, Emsbry Postlethwaite, El Ganso Con la Riñonera, Lady Tedwina Slowsby, Universe Guy, Architect of Destruction Home town: Shaker Heights, Ohio Born: April 25, 1978 Occupation: Architect, Professor Residence: The Apartment (Season 1-7)

Ted’s Second apartment (Season 7 - present)

Ted’s house (future) Romances: Robin Scherbatsky (presumed wife - future)

Victoria (ex-girlfriend)

Zoey Pierson (ex-girlfriend)

Stella Zinman (ex-fiancée)

Tracy McConnell (wife - deceased)

Carly Whittaker (fling)

Ted was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio (in real life, Josh Radnor grew up in the Columbus, Ohio area and writer Carter Bays is from Shaker Heights). He was seen cheering for the Cleveland Indians when they were playing the Yankees at a baseball game in the episode Where Were We? and also alluded to once being trapped under a fake rock at a mall in Ohio when he was 9 in the episode Slap Bet. He also wears a Cleveland Indians t-shirt in Sandcastles in the Sand. Though Ted lost his virginity in 1995 to Molly, it is revealed in Sorry, Bro that during his high school years and periodically during college, Ted dated his longterm girlfriend Karen. He and Marshall were randomly assigned as freshman year roommates at Wesleyan but became friends on a long road trip that was deemed both “Fieroasco” (by Marshall) and the “100k Fiasco” (by Ted). This story was told in Arrivederci, Fiero. Ted graduated from Wesleyan with Marshall in 2000 as implied in the episode How I Met Everyone Else.

search and believes he’s found this woman when he meets Robin. Prone to socially questionable romantic gestures, Ted steals a blue French horn (nicknamed “The Smurf Penis”) that was a topic of conversation on his first date with Robin. In a similar vein, he also dresses up as a “hanging chad” every year for Halloween, in the hopes of meeting the Slutty Pumpkin, a woman dressed as a jack-o’-lantern (complete with strategically placed holes) whom he once met at a Halloween party.

For a while, Ted claimed to be “vomit-free since ‘93,” meaning he had not vomited for any reason since 1993. However, in the episode Game Night, he reveals that this is not true, and that he vomited on Robin’s door mat. He knows sign language (presumably American Sign Language) as well as French, Spanish and Italian. He has a strong tendency to correct everything that people around him say.

He and Robin ultimately reconcile, and shortly after that, Ted makes one last attempt to win her, hiring a chamber orchestra with blue instruments to play in her apartment while he makes his appeal. She cannot give him a definite answer, but, after she is stuck at her apartment due to an un-expected storm (that Ted had danced for), she decides to pursue her feelings for him upon his return to her. After nearly a year together, they break up, and Ted no longer sees Robin as “The One,” but doesn’t reveal the identity of his future wife. Robin, however, does act as an “Aunt” figure of sorts to his future children.

Ted, the central character of the show, is from Shaker Heights, Ohio, and is a Wesleyan University graduate and an architect who, according to Barney, thinks too much. When his best friend Marshall gets engaged, and he realizes his life is moving slow, Ted decides to try and find his soulmate. He goes on a

For a time, he dates a baker named Victoria, whom he met at a friend’s wedding. She accepts a culinary fellowship in Germany, prompting a long-distance relationship, which does not last, due in large part to his persistent feelings for Robin.

His friendship with Robin is threatened when he implies that Victoria broke up with him before she actually did, leading to their making out.

It is revealed in No Tomorrow that at a St. Patrick’s Day party he and Barney attended, his future wife was also present. Once

he returns to the room of the party the morning after, he picks up a yellow umbrella which can be seen blowing in the wind in the season promo. Also, he becomes the second main character to actually own a car (a blue Toyota Camry Hybrid) after getting a raise at his job in The Chain of Screaming. By the end of the episode, Ted decides to get rid of the car to help Marshall with his income trouble.

At the beginning of the third season, Ted, while drunk, gets a butterfly tattoo on his lower back (his “tramp stamp”). He goes to see a doctor in order to have it removed, and goes on a date with the doctor in The Platinum Rule. In Ten Sessions, they reveal Stella as the doctor, and after the tattoo is removed, Ted takes her on a two-minute date. They begin dating, and at the end of Miracles Ted proposes to Stella. She says yes at the beginning of the fourth season. Ted invites Stella’s ex-boyfriend Tony (the father of her daughter) to his wedding, which unbeknownst to him, causes Stella and her ex’s feelings to reemerge for each other, resulting in Stella leaving Ted at the altar.

In the beginning of Season 7, Ted runs into Victoria at the Architects Ball. Ted makes a long-awaited apology for cheating on her, which Victoria accepts though she is no longer angry.

She is surprised to learn that Ted does not find it strange that he, Robin, and Barney hang out every night, despite the fact that both Ted and Barney dated and broke up with Robin. Ted reveals he deeply regretted cheating on her and they had loved one another; they end up sharing a kiss. Despite the kiss, Victoria realizes she wants to be with her boyfriend, Klaus, and leaves to meet him for a trip in the Hamptons.

When Ted, Marshall and Barney embark on another “trilogy time”, Ted thinks that there is something wrong with him, as he still hasn’t settled down with someone. But Marshall comforts Ted, saying that he has a good feeling about Ted’s life in 2015. In a flash forward to 2015, Marshall and Barney set up for another “trilogy time”. Though Barney complains that Ted is breaking their tradition by bringing a girl, he and Marshall make an exception because Ted really loves the girl, who is revealed to be his infant daughter.

After the birth of Lily and Marshall’s baby, Ted talks to Robin about how he wants a family. She encourages him to go after the one who got away, Victoria. He gives her a call and invites her to MacLaren’s. When she arrives, she is in a wedding dress.

Victoria tells him that today is her wedding with Klaus, but she has always had Sunset Ted in the back of her mind. After deliberating with the gang, he takes her into the car, seemingly to drive off into the sunset with her. However, he tells her “I was left at the altar and it almost killed me. You’re someone’s fiance, and I have to respect that”, and says he’s going to drive her back to the church. Once he gets near the church, he sees flashbacks of Victoria, and drives past the church, where Ted and Victoria hold hands and drive off into the sunset.

MARSHALL ERIKSEN

Portrayed by: Jason Segel

Tyler Peterson (Age 10)(Age 13)

Koby Rouviere (Age 8) First appearance: Pilot Last appearance: Last Forever - Part Two Also Known As: Marshmallow, The Kid, Funny Butt, Vanilla Thunder, Big Fudge, Papa, Beercules, Marsh Madness, Ghost in the Post, Sports Guy, Mr. Awesome Home town: St. Cloud, Minnesota Born: 1978 Occupation: New York State Supreme Court Judge (2020 - ?)

Judge (Season 8 - present)

Lawyer (Goliath National Bank (Season 4-6),

Honeywell & Cootes (Season 7-present) Residence: The Apartment (Season 1-3)

Marshall and Lily’s Apartment (Season 4 - 7)

Marshall and Lily’s house (Season 7)

The Apartment (Season 7-Season 8) Romances: Lily Aldrin (wife)

Chloe (one date)

Marshall was born and raised in St. Cloud, Minnesota. He became very close to his parents and was taught manners by them.

He is also close to his brothers. His father was very tough on him as shown in Murtaugh when he wouldn’t let Marshall go to sleep until he scored a hoop in basketball. His brothers also played basketball and baskiceball (a game that he and his family invented combining basketball and ice skating), along with intense wrestling.

Marshall smoked his first cigarette when he was 13. He is the slam dunk champion of Nicollet Country, Minnesota, with his trademark dunk the “White Windmill”. Marshall was attracted to a girl in his class who was later revealed to have had him on “The Hook”. Marshall only realised this after hanging outside her house all night in the snow and waking up to find out that she had literally walked over him to get inside. Marshall got his brother’s old Fierro for his 16th birthday, but had to go through several initiation tests to earn it, including swallowing $5 worth of quarters and buying 12 cups of coffee from a driveway completely naked.

After having his growth spurt, Marshall’s appearance went through several changes. All of them were extremely awkward-looking.

Marshall met Ted Mosby and Lily Aldrin on the first day of their freshman year at Wesleyan University. Marshall graduated with Ted from Wesleyan in 2000, as implied in How I Met Everyone Else. He began law school at Columbia in 2004, he managed a structure in between leaving Wesleyan and starting at Columbia.

(Trilogy Time). He is a Columbia Law School graduate originally from St. Cloud, Minnesota. He can no longer dunk because he has dancer’s hip (The Possimpible). Even though Marshall is at a height of 6’4”, he is the shortest male member of his family and considered the “runt” of the family. Apparently, cough syrup ‘stunted’ his growth, hitting 6”4 in fifth grade, then stopping (The Stinsons). A donkey supposedly had eaten Marshall’s pants the last time he was in Trenton, and at Bill’s bachelor party in Memphis, they had to pump out several nickels from his stomach. (Slap Bet) Marshall is extremely loyal to his friends and in particular Ted, his best friend. In the first season finale, his wedding plans are derailed when Lily pursues a painting fellowship in San Francisco, triggering a fight that ends their engagement. He and Lily rekindle their romantic relationship in Swarley, get re-engaged, and are actually married for 12 seconds in Atlantic City. Their wedding takes place during the last two episodes of Season 2. (Something Borrowed, Something Blue)

In early 2011, Marshall and Lily are worried about their fertility status.

Lily learns that she is fertile, and after some stressful days, Marshall learns that he too is fertile. During this time, Lily informs Marshall that his father, Marvin Eriksen Sr., had died as a result of a sudden heart attack. (Bad News) Marshall always wanted to be an Environmental Lawyer, but had to work at other places when he couldn’t get a job at an Environmental Law Firm. He worked shortly at Nicholson, Hewitt & West. He later took a job at Goliath National Bank . He worked at GNB for a few years but quit in The Exploding Meatball Sub. He tried to find work at various environmental law firms and finally got a job at Honeywell & Cootes in The Naked Truth. In Twelve Horny Women, Marshall goes against his friend Brad in a lawsuit against Gruber Pharmaceuticals for polluting Frog Lake. Although he wins the case for his firm, the judge orders Gruber to only pay twenty-five thousand dollars instead of the twentyfive million dollar claim, which disappoints Marshall. Brad apologizes to Marshall and says that people like him should be behind the judge’s desk. Marshall takes this to heart and applies for a judgeship infront of the New York State Judiciary sometime in the future. In Romeward Bound, Lily finds out that Marshall’s career has taken a setback and his firm has lost a lot of business after the Gruber case, and most of the employees have been laid off. In Something New, Marshall gets a call back for his application for a judgeship, telling him that there is an opening for him to be a judge next Tuesday, a week before he and Lily are supposed to move to Rome for a year so she can be The Captain’s art consultant. Marshall takes the offer but in Daisy , it is revealed he also did move to Italy.

Lily

Aldrin

Portrayed by: Alyson Hannigan

Piper Mackenzie Harris (Age 11) First appearance: Pilot Last appearance: Last Forever - Part Two Also Known As: Lilypad, Justice Aldrin, Red, Lil, Chewbacca, The Belly, The Slap Bet Commissioner, Lori, The Kraken, Red Head, Ms. Aldrin, Lily Stinson, Mrs. Awesome, Number One Gunna Home town: Brooklyn, New York Born: March 22, 1978 Occupation: Art consultant (Season 8 - present)

Kindergarten teacher (pre-Season 1 - Season 1, Season 2 - Season 8) Residence: Lily’s First Apartment

The Apartment (season 1)

Lily’s Second Apartment (season 2)

Barney’s apartment (season 2)

The Apartment (season 2 - 3)

Marshall and Lily’s apartment (season 4 - 7)

Marshall and Lily’s house (season 7)

The Apartment (Season 7 - present) Romances: Scooter (ex-boyfriend, admirer)

Marshall Eriksen (husband)

There isn’t much said about Lily’s early life, but Lily was born in 1978. She grew up in New York City, in the borough of Brooklyn. Her childhood was shaped by the horrible environment that her parents raised her in. Lily’s mother is an extreme feminist, who worked two jobs and refused to buy her an easy bake oven. She had a stay-at-home dad who was distracted by his dream of creating the next great American board game, therefore constantly neglecting Lily. After a while, she even gave him the You’re dead to me look. Young Lily also took ballet and gymnastics (Slapsgiving 2: Revenge of the Slap). It’s also known that Lily owned a dog named Bean.

In high school, Lily had a goth-like appearance. In the ninth grade, she accidentally passed gas loudly while in class. She blamed Michael Sasser, the boy next to her who was just getting close to becoming one of the cool kids after joining the baseball team. After she blamed him, Michael gained the nickname, “Gasser”, and was teased so much that he switched schools. Lily would later consider this to be one of her biggest regrets (Happily Ever After). She became a teenage bad-ass, who terrorised her neighbourhood, would drink under-age, and bullied Scooter into starting a relationship (Twelve Horny Women). She was eventually in a committed relationship with Scooter. She technically may have lost her virginity to him, but as Robin puts it “he didn’t dive in, but he got in the shallow end”. Since the two of them had different plans after high school, she broke up with Scooter at their senior prom.

Lily attended Wesleyan University, where she majored in art.

During a freshman floor party, she made out with a guy named Colin. She got so drunk that she completely forgot who she hooked up with and referred to Colin as “too much tongue guy”.

She would later meet Marshall Eriksen and Ted Mosby. After Marshall helped her set up her stereo in her dorm room, the two of them started dating. When Lily first turned on the stereo, Good Feeling by The Violent Femmes was playing. Lilycollege Lily at WesleyanThe two of them went on to fall in love and lose their virginity to each other, and Good Feeling became ‘their song’. She and Marshall also spent their first Valentine’s Day together watching the movie, Predator, which became their Valentine’s Day tradition.

Lily also developed a loathing hatred for Ted’s on-again, offagain girlfriend, Karen. She and Marshall hated Karen because she was constantly cheating on Ted and when she acted sophisticated, she came off as obnoxious. But the biggest reason she hated Karen was because she walked in on her painting a nude portrait of Marshall and Karen lingered and stared at Marshall’s penis. Sometime during her college career, Lily did a study abroad program in Paris for a semester.

She is married to Marshall Eriksen and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Lily also has dreams of being an artist. She also has

a huge debt problem because of her impulsive buying practices. She is able to hide this from Marshall until they apply for a mortgage. She cannot keep a secret, and is a very caring person and will much of the time do thankless acts for the good of her friends. She is also known to have to pee often, as shown during the episode Duel Citizenship.

She met Marshall and Ted in college and almost immediately started dating Marshall. They were together for about nine years and engaged for almost a year when Lily broke up with Marshall to move to San Fransisco to concentrate on her art. She was there for a summer and came back to NYC but Marshall was too hurt that they stayed separated for another couple months afterward. They eventually patched things up and got married. They moved into an apartment in Dowisetrepla which they do not know at first stands for Down Wind of the Sewage Treatment Plant. They want children, but for awhile are scared so they did not try. Later Lily and Marshall make a bet that once they have seen the doppelganger of every member of their gang they will start trying for a child. By the summer of 2010 they have seen all but Barney’s doppelganger when Lily sees what she thinks his doppelganger (it was not). The rest of the gang knew this meant she was ready for a child and let her believe it. She doesn’t like the word “moist”, and is lactose intolerant. She has a very bad aim.

Barney

Stinson

Portrayed by: Neil Patrick Harris

Tanner Maguire (Child)

Riley Thomas Stewart (Child) First appearance: Pilot Last appearance: Last Forever - Part Two Full name: Barney Stinson, Barney Whittaker Also Known As: Jack Package, The Commodore, Ted Mosby Architect, Barry, Lorenzo Von Matterhorn, Barack Obama Jr., Neil Armstrong, Kristof Doppelganger, Mrs. Stinsfire, Jack Fantastic, Arnie Linson, Barn, The Barn Door, The Barnacle, Barnito Supreme, Broda, Jennifer, Swarley, Swarles, Swarhili, Bob Swarley-man, Swarlay, Swarles Barkley, Swarlos, Swarlitos, Swarshmallow, Keyser Soze, The President of the United States of America, B-Dawg, StinsonNatti, Bro-hio, Diaper Man, Swarleze Theron, Barnabus Stinson Home town: Staten Island, New York Born: Between 1974-1976 Occupation: Employee of AltruCell Corporation

Goliath National Bank Residence: Barney’s Apartment Romances: Robin Scherbatsky (ex-wife)

Shannon (ex-girlfriend)

Nora (ex-girlfriend)

Quinn Garvey (ex-fiancĂŠe)

Barney was born sometime between 1974 and 1976 and grew up in Staten Island.[2] Barney was raised by his single mother, Loretta Stinson, with his older brother, James. James and Barney asked their mother why they had different skin colors, but she would either lie to them with impossible and illogical reasons or attempt to change the subject. Barney would also ask his mother who his father was. Eventually, she would tell Barney that Bob Barker was his father. On July 23, 1981, Barney’s actual father, Jerome Whittaker, took Barney to the National History Museum under the belief he was his “Uncle Jerry”. The six year old Barney knocked down the blue whale that was hung from the museum’s ceiling by throwing a triceratops’ rib at it. When he was returned back to his mother, she was furious and Barney never saw his uncle again and was told that he moved away. The last words that his uncle told him before he left were “Never stop partying”. Throughout his childhood, Barney was constantly lied to by his mother to protect his feelings; for example Barney was told by his mother that he couldn’t play basketball because he was too good and it wasn’t fair for the other kids, but in reality his coach didn’t want him on the team. Barney was also not a popular child and was always picked on. In the seventh grade, Barney was being picked on by Matthew Panning, who was bragging about how he had sex with 100 girls. In response, Barney told Matthew Panning that he would one day sleep with 200 girls, a promise he fulfills. Because Barney grew up in the city, he never learned how to drive.

Barney in 1998 In 1998, Barney had graduated college and was working with his college girlfriend, Shannon, in a coffee shop. Barney had grown up to be somewhat of a hippie. He had planned to join the Peace Corps with Shannon and go to Nicaragua and lose their virginity to one another after they got married. After Shannon did not show up for their departure to Nicaragua, Barney went looking for her. When he found her, she told him that her father, who was still financially supporting her, wouldn’t allow her to leave and told him to go on without her. As Barney was leaving, he decided to go back to the coffee shop to try convince her one more time. When he arrived, he discovered she had in fact been cheating on him with a man named Greg, who had earlier told Barney that the key to picking up women was money and suits. Barney then made a video where he sings a song trying to convince her to get back together with him, but it didn’t work and when he sees her, both she and Greg laugh at him. The yips - Barney and James Barney gets advice from JamesAfter being made a fool of, Barney goes to James for advice. James tells Barney that he needs to lose his virginity and suggests that he loses it to their mother’s 45-year-old friend Rhonda French, who would constantly talk about the guys she slept with in front of them and had the nickname, “The Man Maker”. Barney slept with Rhonda, losing his virginity at the age of 23. Barney’s dress style and personality would then radically change and be similar to Greg, the man that took Shannon away from him, and make

him the man he is currently. At an unknown time between 1998 and 2001, Barney quit his job at the coffee shop and became an employee of the AltruCell Corporation.

In 2001, Barney met Ted Mosby in the men’s bathroom at MacLaren’s.

At the urinal, Barney told Ted a fake story about this being the first time he took his deaf brother out since their mother died and how he puts his dreams on hold to take care of him. Ted believed the story, which surprised Barney and admitted that he made up the story while peeing. Barney asked Ted for his name and before leaving the bathroom he told Ted that he likes him.

Fifteen minutes later, Barney sat down next to Ted and told him that he’s going to teach him how to live. After which he introduced himself and reminded Ted that they met at the urinal. Barney then told Ted to lose his goatee, get a suit, and to not even think about getting married until he’s 30 years old. Barney then told Ted to be silent for the next five minutes as a blonde woman, named Audrey, arrived. Barney then told Audrey that Ted is his deaf brother, Edward.

He then became frightened when Audrey started talking to Ted in sign language. Ted surprised Barney when he replied back in sign language.

Barney believed that Ted went along with Barney’s lie and got Audrey to give Barney her number. Even though the number was fake, Barney considered it a sign that he and Ted were meant to be each other’s wingmen forever. After this Ted and Barney started their friendship.

What really happened was that Ted told Audrey that Barney was lying and told her to give Barney a fake phone number. Soon after, Barney met Marshall Eriksen and Lily Aldrin.

Robin

Scherbatsky

Portrayed by: Cobie Smulders

Olivia Howard Bagg (Age 11)

Shelby Zemanek (Age 8and 6) First appearance: Pilot Last appearance: Last Forever - Part Two Full name: Robin Charles Scherbatsky, Jr. Also Known As: Robin Sparkles Home town: Vancouver, BC (Canada) Born: July 23, 1980 Occupation: Television journalist Residence: Robin’s Apartment (season 1 - 3) The Apartment (season 4 - 5)

with Don Frank (season 5)

The Apartment (season 6 - 7)

with Patrice (Season 7)

Apartment near Central Park (season 7 - 8)

Barney’s Apartment (Season 8 - present) Romances: Simon Tremblay (ex-boyfriend)

Ted Mosby (husband presumed)

Barney Stinson (ex-husband)

Don Frank (ex-boyfriend)

Kevin (ex-fiancé)

Nick Podarutti (ex-boyfriend)

Robin was born in Canada. Her father wanted a son and named her Robin Charles Scherbatsky Jr. (Happily Ever After). At a young age, she cultivated her skeptic mentality when her dog, Sir Scratchewan , “miraculously” transformed into a tortoise as a result of a breakthrough medical procedure “a canine testudine cerebro xenograft” (Miracles). She also displayed her disdain for children, preferring to spend time alone rather than play with younger sister, Katie (Little Boys).

Robin Sr. was a cigar aficionado. Young Robin learned she could gain his favor by displaying interest in the hobby (Zip, Zip, Zip). She eventually would join the pee-wee hockey team much to her father’s pride. However, when she was caught kissing a teammate, her father declared that he “had no son”.

The trauma of being forced to act like a boy to impress him coupled with the fall out from being caught kissing a boy caused things to fall apart with Robin Sr. and Robin moved in with her mother (Happily Ever After). While there are episodes noting her involvement in hockey, she mentions in the episode Slutty Pumpkin that she didn’t play team sports when she was younger, only tennis, which she hated playing doubles.

It was while living with her mother that Robin would embark on journey to become a Canadian pop sensation, going by the name Robin Sparkles. She began by starring on the kids show Space Teens alongside Jessica Glitter and Alan Thicke (Glitter).

Jessica Glitter has been actually Robin’s BFF, until she got pregnant and quickly grew apart from her. Not long after Space Teens, Robin Sparkles would gain notoriety with Let’s Go to the Mall. The song was a minor hit and Robin would spend a year touring the malls of Canada and singing the song (Slap Bet).

Let’s Go to the Mall was followed up with a second song, Sandcastles in the Sand. The love ballad was a flop but it did lead to a romance with Mr. Teen Winnipeg, Simon, who also appeared in the video. The song’s lyrics in many ways mirrored the short relationship Robin would have with Simon who she dated for a week and a half. However, Robin still remembers Simon as her first love (Sandcastles in the Sand).

Robin’s first journalism job was as a cub reporter at Channel 22 in Red Deer, Alberta (The Possimpible). She eventually moved to New York as a field reporter for Metro News 1 where she would do the “fluff pieces at the end of the news” (Pilot).

However, she won a Local Area Media Award for her piece on “Pickles the singing dog” (Mary the Paralegal) and within a year she would rise to the position of lead anchor thanks to the recommendation of the former lead anchor, Sandy Rivers (Come On). It is shown that she has a bad habit of saying the word ‘literally’ many times in conversation (Spoiler Alert). Also she has another habit of saying ‘but...umm’ on live TV (which is turned in a drinking game). (Jenkins)

Robin grew to hate her job and eventually quit to work as a foreign correspondent in Japan (I Heart NJ). Within a week of working there, however, she quit that job and returned to New York (Shelter Island).

Without a job, Robin found herself in danger of being deported back to Canada. Thanks to a new video resume created by Barney, she was able to stave off deportation and land a job hosting a morning show on Channel 12: Come On, Get Up New York! (The Possimpible). After much time at Come On, Get Up New York! Robin decided to pursue a job elsewhere. She debated between a currency rotation specialist (or, as Ted Mosby has called it, coin flip bimbo) for Million Dollar Heads or Tails, a game show with a national audience, and a researching position at World Wide News. Following through with her New Years resolution to obtain a “World Wide News I.D. Badge� she left Come On, Get Up New York! to work there. (False Positive) Robin is sometimes seen as a bit shallow, such as only wanting to go to a hockey game with Barney because he got in a fight. (The Fight) It is later revealed that Robin cannot have kids and that she never became a mother. (Symphony of Illumination)

02

CHAPTER

1

Season

S01E01 Pilot

It’s the year 2030 and an older Ted Mosby is telling the story to his son and daughter about how he met and will eventually marry their mother. This is where we meet for the first time Ted, Lily Marshall, Barney and Robin.

S01E02 Purple Giraffe

After telling Robin that “He loves her”, things fall apart for she and Ted and he figures that it’s all over for the two of them, but not for long as Ted finds out from Lily after she met Robin that she (Robin) likes him and Ted tries once again to win her affections, by throwing a party at his and Marshall’s place, but it turns into 3 parties in 3 nights, when Robin was a no show for the first 2. Meanwhile, after Lily said yes to Marshall’s marriage proposal, she has become extra affectionate to him in the bedroom and Marshall is worrying about finishing a huge paper.

S01E03 The Sweet Taste of Liberty

Rather than go to McLaren’s, their usual hangout, Barney convinces Ted to go to the airport with him to “pick someone up”. It turns out that they’re there to pick up some girls. While doing this, they fly to Philadelphia, get arrested by airport security and that’s when Ted starts to wonder why he ends up in these adventures with Barney. Meanwhile Marshall has studying to do, so Lily and Robin do a girls night out and Lily notices guys are buying drinks and try talking to Robin, so Lily starts to wonder what it would be like to have her engagement ring off, and with...

S01E04 Return of the Shirt

Ted dated a girl, Natalie, three years ago and quickly got annoyed by some of her antics. Therefore he broke up with her, leaving a message on her answering machine on her birthday. His blamed his behavior on his immaturity and after being forgiven by Natalie they end up getting back together. Robin meanwhile realizes that no one is interested in her show and plans to do or say crazy things which Barney dares her to.

S01E05 Okay Awesome

Robin manages to get into OK, an ultra hip exclusive nightclub. Ted and Barney will be going with her, but not Marshall and Lily, as they have been doing a lot of “Classy grown-up things”, as she referred it to and thinks it may be time for she and Marshall to grow up and put behind the things they used to do back in college. While at the club, Robin runs into problems as she cannot get into the VIP Room, then while outside trying to get it straightened out,a different front door bouncer will not let her in, even though she is on their list to get in, but her name is...

S01E06 The Slutty Pumpkin

On Halloween, Robin and her new boyfriend Mike meet for a Double Date with Lily and Marshall, who are eager to win the costume contest. Robin turns out as someone who is not so much into “couple things” so the dinner is not as pleasant as expected. Barney actually wants to take Ted with him to a Victoria Secret’s Party, but Ted heads for a party on the roof of his apartment house, where he a few years ago met a beautiful woman, which is just called the “slutty pumpkin”. Eager to meet her again, because he never had the change to call her because he lost her number, he...

S01E07

S01E08

Matchmaker

The Duel

Barney takes Ted to matchmaker Ellen Pierce, but while Barney gets thrown out, Ellen promises to find a woman for Ted within three days. This promise has disastrous results: the woman that suits him the best has already a boyfriend. Lily and Marshall have problems with some sort of cockroach or mouse that is in the apartment and they cannot get rid of.

Lily moves in with Ted and Marshall and although it was Ted’s idea to ask Lily to move in, he starts to worry that the apartment changes too much with Lily there. Another issue for Ted is who will keep the apartment after Lily and Marshall got married. In the end, a real fight starts between Ted and Marshall over the apartment.

S01E09 Belly Full of Turkey

It’s Thanksgiving and while Lily and Marshall visit his family in Minnesota, Robin and Ted want to volunteer at a homeless shelter kitchen. Surprisingly, Robin and Ted meet Barney at the kitchen, who has been doing volunteer work for the past few years. At the kitchen, Ted meets Amanda, who seems to be a quite nice girl until everything turns out to be different. Lily has some issues with Marshall’s family and is unsure about how her future with Marshall will look like.

S01E10 The Pineapple Incident

In 2030, Ted admits to his kids that he doesn’t remember all the stories from his past, with what he and Marshall call “the pineapple incident” being one of the more fuzzier ones. In late 2005, in the still short time their group of friends has included Robin, she is onto yet another guy (this time a multi-multi-millionaire) while Ted has barely had any women. Barney thinks it’s because Ted over-analyzes every situation. So to lower Ted’s inhibitions, Barney, Marshall and Lily think it would do Ted some good if he downed all five shots that Carl the bartender has made.

S01E11 The Limo

It’s New Year’s Eve 2005 and Ted spends a large portion of his Christmas bonus for a limo for he and the gang.

In addition, he has outlined a plan how they will ring in the New Year. Unfoirtunatley, things don’t always go as planned.

S01E12 The Wedding

Ted is searching for a date for a wedding. He asks Robin to come with him to the wedding as his “date” and she says yes. Problems evolve when the bride-tobe Claudia tells him he didn’t check “plus one” on the reply card and forbids him to bring someone along to the wedding. Ted now has problems to tell Robin that she cannot come with him and asks the Stu, Claudia’s future husband, if he can bring a “date” and he says “yes”. This leads to further problems.

S01E13 Drumroll, Please

Ted meets a beautiful woman named Victoria at Claudia’s and Stu’s wedding and they spend a great time together that night. Unfortunately, Ted and Victoria made a deal that they will never see each other again after that night and they do not exchange telephone numbers or anything else. The morning after the wedding party, Ted wants desperately to see the girl again. So he starts searching for her and asks anyone from the wedding who could have possibly know her, but she seems to be lost.

S01E14 Zip, Zip, Zip

Ted and Victoria had decided to wait for one month before sleeping together, but Victoria forgets that she’ll be out of town on that day. Meanwhile Marshall and Lily celebrate their nine year anniversary, and Barney and Robin have a bros night out.

S01E15

S01E16

Game Night

Cupcake

During a game night Robin gets to meet Victoria. What actually was planned to be a funny night turns quite serious when Barney’s former love Shannon gives an old tape to Lily which shows the “real” Barney. While watching the tape an embarrassed Barney storms off.

When he returns, Barney tells a story from 1998, when he seems to have been a whole different person, and what made him the person he is today. To make Barney feel better, all others also tell their most embarrassing stories.

Victoria is about to leave to go to Germany for two years for a donate fellowship. Ted doesn’t know if he should her ask to stay or if he should tell her to leave. Marshall needs a new suit and Barney helps him. Meanwhile, Robin and Victoria accompany Lily to a wedding dress fitting and also the girls talk about whether Victoria should leave Ted or not.

S01E17 Life Among the Gorillas

After a month of long-distance-relationship with Victoria, she’s already sent Ted three care packages full of stuff he likes, but he hasn’t sent her any. Marshall works in Barney’s office and doesn’t like it all or the people he works with, but Barney talks him once again into keeping the job. Marshall decides that it must be easier to work in the office if he adapts to the people he is working with and gets some “get psyched” training from Barney.

S01E18 Nothing Good Happens After 2 AM

After having quite a rough day and being a little drunk, Robin calls Ted in the middle of the night and asks him if he wants to come over to her place. Ted, of course, says that he will come. On his way to Robin’s apartment, Ted starts to ask himself if it is okay to go to Robin since he still has got his girlfriend Victoria and asks his friends for advice.

S01E19 Mary the Paralegal

Robin invites everybody to a banquet and Ted is insecure about bringing a date or not. Barney offers to hook him up with a prostitute while Robin brings a real date. Ted pretends to be cool with the fact that Robin has moved on, but Robin’s date is her sleazy colleague Sandy Rivers whom Ted and Marshall constantly make jokes about when watching him on TV. With all these people in the same room, the evening seems to be getting interesting.

S01E20 Best Prom Ever

Marshall and Lily finally have got the perfect place they always wanted to get married at. The only problematic thing about this is that the place is only available in two months. So, this means a lot of work for everybody. To listen to a band Marshall wants to play at the wedding, Lily,Barney and Robin sneak into a High School prom.

While the other three are at the prom, Marshall and Ted, who had actually planned a “men’s night”, are wrapping up wedding invitations until Lily wants Marshall to come to the prom too. Of course, Ted comes along too.

S01E21

S01E22

Milk

Come On

It’s Ted’s 28th birthday and he still keeps looking for the perfect girl. Apparantly he is about to find her since the matchmaker he once hired to find him a partner has finally found the perfect match. When he is about to meet her, Lily calls him because she is in trouble. Marshall gets himself into an office war between Barney and some guy named “Clark Butterfield” in which the guys do all kinds of gross things to each other.

Ted makes a final attempt to win Robin’s heart. Marshall and Lily’s relationship is in jeopardy.

03

CHAPTER

2

Season

Marshall becomes predictably depressed and pathetic after the breakup. And it only gets worse when he discovers that Lily may be back in town.

S02E01 Where Were We?

Barney gets Marshall back out on the singles market, but Barney keeps taking all the prospects from him. And Ted’s convinced that Lily is back because she wants Marshall back, even though she says she’s never been better.

S02E02 The Scorpion and the Toad

Ted discovers that his parents are keeping a secret from him after his dad acts as Barney’s wingman, and Marshall and Lily intentionally try to get each other sexually aroused.

S02E03 Brunch

Barney tells Ted that single women like architects. But will Ted use this useful tidbit of information to cheat on Robin after they have their first fight?

S02E04 Ted Mosby, Architect

Lily gets introduced to Barney’s bachelor pad when she needs a place to stay, and Marshall finds a unlikely new friend to join him for brunch, concerts and musicals.

S02E05 World’s Greatest Couple

Ted gets Lily a job at his firm, but she only makes trouble for Ted when he refuses to stand up to his boss. And Barney sleeps with Marshall’s law school professor to help his grades, but she’s less than impressed with his prowess.

S02E06 Aldrin Justice

The guys tell Marshall to stay away from his new date because she has “crazy eyes,” but she couldn’t be any crazier than Lily after she learns that Marshall’s going out on his first new date.

Marshall and Lily elope to Atlantic City, but they discover that getting married in Atlantic City isn’t as easy as getting married in Las Vegas.

S02E07

S02E08

Swarley

Atlantic City

The gang discovers that Robin’s been hiding a huge secret, but they have no idea what it is. Marshall thinks she is married, and Barney thinks she was a porn star.

Barney’s gay black brother is in town, but he doesn’t want to tell Barney that he’s getting married because he’ll be losing his only single sidekick.

S02E09

S02E10

Slap Bet

Single Stamina

Lily takes away her Christmas display after she finds out that Ted called her a bad name while she was broken up with Marshall, and Barney is too sick for his Christmas plans.

S02E11 How Lily Stole Christmas

Robin tries to keep her younger sister from losing her virginity while on vacation in New York, which causes everyone to reminisce about their first times.

S02E12 First Time in New York

Barney asks Lily to paint a nude picture of him after finding her painting of Marshall. And Ted can’t find an opportune time to fire his old boss, who now works for him but still keeps undermining his work.

Everybody misses the Super Bowl because of a funeral.

Therefore, they all try to go 24 hours without finding out who won so that they can watch the game together on Monday night.

S02E13

S02E14

Columns

Monday Night Football

When Ted misses his important business trip to Chicago, he tries to trace his steps back to the original incident that triggered the series of events that made him miss the flight.

S02E15 Lucky Penny

Ted to gets rid of everything he received from other women at Robin’s request, but getting rid of the stuff Robin received from other men won’t be as easy.

Meanwhile, Barney gets revenge on Lily for making him attend her terrible play.

S02E16 Stuff

When Marshall’s car doesn’t quite make it to 200,000 miles without dying completely, everybody reminisces about their greatest memories with the car.

S02E17 Arrivederci, Fiero

Ted and Robin decide to move in together, but nobody appears to be happy with the new living arrangements, especially Barney.

S02E18 Moving Day

Ted changes Barney’s bachelor party plans for Marshall at the last minute, so that it won’t just consist of gambling and cheap strippers. And Robin gets Lily an inappropriate shower party gift.

S02E19 Bachelor Party

Barney becomes a contestant on “The Price Is Right” so that he can confront Bob Barker, because he is believes that the game show host is his biological father.

S02E20 Showdown

Marshall and Lily’s wedding is destined to become a disaster, until fate intervenes and makes it perfect.

S02E21 Something Borrowed

As the happy couple celebrate their wedding, Ted and Robin tell Barney about the latest development of their relationship.

S02E22 Something Blue

04

CHAPTER

3

Season

S03E01 Wait for It

Ted’s still not ready to date months after his breakup with Robin. But when Robin returns to New York with an exotic new boyfriend, he decides it’s time to finally do something adventurous.

S03E02 We’re Not from Here

Ted and Barney pose as tourists to pick up on a couple of New York women, and Robin starts getting fed up with her new boyfriend.

S03E03 Third Wheel

Ted has a chance for a threesome with two women, but Barney and Lily try to sabotage it. Meanwhile, Robin’s date also goes better than expected, if only she can find a razor.

S03E04 Little Boys

Robin tries to date a guy with a child, even though she does not like or want children. Meanwhile, Ted finds it impossible to make it with a woman he knows that Barney slept with a year ago.

S03E05 How I Met Everyone Else

While everyone meets Ted’s new crazy girlfriend, everyone recounts their stories of how they met everyone else. But the stories turn out to have several inconsistencies.

S03E06 I’m Not That Guy

Ted discovers that a porn star is using his name. Marshall is wined and dined by a firm that defends polluters, and Lily’s spending habits may force him to take the job.

S03E07 Dowisetrepla

Marshall and Lily decide to buy a new home, which forces Lily to finally confront Marshall about her credit card debt.

S03E08 Spoiler Alert

The guys shatter Ted’s impressions of his new girlfriend by telling him she talks too much. Ted responds by turning the tables on his friends, and they react by pointing out Ted’s worst flaw.

S03E09

S03E10

Slapsgiving

The Yips

Marshall warns Barney that the third slap in their “slap bet” will be coming on Thanksgiving night. Meanwhile, Ted and Robin sleep together on the night before Thanksgiving.

Barney has trouble hitting on women at the Victoria’s Secret after party and so has to return to the woman who took his virginity.

S03E11 The Platinum Rule

Barney and the gang try to convince Ted not to date the doctor that is removing his tattoo by giving examples of the Platinum Rule.

S03E12 No Tomorrow

On St-Patrick’s Day, Ted follows Barney to a bar to party like there’s no tomorrow, while Robin discovers something strange about Marshall and Lily’s new apartment.

S03E13 Ten Sessions

As the search for Mrs. Right continues, Ted woos his dermatologist Stella -- but her receptionist, Abby, seems more interested in him.

S03E14 The Bracket

One of Barney’s exes is sabotaging his love life, but he doesn’t know who. So he makes a NCAA Basketball Tournament-style bracket to figure out which women he wronged the worst.

S03E15 The Chain of Screaming

Marshall cries in front of his boss after he chews him out, and everybody gives Marshall their own unique advice on how to confront his boss about the situation.

S03E16 Sandcastles in the Sand

Robin gives romance a second try with an old boyfriend, only to have him break her heart...again.

S03E17

S03E18

The Goat

Rebound Bro

Barney is upset because he violated his own “bro code” by sleeping with Robin. How will Ted react when he learns that Barney slept with his ex-girlfriend?

Barney finds a new wingman to replace Ted, but he’s painfully shy and awkward around women. Meanwhile Ted discovers that his new girlfriend Stella hasn’t had sex in 5 years.

S03E19

S03E20

Everything Must Go

Miracles

Barney helps Abby get back at Ted by staging a fake proposal, but Abby doesn’t realize that it’s fake. Lily decides to sell some of her paintings so that she and Marshall can pay for floor repairs at their new place.

Ted breaks up with Stella but immediately wants to take it back after a life-changing experience. However, Stella doesn’t realize that he broke up with her.

Meanwhile, Barney has a serious accident on his way to see Ted in the hospital.

05

CHAPTER

4

Season

Ted and Stella get engaged, but Ted soon learns that he doesn’t know anything about her. Meanwhile, Barney confesses to Lily that he’s in love with Robin

S04E01 Do I Know You?

Marshall claims that he had the best hamburger in the world during his first week in New York City, but he forgot where the burger joint is located. The gang then hits the streets of Manhattan to help him find it.

S04E02 The Best Burger in New York

Ted does not want to move in with Stella because he hates New Jersey. Robin prematurely quits her TV job because she incorrectly thinks that she already has a new job.

S04E03 I Heart NJ

Ted, Robin, Marshall, and Lily all begin getting cold feet because of their imminent life changes, and Barney tries to prove that he can pick up a woman while posing as an 80-year-old man.

S04E04 Intervention

Ted and Stella move up their wedding date, but the wedding may not go off as planned after Ted breaks the “No Exes Rule� and invites Robin to come in from Japan for the wedding.

S04E05 Shelter Island

The gang tries to hide from Stella when they discover that they are eating at the same restaurant.

S04E06 Happily Ever After

While Barney celebrates a pregnancy false alarm, Marshall and Lily try to figure out if it’s time to have a baby.

Lily is disappointed to discover that Robin is secretly a “Woooo! Girl,” and Barney secretly sabotages Ted’s chance to get the contract to design a new bank skyscraper.

S04E07

S04E08

Not a Father’s Day

Woooo!

When the gang learns that a bold, desperation date move got Robin into bed, Ted and Barney decide to try it out for themselves.

S04E09 The Naked Man

The guys get invited to fight alongside Doug the Bartender. However, the fight doesn’t go exactly how they imagined it to.

S04E10 The Fight

Ted tries to keep his irresponsible sister from hooking up with Barney during her trip to New York, and Robin starts hanging out with Marshall at a bar for Minnesotans, not telling them that she’s really Canadian.

Ted and Robin discover that sex with each other solve their fights as roommates, which makes Barney very jealous and angry. Meanwhile, Marshall reveals that he’s too embarrassed to use the office bathroom.

S04E11

S04E12

Little Minnesota

Benefits

During a historic blizzard, Ted and Barney get an opportunity to run their own bar, while Marshall and Lily try to defy the odds and continue one of their cherished traditions.

S04E13 Three Days of Snow

Robin needs to find a television job in seven days or else she loses her work visa, and Barney volunteers to come to her aid. Meanwhile, Ted, Marshall, and Lily consider cleaning up their resumes

S04E14 The Possimpible

The guys find out that Barney is pretending to have a wife and son to make his mother happy, but the charade is blown when Ted makes a move on Barney’s “wife.”

S04E15 The Stinsons

Ted meets with his ex-girlfriend from college--a girlfriend who cheated on him constantly and Marshall and Lily can’t stand, and Marshall tells the story about how he forgot to bring his pants to work.

S04E16 Sorry, Bro

Ted becomes angry with Lily when he finds out that she has been sabotaging all his relationships that she did not approve of, including his relationship with Robin.

S04E17 The Front Porch

Barney and Marshall don’t tell Ted that the plans for the building he has been working on have been scrapped, and the guys try to figure out which Canadian celebrity Robin slept with.

S04E18 Old King Clancy

Barney tries to do all the items on Ted’s “I’m to old for this stuff” list, while Marshall’s over-competitive side comes out when he coaches Lily’s Kindergarten basketball team.

S04E19 Murtaugh

Ted’s plans to make his own design firm in his apartment hit a snag when his personal assistant begins sleeping with Robin, and Marshall tries to find a way to make himself indispensable at his workplace.

S04E20 Mosbius Designs

Ted gets around the three-day rule by texting a woman he just met, but he doesn’t realize that he’s actually texting Barney and Marshall.

S04E21 The Three Days Rule

Ted recounts the series of random events that lead up to the chance meeting with the woman who would eventually become his wife.

S04E22 Right Place Right Time

Stella’s boyfriend Tony breaks up with her after having a conversation with Ted, prompting Stella to come back to Ted with a surprising request.

S04E23 As Fast as She Can

While Ted struggles with an unorthodox architecture project, Robin finds out that Barney is in love with her, and Marshall threatens to take a long-considered leap from the roof to a neighboring building.

S04E24 The Leap

06

CHAPTER

5

Season

S05E01 Definitions

As Ted begins his new career as a professor and is about to meet his future wife, Lily forces Barney and Robin to have “the talk” and define their new relationship.

S05E02 Double Date

Ted goes on a blind date with the same woman he went on a blind date with seven years ago, and Barney and Marshall find Lily’s stripper look-alike.

S05E03 Robin 101

When Robin fears that Barney is cheating on her, she soon discovers that he is spending his evenings with Ted learning everything there is to know on how to date her.

S05E04 The Sexless Innkeeper

When Lily and Marshall realize that Robin and Barney are the perfect double-date friends, they try too hard to impress and come on too strong. Meanwhile, Ted gets a new nickname from Barney after an unsuccessful hook-up.

S05E05 Duel Citizenship

Ever since Marshall and Lily got married, Ted feels that his “best bro” Marshall has turned from being a “me” to a “we”. That’s why Ted is so excited when Marshall agrees to recreate one of their crazy college road trips to Chicago’s Gazola’s pizza joint, which is closing. But this trip is not quite what Ted was expecting as Marshall invites Lily. As Lily’s presence changes the nature of the road trip, Ted tries to regain what he wanted this trip to be. Meanwhile, Robin may be deported unless she becomes a US citizen.

Robin, a patriotic Canadian, isn’t sure if she.

S05E06 Bagpipes

Despite their best efforts to be the perfect couple, Barney’s know-it-all attitude gets him in trouble with Robin and they are forced to ask Marshall and Lily for relationship advice.

S05E07 The Rough Patch

After Barney and Robin hit a rough patch in their relationship, Lily devises the perfect plan to break them up, calling in help from Robin’s famous friend, Alan Thicke.

S05E08 The Playbook

When Barney hooks up with a woman Lily had been saving for Ted, she gets revenge by stealing his “playbook,” which contains all the moves he uses to pick up women. But will Barney have the last laugh?

S05E09 Slapsgiving 2: Revenge of the Slap

Barney freaks out when Marshall bequeaths a “slap bet” slap to Ted and Robin. Meanwhile, Lily’s estranged father shows up for Thanksgiving.

S05E10 The Window

Maggie a girl next door Ted has wanted to date for years has suddenly broken up with her latest boyfriend, giving him and many other guys a chance to score with her.

S05E11 Last Cigarette Ever

Although he vowed to Robin and Marshall that he would never tell them, Ted finally tells his kids that at one time both Robin and Marshall used to smoke. In 2009, they both felt like they had good reason to do so. Marshall, only an occasional smoker, always said that each cigarette was his last. But when his old boss, the meanest man nicknamed Artillery Arthur, became his new boss, he thought he was going to be fired again. So when Marshall found out that Arthur was a smoker, Marshall used it as a bonding mechanism to keep his job. Robin, at the time anchoring the journal.

S05E12 Girls Vs. Suits

Barney chooses between wearing suits and sleeping with a sexy bartender. Meanwhile, Ted gets ever closer to meeting “the mother�.

S05E13

S05E14

Jenkins

Perfect Week

When Marshall finds out he’s the “reacher” in his relationship with Lily and not the “settler,” he considers pursuing a sexy and cool female coworker.

Meanwhile, Ted finds out Robin is a drinking game for his architecture students.

When Barney is about to complete the perfect week landing seven different girls in seven days - the gang roots him on in order to forget about their own miserable week.

S05E15 Rabbit or Duck

Barney runs into problems when he displays his cell phone number during the Super Bowl, Ted asks Marshall and Lily to arrange a marriage for him, and Robin thinks that her co-anchor has asked her out on a date.

S05E16 Hooked

When the gang tries to convince Ted that he is being strung along by Tiffany, they reflect about relationships where each of them has been in the same situation.

S05E17 Of Course

After the guys discover that Robin deliberately got Barney hooked up with an incompatible female writer, they find out that that they didn’t realize that Robin hasn’t been handling their breakup very well.

S05E18 Say Cheese

Ted angers Lily when he brings a random date to her birthday party, so she is forced to remind him of all the other random women he has brought along to important functions, only to discover that they weren’t “the one.”

S05E19 Zoo or False

Marshall comes up with a number of different outrageous and embarrassing stories to explain how he was mugged in Central Park, but which of his stories is the truth?

S05E20 Home Wreckers

Ted reacts to his mom’s second wedding by making the capricious decision to buy his “dream house,” while everyone tries to figure out whether Barney or Robin cried at the wedding.

S05E21 Twin Beds

As Robin contemplates moving in with her new boyfriend Don, Ted and Barney both decide that they want her back. Meanwhile, Marshall and Lily think they’ve revolutionized modern marriage when they begin sleeping in separate beds.

S05E22 Robots Vs. Wrestlers

Barney is worried that the old gang is falling apart when Ted blows off a “Wrestlers vs. Robots” competition so that he can stay at a snobby party.

S05E23 The Wedding Bride

Ted is livid when he discovers that the man Stella left Ted for at the altar wrote a blockbuster movie about the incident, and portrays Ted as the bumbling, meanspirited bad guy.

S05E24 Doppelgangers

Marshall and Lily think they’ve spotted Barney’s doppelganger, which means that they can start trying to have a baby, but it’s really Barney in disguise.

Meanwhile, Ted goes blonde and Robin considers taking an anchor job in Chicago.

07

CHAPTER

Season

6

Ted musters up the courage to talk to a girl at the bar, but then discovers she’s there with one of his exes.

Meanwhile, Lily is mad at Marshall because he told his dad they’re trying to have a baby, and Robin lets herself go.

The gang accompanies Barney and his brother James after they find the man who may be Barney’s father, but it turns out to be James’ father instead.

S06E01

S06E02

Big Days

Cleaning House

When Ted declines Barney’s offer to design the new GNB building, Barney ties to woo him by using all of his best womanizing tactics. Meanwhile, Robin is still not over her relationship with Don and drunk dials him.

S06E03 Unfinished

The guys race each other, each using a different form of transportation, from the pub to a restaurant seven miles away because a friend claims that Woody Allen is there.

S06E04 Subway Wars

Is Ted having second thoughts about designing GNB’s new skyscraper because it would tear down a landmark, or because he’s trying to impress a woman?

Meanwhile, Lily shares a secret about Robin’s new boyfriend with Marshall.

S06E05 Architect of Destruction

Marshall takes steps to make sure that he and Lily have a baby boy, but Lily has other ideas. Meanwhile, when Ted begins dating Robin’s co-anchor, Barney is inspired to use baby talk to pick up women, and Robin feels betrayed.

S06E06 Baby Talk

Marshall struggles to fire an incompetent employee, everyone tries to figure out whom Robin slept with Halloween night, and Zoey, the GNB skyscraper protester, finds a way to turn Ted’s class against him.

S06E07 Canning Randy

Ted and Zoey’s feud continues during a fundraiser at the Museum of Natural History. Meanwhile, Marshall confesses to Lily that he enjoys his job at GNB, and a prank by Barney and Robin may lead Barney to his real father

S06E08 Natural History

While Barney finds a new video from Robin’s Canadian teen star past, Lily fears that a baby could come between her friendship with Robin. Meanwhile, Ted’s obnoxious old friend, “Punchy,” comes from Cleveland for a visit.

S06E09 Glitter

When Ted leaves the bar early to prepare a Thanksgiving feast for his friends, the gang winds up partying all night with The Blitz, an old friend from college who has bad luck. As a result, Ted is forced to spend Thanksgiving with Zoey.

S06E10 Blitzgiving

Ted goes on a boating trip with Zoey’s husband, “The Captain.” Menawhile, Barney’s “Mermaid Theory” prevents Marshal from having a nice dinner with Robin, and the narrator tries to recall the details of a fight between Lily and Barney.

S06E11 The Mermaid Theory

Barney and Robin contemplate drastic positive changes in their lives when Marshall and Lily announce that Lily is pregnant, but renege on their promises when Marshall and Lily tell them that it was a false positive.

S06E12 False Positive

Marshall suspects that he is the reason Lily can’t get pregnant after meeting a fertility doctor who also happens to be Barney’s doppelganger. Meanwhile, Robin’s embarrassing past is revealed at work by her former co-anchor.

S06E13 Bad News

The gang tries to support Marshall and Lily tries to help his mom during Marshall’s father’s funeral, but Marshall becomes preoccupied when he discovers that he has one final voicemail message from him.

S06E14 Last Words

Ted discovers that he is in love with Zoey after she tries to set him up on a date with her naive cousin, and he cuts off their friendship as a result. But little does he know that her marriage status has changed and she loves him too.

S06E15 Oh Honey

Lily goes to Minnesota to bring Marshall back, but he’s not ready to leave yet. Meanwhile, Ted and Zoey’s relationship gets off to a rocky start, and Barney searches for a female “victim” the night before Valentine’s Day.

S06E16 Desperation Day

The Captain asks Ted to help find out who stole Zoey away from him, Marshall withholds sex until he does something to help the environment, and Barney is reluctant to admit that he has a crush on Robin’s friend.

S06E17 Garbage Island

The gang gets mad at Barney when he lies to Nora and says he wants to get married and have a family to impress her, and Robin begins dating a guy who seems to possess several canine characteristics.

S06E18 A Change of Heart

Barney finally meets his biological father, but is disappointed to discover that he leads a boring life and is nothing like him.

S06E19 Legendaddy

Despite Zoey still opposing the new GNB headquarters being built on the Arcadian Hotel site, Ted and Zoey’s personal relationship is thriving. That issue is only one of the many disagreements in their life, which Ted likens to the two challenging each other mentally. On the other hand, he sees Marshall and Lily’s relationship as being boring, as they agree on everything to the point of them almost melding into one person. Lily and Marshall, on the other hand, see their relationship as being supportive, the way that relationships should be, whereas they see Ted. S06E20 The Exploding Meatball Sub

When Barney tries to bond with his father, he asks the gang to help make his life seem more exciting by lying about their own lives. Meanwhile, Robin runs into a guy she has a crush on.

When Marshall switches sides on the Arcadian dispute, his friendship with Barney is compromised and the gang is banned from the bar. Meanwhile, Ted finally finds the courage to confront Zoey about the same topic.

S06E21

S06E22

Hopeless

The Perfect Cocktail

Ted is forced to make the final decision on whether he thinks The Arcadian should be declared a landmark, and his future with Zoey and Barney’s future at GNB hinge on his decision.

S06E23 Landmarks

In the aftermath of Ted and Zoey’s break-up, Ted is having second thoughts. He is freaking out about an issue with the GNB headquarters, and historically when Ted freaks out about something, he turns to dating an old girlfriend if only for something comfortable and familiar, however bad returning to that relationship ended up being. When Barney and Robin find out that Ted is going to meet Zoey to get back together with her, they have to try and figure out where that meeting place is so that they can stop him.

Beyond piecing together this puzzle.

S06E24 Challenge Accepted

08

CHAPTER

Season

7

S07E01 The Best Man

While Barney prepares for his wedding to a mystery bride, he and Ted reminisce about Punchy’s wedding, including when Marshall and Lily announced they were having a baby. Meanwhile, Robin considers telling Barney she has feelings for him.

S07E02 The Naked Truth

Ted tries to choose a date for the Architect’s Ball, an embarrassing Internet video could cost Marshall a new job, and Barney makes a bold move to prove to Nora that he’s a changed man.

S07E03 Ducky Tie

At the Architect’s Ball, Ted runs into Victoria, who tells him that she’s getting married. Meanwhile, Barney places an unlikely wager with Marshall and Lily in order to see Lily’s breasts.

S07E04 The Stinson Missile Crisis

Jealous over Barney’s relationship with Nora, Robin tells her court-appointed therapist the series of events that led up to the assault that she committed.

S07E05 Field Trip

Robin tries to date her therapist, Marshall thinks his boss has gone soft on environmentalism, Barney suspects that Nora may be lying about her age, and Ted takes his Intro to Architecture class on the worst field trip ever.

S07E06 Mystery vs. History

ed agrees to go on a date without researching each other on the Internet beforehand, Barney urges Marshall and Lily to find out and reveal the gender of their child, and Kevin tries but fails to avoid passing judgment on the group.

S07E07

S07E08

Noretta

The Slutty Pumpkin Returns

Kevin’s declaration that everybody marries their parents ruins Marshall and Lily’s romantic evening, but will anything keep Barney from getting lucky with Nora?

And will Kevin finally get fed up with Ted and Robin’s close relationship?

Ted finds his long lost crush from a Halloween party 10 years ago, but will there be any chemistry? Meanwhile, Lily’s “pregnancy brain” convinces her to move to the suburbs, and Barney finds out he’s one-quarter Canadian.

S07E09 Disaster Averted

The gang explains to Kevin the origins of the “No boogie-boarding” sign in front of McClaren’s, which has to do with hurricane Irene. Meanwhile, Barney negotiates with Marshall about how to get out of wearing the ducky tie.

S07E10 Tick Tick Tick

Barney and Robin are afraid to break the news to Nora and Kevin that they cheated with each other and want to get back together, while Ted and Marshall get stoned together at a concert.

S07E11 The Rebound Girl

While Robin tries to talk Marshall and Lily out of moving to Long Island, Ted and Barney make the decision to become “bro-parents.”

S07E12 Symphony of Illumination

After Robin tells Barney that she’s pregnant with his child, she receives some shocking news from her doctor.

Meanwhile, a neighborhood teen plays a trick on Marshall while he decorates his house with Christmas lights.

S07E13

S07E14

Tailgate

46 Minutes

After celebrating New Year’s Eve, Marshall visits his father’s graveside to carry on their tradition of tailgating. Meanwhile, Barney and Ted open a bar called “Puzzles,” and Robin is forced to fill in for an inebriated news anchor.

While Marshall and Lily spend their first night in their new home after deciding to permanently move to Long Island, Barney takes over as group leader in Manhattan-both with disastrous results.

S07E15 The Burning Beekeeper

Lily and Marshall throw a housewarming party, where Ted nearly comes to blows with Marshall’s boss, and Barney hits on a crazy divorcee.

S07E16 The Drunk Train

Kevin proposes to Robin, but will he take it back when Robin tells him she can’t have children? Meanwhile, Barney and Ted try to score on the “drunk train” to Long Island, but something is surprisingly holding Barney back.

S07E17 No Pressure

While Ted waits to find out whether Robin loves him back, he discovers that Marshall and Lily have been trying to influence him in opposite directions to win a bet.

Meanwhile, Barney tries to find Marshall and Lily’s sex tape.

S07E18 Karma

Barney gets played and heart-broken over a stripper named “Karma,” Robin becomes bored with her life on Long Island with Marshall and Lily, while Ted searches for a hobby to fill the empty space in Robin’s old room.

S07E19 The Broath

The gang tries to break up Barney and Quinn after learning they plan on moving in together, leaving Robin and Ted to fight over who deserves to sublet her apartment.

S07E20 Trilogy Time

As Ted, Marshall, and Barney get together for their annual viewing of the original Star Wars trilogy, Ted begins to question if he will ever end up where he wants to be especially now that Barney and Quinn are getting serious.

S07E21 Now We’re Even

Just as Ted starts to settle into his new apartment alone, Barney tries to entice him into going out every single night. Meanwhile, Lily has a naughty dream about someone other then Marshall, and Robin finally becomes a famous news anchor.

S07E22 Good Crazy

Barney tries to set Ted up on dates so that he can forget about Robin, while also plotting to get Quinn out of her stripping job. Meanwhile, Lily sends Marshall on a getaway so that he will stop stressing over the baby.

S07E23 The Magician’s Code: Part 1

Ted and Robin take care of Lily when she goes into labor because Marshall is drunk and stuck in Atlantic City with Barney.

S07E24 The Magician’s Code: Part 2

Ted makes a fateful phone call to his old girlfriend Victoria, Barney’s magic trick gets him in trouble with airport security just as he’s about to leave on a trip with Quinn, and Robin tries to take the perfect birth announcement photo.

09

CHAPTER

Season

8

Ted convinces Victoria to take a brief detour before they leave together after she leaves her fiancé at the altar, and Barney’s engagement to Quinn may be short-lived after she finds about his past relationship with Robin.

S08E01 Farhampton

Barney’s ridiculous pre-nup that he asks Quinn to sign gives the other guys ideas of their own, but the girls find a way to retaliate.

S08E02 The Pre-Nup

When Lily and Marshall have trouble finding a nanny, they learn it’s because of an elaborate scheme Barney came up with to meet girls. Meanwhile, Robin and Ted butt heads over who has a more serious relationship.

When Lily and Marshall can’t decide on godparents for Marvin, they put the gang to the test to see who would make the best one.

S08E03

S08E04

Nannies

Who Wants to Be a Godparent

As the season of break-ups continues, Ted and Victoria must choose the next step in their long and complicated relationship. Meanwhile, Robin worries about Barney when he chooses a dog to be his wingman.

S08E05 The Autumn of Breakups

When Robin is hesitant to break up with Nick, Barney takes matters into his own hands. Meanwhile, Lily and Marshall are desperate for some private time.

S08E06 Splitsville

Marshall gets in the doghouse at work after he recommends a friend for a job, Robin helps Barney find a new strip club, and Ted is embarrassed after watching his video diary from college.

S08E07 The Stamp Tramp

While Marshall faces the most important court case of his career against his new arch-nemesis, Brad Morris, the rest of the gang tries to figure out which one was the biggest bad-ass in their youth.

S08E08 Twelve Horny Women

Robin has a plan to get Barney out of her system for good, Ted witnesses Marvin’s first crawl while babysitting for Marshall and Lily, and Barney has a new business idea after destroying a beloved tie.

S08E09 Lobster Crawl

Robin tries to get Barney’s “Playbook” out of jealousy over his new girlfriend, Marshall catches his mom having sex with Lily’s dad, and Ted tries to get everything back that was borrowed from him and never returned.

S08E10 The Over-Correction

Ted wants to rub his new building in the face of an old professor, Barney is the victim of a lengthy jinx, Marshall and Lily run into an annoying old acquaintance, and Robin gets an opportunity to fire Patrice.

S08E11 The Final Page: Part One

Will Ted go to the opening of his new building with Robin as his date, or will he break his promise to Barney and tell her that Barney is proposing to Patrice? Meanwhile, Marshall and Lily have big plans for a rare night out.

S08E12 The Final Page: Part Two

Robin’s dad denies Barney permission to marry his daughter, Marshall and Lily deal with Marvin’s constipation, and why is Ted so dead-set against hiring a band for Barney and Robin’s wedding?

Barney convinces Ted to sleep with a 20 year old until Barney learns her identity, Robin discovers that her engagement ring makes her invisible, and a leather cuff improves Marshall and Lily’s love life.

S08E13

S08E14

Band or DJ?

Ring Up!

Robin’s past as a Canadian pop star is revisited when Barney uncovers the lost episode of a music documentary series in which she was featured as Robin Sparkles. Marshall and Lily have some concerns about Ted’s latest girlfriend.

S08E15 P.S. I Love You

Ted’s attempt to break up with his crazy new girlfriend does not go as planned, and Robin’s fear of holding Marvin leads to an adventure with Mike Tyson.

S08E16 Bad Crazy

When Ted receives an unexpected call from The Captain, the gang reminisced about their last awkward encounter with him.

S08E17 The Ashtray

Barney is forced to break out “The Playbook” one final time to keep Ted from getting back together with Jeanette and taking her to his wedding, and Marshall embarrasses Lily at an art exhibition.

S08E18 Weekend at Barney’s

It’s weeks before Barney and Robin’s wedding, and one of the many things they still have to decide is where to live. The one thing Robin insists is that they don’t live at Barney’s apartment. So it goes on the market. However, Barney doesn’t want to sell it to just anyone, but someone who is worthy of what was and will always be in his heart his “Fortress of Barnitude”.

Robin has a slightly different idea, which isn’t as easy to achieve as she would like when she and others learn more and more about with what Barney has equipped his apartment.

S08E19 The Fortress

Ted and Barney run into their future selves as they debate whether to go to “Wrestlers vs. Robots,” while Robin and Marshall argue over who gets credit for a new drink at McLaren’s.

S08E20 The Time Travelers

“The Captain” offers Lily a job in Rome, but will she take it? Meanwhile, Ted won’t stop raving about the body of Barney and Robin’s wedding planner.

S08E21 Romeward Bound

Ted and Marshall turn Barney’s bachelor party into the worst night of his life, or is that exactly what they want him to believe?

S08E22 The Bro Mitzvah

Robin searches for a locket that she buried in Central Park for her wedding, Ted helps Marshall and Lily pack for Italy, and Barney plays laser tag with his future father in law.

S08E23 Something Old

As the wedding approaches, Barney and Robin deliberately ruin an obnoxious couple’s evening, Marshall and Lily’s plans for Italy hit a snag, Ted tells Lily that he’s moving to Chicago, and the “mother” buys her ticket to Farhampton.

S08E24 Something New

10

CHAPTER

Season

9

S09E01 The Locket

Lily meets an interesting person on the train to Farhampton, Marshall gets kicked off his flight to New York, Barney and Robin discover that they might be related, and Ted prepares to deliver a personal gift to Robin.

Marshall is forced to rent a car to get to New York, causing Lily to start drinking and accidentally reveal to Barney some bad news about his brother’s marriage.

S09E02 Coming Back

Barney and Robin try to have sex before the elderly wedding guests arrive, Ted reveals a list to Lily of things to do before he leaves New York, and Marshall has problems traveling through Packer Country

S09E03 Last Time in New York

Barney gives Ted’s Best Man duties to The Karate Kid’s William Zabka over the incident at the carousel, and Lily gives Robin a lousy bridal party.

S09E04 The Broken Code

Barney is upset after Robin wins James’s wedding ring during the poker game, and Ted argues with Marshall and Lily over whether he gave them a wedding gift.

S09E05 The Poker Game

When Ted finds himself with three prospects to be his date for the wedding weekend, he chooses poorly.

Meanwhile, Barney and Robin have a confrontation with their minister, and Marshall learns more about his driving companion, Daphne.

S09E06 Knight Vision

S09E07 No Questions Asked

When Daphne sends a troubling text message to Lily, Marshall enlists the gang’s help to remove the message while enforcing the “No Questions Asked” rule..

AWhen Robin and Loretta’s conflict escalates, Barney is caught in the middle. Meanwhile, Marshall and Daphne deal with a stowaway on their road trip, and Ted and Cassie try to enjoy a trip to a lighthouse.

S09E08 The Lighthouse

After Robin finds out her mother isn’t coming to the wedding, the group recalls a fateful night six months ago when Barney accepted the “challenge” of a lifetime, and Ted made a decision about his pursuit of Robin.

S09E09 Platonish

Barney and James fight over which one of their fathers will get back together with their mom, Ted becomes a victim of “Zabkatage,” and Daphne becomes inexplicably upset with Marshall.

S09E10 Mom and Dad

S09E11 Bedtime Stories

On the bus to Farhampton, Marshall tells Marvin bedtime stories about Ted, Robin and Barney in rhyme.

S09E12 The Rehearsal Dinner

Barney becomes fixated on having his rehearsal dinner at a laser tag arena, much to Robin’s dismay. Meanwhile, Ted doesn’t come through on a promise, which aggravates Lily.

S09E13 Bass Player Wanted

The gang encounters a guy at the wedding who intentionally stirs up trouble among them, and Marshall finally arrives at the Farhampton Inn.

S09E14 Slapsgiving 3: Slappointment in Slapmarra

In an attempt to deliver a devastating final slap to Barney, Marshall explains how he mastered the Slap of A Million Exploding Suns.

S09E15

S09E16

Unpause

How Your Mother Met Me

Robin and Ted take advantage of Barney when he becomes “truth serum drunk,” and Marshall does everything he can to remain in “pause” with Lily and avoid their fight.

The story of The Mother, from her traumatic 21st birthday to a number of close calls with meeting Ted to the night before Barney and Robin’s wedding.

S09E17 Sunrise

While out looking for Barney on the day of the wedding, Robin and Ted reminisce about past relationships. Meanwhile, Marshall and Lily finally resolve their issues and Barney befriends two young guys eager to meet women.

On their wedding day, Barney has a massive hangover.

The gang tries to help him get over the hangover by finding the correct ingredients.

S09E18 Rally

S09E20 Daisy

The guys try to figure out where Lily went after her fight with Marshall and why. Meanwhile, after a talk with her mother, Robin is concerned that she is marrying her father.

Lily is concerned that Robin is not acting appropriately on her wedding day, Ted helps Barney pick his wedding suit, and the gang watch an embarrassing movie based on Ted’s life.

S09E19 Vesuvius

Ted wants to get a wedding guest he especially despises to leave, but Lily wants him to stay because she likes him.

S09E21 Gary Blauman

With only half an hour to go, both Barney and Robin have panic attacks about their upcoming nuptials. Meanwhile, Marshall and Lily rewrite their old wedding vows.

S09E22 The End of the Aisle

S09E23 Last Forever: Part One

After Barney and Robin’s wedding, Ted builds up the courage to approach “the mother” at the train station.

Meanwhile, three years after the wedding, Barney and Robin drop a bombshell on the group.

S09E24 Last Forever: Part Two

As the years go on, changes cause the group to drift apart, but they reunite one more time for Ted’s wedding.

Meanwhile, a monumental event causes Barney to finally change his ways.

11

CHAPTER

Objects

Episodes: Pilot Come On Somenthing Blue Twin Beds No Pressure Platonish Last Forever part 2

The Blue French Horn first appeared in the Pilot episode, in which Ted steals it for Robin after she saw it in a restaurant called “Carmichaels” and he said it reminded him of a ‘Smurf penis’ and she said she’d like one for her apartment. From this point onwards, Robin kept in on the mantle in her apartment.

Blue French Horn

Episodes: Little Minnesota Zip, Zip, Zip The Three Days Rule Best Prom Ever Brunch The Platinum Rule How I Met Everyone Else We’re Not From Here I Heart NJ Slapsgiving Slutty Pumpkin The Limo The Duel

The Bro Code is a set of rules, seemingly started by Barney. A published version of the book, first shown in The Goat is now available in paperback and audiobook. The published version was written by Barney Stinson with Matt Kuhn.

In the year 1776, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington were having a drink in Philadelphia when Franklin accused Washington of “codpiece block[ing]” him. Washington remarked there was no rule against it and Franklin insisted that there should be. Barnabus Stinson stepped in and offered to write this collection of rules when Washington and Franklin each said they were too busy. The first article mentioned referred to the avoidance of eye contact during a devil’s threeway.

The Bro Code

Episodes: Rabbit or Duck.

Sweet Taste of Liberty.

The Naked Man. The Bracket.

I Heart NJ. Intervention.

The Over-Correction.

The Final Page - Part Two. The Ashtray Weekend at Barney’s.

The Playbook is a book authored

by Barney Stinson that contains a collection of scams Barney uses for picking up women. The Playbook was first seen in the episode “The Playbook “ but then it disappears for a while and all we hear about it through plays Barney talks about. The next time we see The Playbook is season 8 episode 10 “The Over-Correction “ where Robin breaks into Barney’s apartment to reveal to Patrice (Barney’s girlfriend at the time) what a player he once was and whilst doing so Robin gets herself, Ted and Lily trapped in Barney’s apartment.

Whilst trappped in Barney’s apartment they witness Barney burns The Playbook as the group watch Barney’s life’s work gone just like that. But Barney being Barney has a spare copy even more “Legendairy” than before, The Playbook makes a return but not in its full form in season 8 episode 12 “The Final Page - Part Two “ towards the end of the episode Ted tells Robin about Barney proposal to Patrice on the top of the World Wide News Network, Robin wanting to tell Barney she loves him goes to the top of the World Wide News Network. She arrives at the roof to find that Barney and Patrice aren’t

there all thats there is a page of The Playbook left on the floor. Picking it up Robin reads about Barney’s long and complex plan to get her to marry him. The Playbook returns in season 8 episode 18 “Weekend at Barney’s” after Ted has a rough break up with crazy girl, Jeanette, Barney breaks out The Playbook to help Ted score a girl but near to the end of the again the gang watch as The Playbook is blown up not by Barney but by Jeanette, Ted’s crazy ex-girlfriend, who breaks into his apartment and finds the book.

In season 9 episode 17 “Sunrise “ we witness the return of The Playbook near to the end of the episode after Barney has trained two young men to the point of “Legend-Wait-For-It-Dairy” he hands them a stack of napkins containing the pages of The Playbook passing on his knowledge to the next generation.

An actual published version of The Playbook is also available.

The Playbook

Episodes: Everything Must Go The Three Days Rule Hopeless The Over-Correction Bad Crazy Weekend at Barney’s Vesuvius (In the Wedding Bride Too film)

Ted’s Red Cowboy Boots, as the name suggests, were a pair of red colored cowboy boots which are owned by Ted Mosby. He is under the impression that he can “pull them off”, but everyone else thinks otherwise.

However, a gay couple (dubbed the “G-CWOK” for “gay couple without kids”) believed Ted can pull them off after he asked them because of their “impeccable taste and style”.

He bought them while Robin and him were dating, at the same store she met Nick for the first time, after a woman told Ted that he would look hot in them right after he was mocking anyone willing to wear

them. They were finally destroyed at Weekend at Barney’s when Jeanette burns them. Because this action led to Ted being ready to finally settle down, the Red Boots represent a life that he was finally ready to leave behind.

The destruction of the Red Boots coincided with the destruction of Barney’s The Playbook, an item that represented Barney’s old life.

Red Cowboy Boots

Episodes: How I Met Everyone Else The Fight Natural History Blitzgiving A Change of Heart Tick Tick Tick Symphony of Illumination The Broath The Magician’s Code - Part Two The Stamp Tramp The Ashtray Mom and Dad

Eating a Sandwich is the metaphor Future Ted uses for smoking cannabis, when telling his kids stories about them. This element is seen most commonly through flashbacks to Ted, Marshall, and Lily partaking in this activity in their college years together at Wesleyan University. It first appears in How I Met Everyone Else and is featured as a running gag throughout the series.

Sandwich

Episodes: Wait fot It No Tomorrow Right Place, Right Time Girls Versus Suites Big Days No Pressure Farhampton Something New Last Forever part 1 Last Forever part 2

Kids, there’s more than one story of how I met your mother. You know the short version, the thing with your mom’s yellow umbrella, but there’s a bigger story...” —Future Ted

The Yellow Umbrella is an object originally owned by The Mother, which comes into the possession of Ted after she leaves it at a party. It is often used to represent her since she remains faceless. Its significance was first mentioned during Wait For It.

Yellow Umbrella

Episodes: Desperation Day Challenge Accepted The Broken Code Bass Player Wanted Desperation Day The Poker Game

Marshpillow is the name Lily gave her body pillow after dressing it up to look like Marshall in Desperation Day. After the death of Marshall’s father, Marvin Eriksen Sr., Marshall stayed in Minnesota to look after his Mom. After being alone in her apartment for so long without Marshall, she went a little crazy. She started off by putting Marshall’s jersey on her body pillow, but soon spiraled out of control from there, when she began to have romantic dinners with Marshpillow and the two had conversations (where Marshpillow answered back).

In The Broken Code, Lily comes up with Marshpillow 2.0. Marshpillow 2.0 is a humanoid Pillow, having a tablet computer as a face. On the screen of Marshpillow 2.0’s face, can be seen Marshall via videotelephony. He supports his friends, Ted and Barney, in their problems with Ted holding Barneys fiancée’s hand in the Park . Barney claims, that it was a weird moment between Ted and Robin, for that Ted broke the Bro Code. Marshall, who is a future judge, judges about their problem, as Marshpillow 2.0.

Marshpillow

Episodes: The Naked Truth Ducky Tie The Stinson Missile Crisis

The Ducky Tie is a blue tie with yellow ducks on it. Although, first mentioned in The Best Man by Ted in a scene from Barney’s wedding, and was first seen in the following episode during a flashforward of Marshall and Barney’s trip to Atlantic City.

about this, he lets Barney take the tie off in exchange for the addition of three more slaps to his one remaining slap. Barney agrees to this, but when Marshall immediately slaps him twice after that, he realizes that he made a mistake.

The tie is originally worn by Marshall, but after making fun of it, Barney ends up having to wear it as a result of losing a bet with Marshall and Lily. From then on Barney is seen wearing it in every episode. It is even seen wrapped around Barney’s arm in The Slutty Pumpkin Returns, when Barney turns up almost naked in the Halloween Party on the roof of The Apartment’s building.

The Ducky Tie is not seen again, until Marshall and Barney’s trip to Atlantic City, during Marshall’s freak-out on his son’s impending birth. Barney agrees to wear the tie, if they both turn their phones off for a whole hour, and get incredibly intoxicated. After one hour, Barney turns on his phone and finds 17 voice mails from Lily, who is in labor and needs them to be in New York immediately, while a drunk Marshall throws casino chips everywhere.

Field Trip Mystery vs. History Noretta The Slutty Pumpkin Returns Disaster Averted Good Crazy The Magician’s Code - Part One The Magician’s Code - Part Two)

According to the bet Barney has to wear it for a whole year, but in Disaster Averted, he tries to get out of wearing it for the rest of the year. He even offers Marshall a lot of cash if he lets him take it off. It turns out that Barney wants to take it off because he is meeting Nora’s parents and he wants to make a good impression. When Marshall finds out

Duck Tie

Episodes: Something New The Locket Sunrise The End of the Aisle

The locket is a family heirloom passed on to Robin by her grandmother. Since her teen years, Robin has intended to use at as her “something old” at her wedding. It first appeared in the episode Something Old. It is revealed that Robin buried it Central Park in 1994 on a “father-son” bonding trip.

She vowed to marry a successful businessman, and to use it as her something old at her wedding. In May of 2013, she returns to Central park, weeks before Barney and Robin’s wedding, to dig it up. Her father and Barney are too busy to help her look for it, and Ted shows up. She digs up the box it was in, and the locket is missing, which causes her to doubt marrying Barney.

The Locket

12

CHAPTER

Ex-girlfriends

Karen

While dating Ted in college, Karen cheated on him with her Philosophy professor.

Both Marshall and Lily hated Karen in the past because of her incredible pretentiousness and her tendency to bring it out in Ted. Lily admitted that she particularly hated Karen because she “lingered” her gaze on a nude Marshall when she walked in on Lily doing a nude portrait of him. They also hated her because she frequently cheated on Ted. In 2009, Karen and Ted started dating again, even cheating on her boyfriend at that time with Ted, until she finds Robin’s earring in Ted’s bed. Later Ted discovers that Lily was responsible and has been meddling with his relationships for years. She and Ted reconcile after Lily confesses the truth to Karen. When Karen expects Ted to never see Lily again, however, he breaks up with her for good, deciding that while it doesn’t matter what his friends think of his girlfriend, it does matter what his girlfriend thinks of his friends. (The Front Porch)

Victoria

They met at the wedding of Ted’s friends Stuart and Claudia (The Wedding) for which she had made the cake. Victoria kept her identity secret, calling herself Buttercup (the name of her bakery, and how Ted eventually found her again) and preferring to have one night of romance and fun with Ted, and then never seeing him again. However, Ted discovered her real name and tracked her down, and the two began dating. (Drumroll, Please). Everything was going well in their relationship and they had a lot of sex, until she was accepted into a cooking fellowship in Germany. Although they were both initially against the idea, they tried a long-distance relationship. (Cupcake) However, they broke up after Ted tried to sleep with Robin. (Nothing Good Happens After 2 A.M.) Six years later, in September 2011, Ted sees Victoria again. At the Architect’s Ball, attended by Ted and Robin, Ted spots her from across the room, placing cupcakes onto a table. This looking over and seeing of Victoria is similar to the first time the two meet one another, in which Ted looks across the room and sees Victoria. It should also be noted that Robin was once again Ted’s date to the event in which he sees Victoria. Ted is very nervous when meeting Victoria again, considering the way the broke up last time. (The Naked Truth) When Victoria and Ted meet once again, Ted goes to help her do the dishes at her bakery. He claims this is to clear his guilt of cheating on her. The two then share an intimate moment kissing, even after figuring out that Victoria is getting engaged. Ted then walks Victoria to her bus. She then tells Ted that the reason that none of his relationships have worked, is because Robin plays a huge part in his life. She also says that Ted, Barney, and Robin can’t just hang out at a bar as friends. Future Ted ends the episode by saying that Victoria was right, they just didn’t realize it yet. (Ducky Tie) A few months later, Ted decides to call Victoria, after talking with Robin about how Victoria is the only woman he dated who could be “The One”. He asks her to meet up at MacLaren’s and she turns up in a wedding dress, running from her groom. She tells him that today is her wedding with Klaus, but she has always had Ted in the back of her mind. If he wants to drive off into the sunset with her, now is their chance. After deliberating with the gang, he takes her into the car, seemingly to drive off with her. However, he tells her “I was left at the altar and it almost killed me. You’re someone’s fiance, and I have to respect that,” and says he’s going to drive her back to the church. Once he gets near the church, he remembers his time with Victoria, and drives past the church, where they hold hands and drive off into the sunset. (The Magician’s Code - Part Two)

While Ted is driving away with Victoria, he says that right now Klaus would be reading the note she left, but Victoria tells him that she didn’t leave one. Ted then convinces her to write a note to leave for Klaus. He tells her that he feels guilty for stealing her, but Victoria tells him that she chose him. She then asks Ted to deliver the note. Ted tries to get to Victoria’s dressing room, but does not want to climb the drain pipe. Victoria then gives him the keys to her dressing room, but Ted is stopped by Klaus’s sister Uta from going into the dressing room.

Using Barney to seduce Uta, Ted then leaves the note, but forgets the car keys in the dressing room. When Ted is about to climb the drain pipe to get the keys, he sees Klaus climbing out of his window. Klaus tells him that he can’t get married, and then leaves to take the train to the city. Ted climbs the drainpipe up to the dressing room window, grabs the notes and the keys, but leaves Klaus’s note in Victoria’s room to make it look like she read it and then ran off. He then drives away with Victoria again, but has to stop at the Farhampton train station to ask Klaus why he didn’t want to marry Victoria. He tells him that although Victoria is wonderful, she is not “the life long treasure of destiny” for him, but “almost the thing he wants, but not quite”. (Farhampton) In October 2012, Ted and Victoria have a fight when Ted wants to throw Klaus out of his apartment, after letting him stay there till he gets back on his feet after his break-up with Victoria. (The Pre-Nup) In Nannies, it is shown that Ted is a little frustrated with Victoria, as she is a slob.

In The Autumn of Break-Ups, Victoria starts dropping hints that she wants a more serious relationship and tells Ted that something is holding their relationship back. Ted later proposes to her, but she says she ‘Hates to be the girl who says it’s me or Robin but...’ and Ted realises that she wants him to stop being friends with Robin, since she is afraid that Ted’s feelings for her might rekindle in the future. However, Ted tells her that although he is not in love with Robin, she is like his family and he can’t end that, and asks her if she can accept that. However, Victoria tells Ted: “I really hope you get her someday” and walks away crying. Ted later tells Marshall and Lily the reason behind their break up, but ask them not to tell this to Robin. However, Future Ted says that Robin finds out at a later date.

In Sunrise Ted recalls calling Victoria (who is now back in Germany) asking her if she’d seen Robin’s locket. It turned out Victoria was wearing it at the time. She then agreed to overnight it to Ted.

Stella Zinman

Her first encounter with Ted occurs in the professional manner as his dermatologist in Ten Sessions, where Ted consults her to remove his butterfly lower-back tattoo. During his first session, the two agree to go out for a movie, but Ted mistakes this invitation for a date and ends up accompanying Stella on girls’ night out, and she explains to him how there are regulations forbidding her to date patients. However, when Ted works around this by forewarning her that he’ll ask her out once the sessions are over, she gives him fair warning that she will refuse. The sessions end, and Ted asks her out, to which Stella replies that she has a daughter, Lucy. However, this does not throw Ted off course, because she doesn’t explicitly refuse (and he gets to learn that Marshall heard Stella describe Ted as a “small crush”), so he takes her on a two-minute date during her lunch-break. The two have a good time and they kiss.

The relationship kicks off and the two seem happy with each other, although Ted gets the feeling that Stella might be taking things too slow (Rebound Bro), since she has neither slept with him nor introduced him to her daughter. (By the end of the episode, she ends up doing both things). Paradoxically, in the finale, Ted freaks out when she asks him to accompany her to her sister Nora’s wedding in six months, and breaks up with her, ignorant of the fact that she did not get the intention of his words. After Ted gets in a car accident, she visits him in the hospital and makes out with him on his bed. But when Lily accidentally reveals to Stella that he intended tow break up with her earlier that day, she confronts him and dumps him. Ted doesn’t give her up and once discharged, finds her at Kiddie Fun Land, where he proposes to her. The Season 4 premiere opens with her accepting his proposal.

Soon after the proposal, however, Marshall helps Ted realize how little he knows his wife-to-be, and he has her watching a Star Wars movie with him. Stella admits to Marshall, however, that she hated the film, but is ready to pretend to love it for the rest of her life for Ted. Despite this, Marshall still thinks that things are moving too fast and, together with the rest of the group, decides to hold an intervention for Ted about Stella. The intervention never took place, but Marshall still expresses his concerns to his best friend, although he also tells Ted that he and the group have since changed their opinion about Stella and are now happy to see the two together, even if the course of events has him moving to New Jersey (Stella refuses outright to move to New York with Ted).

The next day, Ted shows no signs of anger with regards to Stella and the group go to have dinner at a restaurant. Lily recounts Stella advising the place to her, and the gang are shocked to see Stella at the restaurant ordering a takeaway. To avoid confrontation, they take shelter under their dining table until

she leaves. After hearing the unresolved issues his friends still have with their “ghosts”, Ted finally decides to confront Stella and follows her home, although he has no plans to yell in rage at her. On the way, Marshall lets slip out that Stella hated Star Wars in an unsuccessful attempt to get him angry. But when Lily points out that Stella is stopping at Tony’s, Ted realizes that she has moved in with Tony despite her refusal to move in to New York with him, and his anger erupts. He plans an entire list of things to say to her, but after seeing her with Tony and Lucy as a perfect family, his anger vanishes and he just walks away.

Cindy

Cindy is a PhD student that entered into college with a scholarship, and lives with Ted’s future wife, whom she resents for stealing all her boyfriends. She first appears in the season five episode Girls Versus Suits, where she and Ted date, but Cindy ultimately breaks up with him due to Cindy being a student, and Ted a lecturer. Ted tries to get back together with her in the same episode.

As he tries to convince Cindy that their paths are meant to cross, he picks out items from her room which show how much they have in common. Cindy reveals that all three objects are really connected to her roommate. Frustrated that Ted is already more compatible with her roommate, Cindy tells him to leave and stays mad at him for a while. When the Mother enters her room to ask where the yellow umbrella came from she sees Cindy crying over Ted and sits down with her. Cindy is upset about every guy falling in love with the Mother rather than her, but is shown to be attracted to the Mother and therefore really, without knowing it, agreeing with the guys. After talking about how sweet and attractive the Mother is she kisses her.

She reappears in Big Days , at MacLaren’s bar and Ted is afraid she is still mad at him. Before she arrives, Ted sees a girl sitting at the bar, he wants to start talking to her but is afraid. He sees Cindy talking to her and assumes she was Cindy’s roommate (the mother) and remembers that the stuff in Cindy’s room that belonged to her roommate indicated she was the perfect girl. When Cindy spots Ted, she tells him she was really mad at him for a long time but she realized that they both wanted different things. She says she’s happy and she wants to thank him somehow, Ted suggests to introduce himself to one of her friends and she says sure. Later on, Ted is about to make moves on Cindy’s friend when Cindy kisses her. Future Ted says that that girl wasn’t their mother after all, but she ended up being someone else’s mother, with Cindy.

She later gets married to the girl she kisses in the bar and they have a daughter.

In Band or DJ?, it is shown in a flash-forward to four months later, that Ted meets Cindy and her wife Casey on a train ride, a week before Barney and Robin’s Wedding. He tells them that the band that was hired to play at wedding cancelled, and asks them if they know a wedding band. Cindy tells him that she recently had brunch with her ex-roommate (The Mother), and her band is available for the weekend.

In How Your Mother Met Me, it is revealed that she met The Mother in the economics class that Ted was teaching by mistake. After telling The Mother she just moved to town and has no place to stay, The Mother invites Cindy to live with her in her apartment. They live together until Cindy moves out and gets married to Casey.

Zoey Pierson

Zoey is an activist for the issues she believes are important. She had previously chained herself to a 100-year-old redwood, stolen a police horse at an anti-war rally, set a car on fire after the Guns ‘n Roses 2009 concert, and stolen a whole van of white rabbits from a beauty company. However, she became a nuisance to Ted as a protestor against the destruction of The Arcadian, an old hotel in NYC which would be torn down to be replaced by the new Goliath National Bank office headquarters of Ted’s design.

Ted expresses interest in her at first and finds himself in a dilemma between work and love, which is increased when Barney has a poster of Ted placed on the façade of the Arcadian. This turns Zoey against Ted, and she puts him in her crosshairs. He tries to make ends meet by integrating the old façade into the new GNB headquarters, but when he shows her the design, he finds out that she is married. Realizing that his efforts were for Zoey rather than the Arcadian, he scraps his new design and reverts to the old ones, bringing his relationship with Zoey to hatred once more.

(Architect of Destruction) To frustrate Ted further, Zoey enrolls in Ted’s architecture class and lures all of his students to protest in favor of the preservation of the Arcadian, turning them against him. Ted loses control of his students to the degree that they don’t even show up for class one day, but he regains control when he threatens to give an F to all who don’t show up in class next day. (Canning Randy) Shortly after, at the autumn spectacular at the NYC Museum of National History, Ted runs into Zoey again, and her husband, George Van Smoot, also known as The Captain. Unlike Zoey, the Captain likes Ted and invites him on his boat. While at the spectacular, Zoey manages to manipulate Ted into saying that he dislikes GNB and their plans to scrap the Arcadian on tape. But The Captain finds out everything and offers Ted to find the tape and erase it, knowing how Zoey’s temper tantrums can get in the way of people who are trying to do their jobs. Ted refuses, unaware that Zoey can overhear their conversation from the other side of the hall. She finds Ted and explains that she erased the tape (although it is later revealed in Landmarks that this was a lie), but will still be keeping him in her crosshairs starting on Monday. The two end up dancing. (Natural History) On the night before Thanksgiving, the gang (minus Ted) spot her in MacLaren’s Pub, and they recognize her as Ted’s enemy. However, she spends time with them, and by the end of the night they all grow to like her. She invites them all to spend Thanksgiving with her, and while the rest of the gang enjoy her company, she and Ted continue to argue and insult one another. Eventually, she kicks them all out of her apartment once Ted compares her to Cinderella’s evil step-mother.

However, when Ted realizes that she is an actual step-mother, and that her step-daughter hates her, Ted comes back and apologizes about his earlier remark. The two finally become friends, and they all share Thanksgiving together. (Blitzgiving) Due to their recent friendship and similar interests, she and Ted start spending a lot more time

together. When they spend time alone at an art gallery, her husband calls. Zoey lies and tells him she’s out with friends, instead of with Ted. When Ted asks her about it, she explains that her husband tends to get jealous when he’s away. To try and make things better, Ted decides to spend time with Zoey and The Captain together on their boat, but at the last minute Zoey gets sick and cancels. Although it’s just the two of them, Ted and The Captain become good friends.

Zoey later admits that she faked being sick, in the hopes that Ted and The Captain would become friends. Ted mentions his concern that the two of them spending time together doesn’t cross any lines, and that if either of them develops feelings for the other, they should stop hanging out. Zoey agrees, and they both deny that they have feelings for one another. However, it’s hinted that this will not always be the case, as the Mermaid Clock begins to count down (the hypothetical countdown to the moment when you realize you want to sleep with someone). (The Mermaid Theory) Soon after Marshall’s father dies, Ted begins to realize his feelings for Zoey. He tells her they cannot be friends anymore, so not to complicate her relationship with The Captain. She asks him why they can’t be friends, and he replies that Lily hated her. Lily told Zoey that Robin hated her, and Robin said that Marshall hated Zoey. Honey calls Marshall to get in contact with Barney, and is tricked into revealing Zoey’s secret: Zoey and George were getting a divorce and Zoey was in love with Ted. Marshall calls both Ted and Zoey, telling both of them how they felt about each other, and they get together. (Oh Honey) Ted had always remained cautious around Zoey because she was married. After learning about the divorce and her mutual feelings for him, it seemed safe to make a move. He told people the story about how she had fought with The Captain and then came to Ted after leaving him. However, he learned from The Captain (who didn’t yet know it was Ted who Zoey was now seeing) that she had in fact left him for another man. After confronting Zoey, he learned this was true. Despite his attempts to be respectful and keep his distance, he was still the “bad guy”. (Garbage Island) While they’re dating, Ted finds that his relationship with Zoey becomes increasingly strained because they constantly argue about everything. Despite their attempts to avoid talking about the Arcadian, Ted expresses his anger and frustration that Zoey will not support his dream to build a new skyscraper in New York City despite the fact he has acknowledged her reasons for wanting to save the Arcadian. When Ted realizes that he cannot have both Zoey and his dream of building a skyscraper, he chooses his dream over Zoey, who breaks up with him for refusing to save the Arcadian.

Several months later, Ted runs into her. She tells Ted that she is still unemployed and had to get a couple of roommates who sell drugs. She tries to convince Ted that they should get back together.

The two arrange a meeting but in the last moment Robin and Barney convince Ted not to make the same mistake and date Zoey again. (Challenge Accepted)

Naomi

They had an instant connection, but unfortunately Ted lost her phone number, so they never had the opportunity to date, and her identity remained a mystery. Since they never learned her name, the gang was forced to refer to her as “The Slutty Pumpkin”, due to the strategically carved pumpkin costume she wore at the party.

In an attempt to find her again, Ted spent the next few years attending the Halloween party on his roof, wearing the same costume (a “Hanging Chad”) in the hopes she’d make another appearance. Sadly, he was unsuccessful, and eventually he stopped trying. (Slutty Pumpkin) Her first appearance was in The Slutty Pumpkin Returns. Ted meets Naomi again and they started dating right away. Ted immediately realizes he doesn’t connect at all, but can’t bring himself to end the relationship so easily after finally finding “The Slutty Pumpkin” girl. When Ted decides that he needs to break up with Naomi, he’s stunned to see she’s wearing the slutty pumpkin costume and says that he loves her. They arrive at the Halloween party on the roof wearing the costumes they wore when they first met. When Naomi makes the Tootsie Roll drink, she confesses that she found their relationship as awkward as Ted did, but also didn’t want to end it after waiting so long to meet him and tried to force him to break up with her by acting strangely.

They break up amicably.

Carly Whittaker

n Ring Up, Ted meets and starts seeing a girl who turns out to be just slightly younger than 21. While he finds her really attractive, the difference in their age means he has trouble connecting with her. When he is about to give up and end things with her, Barney convinces him to give it a shot, which will allow Barney to live vicariously through Ted now that Barney is engaged to Robin.

Ted finally gives in when he realizes she likes Star Wars. After their one-night stand, however, Barney finds out that she is actually Carly, his half-sister.

Barney attempts to marry Ted and Carly, and mentions that he finds the idea of a one-night stand “cheap, meaningless and disgusting�.

Jeanette Peterson

In P.S. I Love You, Ted spots Jeanette during a train ride, but she exits the train before he can talk to her. However, the next day, he sees Jeanette outside the university where he teaches, where she tells him that she looked him up from the details she remembered about him and that if the fire alarm hadn’t gone off, she wouldn’t have found him. The gang thinks that Jeanette is a stalker but Ted disagrees. He later asks her if she was the one who pulled the fire alarm, and she says she was. However, Marshall and Lily notice that there isn’t a fire alarm in the university, meaning that Jeanette started a fire to sound an alarm, which turn out to be true. However, Ted is charmed by these things. Later, at his apartment, Ted tells Jeanette that if she hadn’t been reading the same book as him, they would never have met and that’s destiny. He then finds a receipt her book and realizes that she bought the book at the same store he did, within ten minutes of him buying his. She tells Ted that she followed him to the store.

Ted asks how long she has been following him and she tells him a about year and a half ago, when he was on the cover of New York magazine. Ted ignores this obvious sign of Jeanette being a stalker, and starts making out with her.

In Bad Crazy, Ted begins to see her crazy qualities but ignores them until deciding to attempt breaking up with her during a basketball game, however, Jeanette infatuates him to a point they stay together, later, she visits Ted’s apartment to find her novel she’d been reading on the train in the previous episode, Marshall and Barney forget that she entered the house and soon she destroys Ted’s room in search for the book or in just impulsiveness, Ted returns home and tries to get her to leave and break up with her later on but all his attempts, including fighting her with a sword while in a Boba Fett costume, prove useless and eventually calls the police, they find out Jeanette is a Police Officer who responds to the call and talks to the other cops, Lily suggests they stay together, as while Jeanette may be crazy, Ted is crazy at the moment in ways as well, and maybe he should let things blow over until they break up in flames (Which Ted tells his kid’s literally happened once her and Jeanette do split up). Later, it is seen that the outside of Ted’s apartment is in ruin and the street lay in rubble with many objects on fire around the gang as they wait for Jeanette to finish her rampage (in the future).

In Weekend at Barney’s Jeanette is signed on by Ted to be his +1 for Barney and Robin’s wedding but the rest of the gang doesn’t want her to come because she’s insane and as Robin says “Would probably be a +5 with all the voices in her head” soon, Ted arrives back at Ted’s apartment to find out Jeanette is breaking up with him and has destroyed everything in his apartment after seeing an Email sent to Ted about spam for pornography, Ted is surprised she broke up with him rather than the other way around and after convincing

himself post break up, that he’ll fight to win her back. Barney, however shows Ted that he hadn’t actually burned The Playbook (book) as he told Robin he did in The Final Page - Part Two and he sets Ted up in various scenarios to land him a new girl, Jeanette walks into the bar during one of his plays and starts kissing him aggressively when she sees him. Later, she finds the playbook and as Ted walks back into his apartment Jeanette gets furious at him, Ted is later seen outside his apartment distraught, Barney and Robin with Marshall and Lily all arrive at the same time and sit by Ted as he confirms he’s done with the single life. Jeanette duct tapes fireworks around the playbook and lights it, throwing it out the window while screaming at Ted, the Playbook is destroyed after exploding in mid air. Ashes, and rubble lay all around them as seen in the flash-forward in Bad Crazy, the last thing seen being thrown out the window is Ted’s Red Cowboy Boots lit on fire. The incident confirming Ted and Jeanette are broken up.

In Sunrise, Jeanette gets hold of Robin’s locket that Victoria had sent to Ted from Germany. Ted calls Jeanette and asks to meet up with her to get the locket back. Jeanette drops the locket into the river after pointing out how irrational he is for being unwilling to let go of Robin. She then says to Ted “I think we should get back together”, to which Ted immediately dismisses. In Gary Blauman she is shown in the future to be dating Kevin Venkataraghavan.

13

CHAPTER

Trivia

In Brunch, it is revealed that Ted was probably raised Catholic, as Barney tried to soften up to his mother by taking her to mass at Saint Peter’s.

In Doppelgangers, he dyed his hair blonde.

He thinks his old room became a sex temple as mentioned in Cleaning House

In Big Days, it is shown that when Ted is nervous, he peels off the label on beer bottles, similar to how Lily peels off the label when she has done something bad.

In The Three Days Rule Ted is shown to have a “naked lady noise”, which he uses every time he sees a naked lady (proven by Robin). This could be in either reality or in his imagination.

In The Fight it is revealed that in his whole life, Ted has only been in one fight, with one of the bartenders at MacLaren’s, Doug Martin. Ted was beaten up by Natalie in Return of the Shirt, but since that was one-sided, so maybe he didn’t count that as a fight.

Ted can communicate with sign language, as shown when he first “helps” Barney to get a phone number from a girl (actually, he tricked Barney, since what he really told the girl was to give Barney a fake number), as shown in How I Met Everyone Else. This talent appeared again in Spoiler Alert.

He also speaks French as he and Stella spend an entire session in Ten Sessions speaking it. Presumably he can also speak Italian as he recites a passage from Dante in Italian in Robots Versus Wrestlers.

He does not speak Spanish. Or at least he doesn’t speak it very well.

He wears his grandmother’s watch. (Oh Honey) In Duel Citizenship, he was colorblind for a week because he drank a whole case of Tantrum with Marshall on a trip to Gazzola’s.Vlcsnap-2013-05-2118h26m41s234

He maybe has a collection of Jedi Knights when he was a kid, mentioned in Cleaning House.

It has been shown on a few occasions that Ted has trouble remembering names, for example, forgetting the name of Mark in Monday Night Football, and forgetting the real names of Blah Blah and Honey, when telling his kids a story about them.

In Drumroll, Please, it is revealed that Ted can play the piano. He plays while Victoria is pretending to tap dance and also again in Tailgate, where he plays The Puzzles Song.

Barney has a play named after Ted called “The Ted Mosby.” which involves him pretending to be left at the altar (to get a girl). Another play inspired from Ted is “pulling a Mosby” which is to chase off an potential love interest by telling him/her that you love them too soon. This was done both by Barney (to Works With Carlos Girl) in Purple Giraffe and by Robin (to Barney) in The Leap. It was first done by Ted (to Robin) in Pilot.

Ted is loosely based on series writer Carter Bays. Marshall’s name was the first introduced name in the entire series, said by Future Ted in Pilot. The next introduced names were in the following order Ted’s (from Marshall), Lily’s (from Ted), Barney’s (from Future Ted), and Robin’s (also from Future Ted), all in the same episode.

Marshall cannot grow a mustache (Robin 101).

Lily’s pet name for Marshall is “Marshmallow.” He calls her “Lily Pad.” It’s revealed in Duel Citizenship, having gone through a whole case of Tantrum with Ted during a trip to Gazzola’s, he passes out whenever he hears church bells.

Ten year old Marshall was portrayed by Tyler Peterson in Life Among the Gorillas and thirteen in Last Cigarette Ever, and with eight by Koby Rouviere in Sorry, Bro. Marshall is loosely based on series writer Craig Thomas.

Marshall is the only member of the gang whose parents didn’t break up.

Lily was not seen in season four episodes Mosbius Designs (except for a brief moment in the beginning), The Three Days Rule, Right Place, Right Time and As Fast As She Can due to Alyson Hannigan’s pregnancy. This makes her the only one of the five main characters who has not been in all of the episodes so far.

In Barney’s blog (The Slap Stops Here!), Barney states that Lily’s full name is Lilith. However, he also says her last name is Eriksen (nee Aldrin). Between the fact that Lily’s last name is Aldrin and the fact that Barney has been known to improvise his friends’ full names when he doesn’t know them (How Lily Stole Christmas), it’s unclear if Lily actually is short for Lilith.

Lily’s résumé says that she speaks Italian fluently.[2] However, in The Rehearsal Dinner, she is shown speaking Italian poorly by saying “I am goodbye to a job in Italian. Many sad.” in Italian after claiming it was getting better.

She claims to speak Conductor in Subway Wars but whenever the conductor makes an announcement, the train seems to do the opposite.

In Dowisetrepla, it is shown that whenever Lily feels guilty, she peels the label of bottles, similar to how Ted peels off the label of beer bottles whenever he is nervous.

Lily could be bisexual, this could be proven as she said in one episode that she wants to have a lesbian experience, and that she told Robin she had a great ass. She also admitted to having some romantic dreams about Robin.

It stated that whenever she drink martinis she wants to make out with Robin and she has dreams about her when she’s pregnant. (The Rebound Girl) Lily is the second well-known character of HIMYM (the first is Barney Stinson) as Hannigan received some awards and nominations for her appearance as Lily.

In Spoiler Alert it was revealed that Lily chews very loudly, even when she is eating cotton candy.

While Alyson Hannigan was starring in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, her character stated that she once wrote Doogie Howser, M.D. fan fiction. Doogie Howser was portrayed by Neil Patrick Harris, Alyson’s now costar.

When the character Lily is pregnant on the show, the actress who plays Lily (Alyson Hannigan) is pregnant in real life.

In both of Alyson Hannigan’s most well known television roles, her characters have been named after plants. Willow (after the tree) on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and obviously Lily (the flower) on How I Met Your Mother.

Eleven years old was portrayed by Piper Mackenzie Harris in Slapsgiving 2: Revenge of the Slap.

Lily is loosely based on Rebecca Alson-Milkman, wife of series writer Craig Thomas who Marshall is based on. Rebecca agreed to have the character based on her if Hannigan played the role.

It is implied that while living in San Francisco Lily derived sexual pleasure from the vibrations caused by an earthquake, sighing contentedly at the memory. Technically this makes the city her only sexual partner other than Marshall and Scooter.

She is the only member of the gang who has no siblings.

Robin was born in 1980, in real life actress Cobie Smulders who plays Robin on the show was born in 1982.

Robin was written as Canadian after the show’s creators learned that Cobie Smulders was Canadian. Robin was revealed to be Canadian in Belly Full of Turkey.

In Robin 101, Robin wanted her father to be proud of her and wanted her father to say the 6 simple words, “Robin, I’m proud of you, eh’.

Robin owns a necklace with a handgun-shaped pendant that she can be seen wearing even before she revealed her love of guns to Ted in Where Were We? (first seen in the cold open of that episode).

Robin’s apartment was in Park Slope, Brooklyn, somewhere close to the intersection of 8th Street and 8th Avenue. (Nothing Good Happens After 2 A.M.) Cobie Smulders, who portrayed Robin, is actually terrified of guns as shown in an exclusive interview in MySpace. [5] It is stated in Last Cigarette Ever that Robin’s real last cigarette was in June 2013. This is one month after her wedding to Barney.

She is allergic to lobster.

Eleven years old Robin was portrayed by Olivia Howard Bagg in Little Boys and by Shelby Zemanek with eight in Shelter Island and with six in Miracles.

In Slutty Pumpkin, Robin said she never played on any sports teams, but in a flashback in Happily Ever After, it shows she had played on a hockey team when she was younger.

He calls his penis in one show Barnacle, Barnana, Barnito supreme and Barney Jr. Foreign languages he knows include Ukrainian, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and German.

wasn’t needed by his bed side. Some others like to think that his wife might be Robin. It was later revealed that Robin is his future wife.

Barney has an oft-mentioned blog in the show, which is run and updated in real life by CBS. The blog references events from the show from Barney’s perspective.

Barney did not learn to drive until at least 2005.

It is almost impossible for Barney to take a bad photo, as he always appears standing in the exact same pose, independent of the pose he was photographed in (Robin took one in Say Cheese).

In Robin 101, Barney implies he has ADD or ADHD even though as a child he got straight A’s.

Barney has been unable to use chopsticks properly in several episodes.

When he is nervous, he will imagine that he is being interviewed by CBS sportscaster Jim Nantz.

Barney is one quarter Canadian.

The production staff have stated they prefer a single Barney to a relationship Barney.

Barney’s twitter account, first mentioned in Robin 101, is @broslife and is maintained by CBS. Actor Neil Patrick Harris’ twitter feed is @ActuallyNPH. While in Challenge Accepted Barney appears to be getting married, Barney is not wearing a wedding ring in the flashforward at the end of The Exploding Meatball Sub. Also, the only people at his bedside are Robin, Lily, Marshall, and Ted, so unless Barney married Robin, his potential wife is not at his bedside. However, he may have told his wife of the prank he had planned, and

Barney is the most well-known (the second is Lily Aldrin) character in HIMYM as Harris had received numerous awards and nominations for his appearance as Barney .

Barney said in one episode that he has a shrink for narcissism, a mental illness where you are physically or sexually in love with your appearance.

Robin called Barney’s Stormtrooper as a Barbie wearing a diaper.

He is the only character who never moved out of his apartment during the course of the series. All the other characters moved at least once out of their places.

Young Barney was portrayed by Tanner Maguire in Showdown, The Yips and Right Place, Right Time and by Riley Thomas Stewart in Cleaning House, Hopeless and Noretta.

In Moving Day, Barney laments that the MacLaren’s pub is exactly a 23-minute cab ride from his own apartment, which is often a cause for his conquests to fail.

In Showdown, Future Ted states that there are 11 deep-fried appetizers on MacLaren’s food menu. In the same episode, Lily orders all of them in an attempt to gain weight so that her wedding dress will fit.

A variety of MacLaren’s-themed merchandise is available in the How I Met Your Mother store from CBS. MacLaren’s is based on a bar in 240 West 55th Street, New York City called McGee’s.

It has a mural that Carter Bays and Craig Thomas both liked and wanted to incorporate into the show.

It is named after Carter Bays’s assistant, Carl MacLaren, who was also the namesake for Carl the bartender.

In Right Place, Right Time, the pie chart describing Marshall’s favorite bars include McGee’s.

The bar appears in the background of the set of Bones Season 5 Episode 3. (approximately 3 minutes and 43 seconds into the episode). It even includes the stairs leading up to The Apartment.

The same “street” (on the Fox Studios Lot) contains the Royal Diner, a frequent setting on Bones.

The gangs booth is always seen and thought to be near the middle of the bar and can be entered from either side however this is a slight continuity error as in Slutty Pumpkin the booth is shown from a different angle and it is actually joined onto the back wall of the bar, although it has been seen in later episodes to be in the middle, with another row of booths on the wall behind the camera Throughout the seventh season (and later seasons), the No Boogieboarding sign has remained infront of the bar.

The opening sequence of How Your Mother Met Me shows that the Mother and her gang frequent MacLaren’s as well, although it is a different MacLaren’s in another part of town.

After the show ended Josh Radnor kept the blue french horn, Neil Patrick Harris got the Playbook and the gang’s MacLaren’s booth, and the three yellow umbrellas now belong to director Pamela Fryman, as well as creators Craig Thomas and Carter Bays.

Most of the websites featured in the show such as www.canadiansexacts. org and www.stinsonbreastreduction.com are real websites. www. lilyandmarshallselltheirstuff.com was created for charity and items from the show were auctioned off.

Season 2, when she and Radnor’s characters are dating.

Because of the numerous scenes and the quick-cut nature of the show’s visual style, the show is filmed without the traditional live studio audience.

The finished episode is later shown to an audience, and their reactions are recorded and added for broadcast. The series’ creators joke that the long set-up time between scenes would cross the line from “studio audience” to “hostage situation.”

When promoting the final season on The Talk (2010), Alyson Hannigan was unable to answer what she would miss the most about Jason Segel. She became teary as it was an too emotional topic for her.

Ted and his friends regularly got to Maclaren’s Pub, which is a bar right next to Ted’s apartment. The pub was named after ‘Carl Maclaren’, who is the associate producer, assistant to Carter Bays. Also, a bartender named Carl plays a minor role in the show.

Many episodes deal with Robin’s past as the teen pop star Robyn Sparkles, including her big hit “Let’s Go to the Mall.” That song is available on the dancing game “Just Dance 3”.

Although singers Britney Spears and Katy Perry were two of the biggest guest stars, fashion designer Tim Gunn was the most welcomed guest star from the cast and crew. Nearly everyone on set wanted an autograph from him.

In an online poll, Victoria (Ashley Williams) was voted the all time favorite love interest of Ted (Josh Radnor) on the show. Zoey (Jennifer Morrison) was voted the least favorite.

Whenever two characters get in a physical altercation, the song ‘Murdertrain’

by Robin’s ex-boyfriend Simon’s band ‘The Four Skins’ is heard under the scene.

In most “statistics” Barney Stinson expresses, the numbers 83 or 8 and 3 are involved. And in one instance, when he posed as an elderly man, he claimed his age was 83.

Barney Stinson was named after a heroin peddler in the James Ellroy book ‘LA Confidential’.

In Season 7 one can see Conan O’Brien in the background at the gangs famous MacLaren’s Pub. In the DVD commentary for the Pilot episode, Josh Radnor reveals that he is allergic to dogs, something the creators didn’t know until Radnor was cast.

That may have played a part in the decision to get rid of Robin’s dogs in

When both Samm Levine and Neil Patrick Harris were on Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show (2009), Levine said that he was called to audition “more than once” for the role of Barney Stinson, even though he himself thought that he was wrong for the role. Levine told Harris that he thought Harris was better as Barney than he would have been.

The two-part finale was the show’s most-watched and highest-rated episode.

Writers/producers/co-creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas are members of the band “The Solids,” which performs the show’s theme song “Hey Beautiful”.

When Neil Patrick Harris directed a 2010 limited-run production of the musical “Rent” at the Hollywood Bowl, he cast Wayne Brady in the role of Tom Collins, after Brady and Harris had previously played brothers on “How I Met Your Mother”.

Ted is from Ohio, just like Josh Radnor and Carter Bays. Bays and Ted share the same home town: Shaker Heights.

Cobie Smulders is from Vancouver. Her character, Robin Scherbatsky, is also from Vancouver.

If one were to discount Robin (Cobie Smulders), since she is a main character, then the ex-girlfriend of Ted’s (Josh Radnor) who has appeared in the most episodes would be Victoria (Ashley Williams), with 16 overall.

The mother of co-creator Carter Bays is an ordained minister. Bays said he would only get calls from her if one or more jokes were not funny, despite the show’s sometimes-risqué material.

Hanging on the wall of Barney’s apartment set is a framed poster of the cover art for the 2001 novel ‘Carter Beats the Devil’ by Glen David Gold. The novel is about a magician in 1920s San Francisco; Neil Patrick Harris, who plays Barney, is a talented magician.

One of the show’s recurring gags is, whenever somebody says a phrase or word that resembles a military rank (eg. “Major buzz-kill”) both Ted and Robin (and in some instances Barney, Marshall and Lily join in) salute and repeat whatever is said as though addressing a military officer (“Major Buzzkill”).

The history without an end...

In the end of Sandcastles in the Sands Barney and Robin hook up for the first time after Robin is dumped by Simon and invites Barney to watch the music video after which they have sex. In the 5th season in the episode “the rough patch” Barney and Robin break up and Barney discovers that Robin had an embarrassing T.V show according to Alan Thicke. He then storms out of the bar to find it,this shows that what started from a Robin Sparkles video ended on a Robin Sparkles video.

Due to Jason Segel’s (Marshall) real-life smoking habit his co-star and on-screen wife Alyson Hannigan (Lily) often refuses to french kiss him during their scenes together.

One ongoing joke is that a favorite topic is “Who is Ted’s ‘best friend’”.

Even though it is already confirmed that it is Marshall, Barney ignores this every time and claims that he is Ted’s best friend.

An on-going joke in the show is that nobody ever finds out what Barney’s job is. Every time the gang ask him he sarcastically replies, ‘Please’! In the final season, it is revealed that PLEASE actually stands for Provide Legal Exculpation And Sign Everything.

All of Lyndsy Fonseca and David Henrie’s scenes as Ted’s future children were filmed during the first season to keep them the same age throughout the series. This includes a scene for the show’s eventual final episode that includes the titular Mother which were filmed early in the second season.

The following episodes wans’t directed by Pamela Fryman: The Scorpion and the Toad, Columns, Monday Night Football, Little Boys, Intervention, The Front Porch, Jenkins, Robots Versus Wrestlers, Garbage Island, Ducky Tie, Disaster Averted and The Fortress.

14

CHAPTER

Special Guests

John Lithgow

Alex Trebek

Weird Al Yankovic

Jerry Whittaker

Himself

Himself

Dan Castellaneta

Thomas Lennon

Bryan Cranston

Milt

Klaus

Hammond Druthers

Chris Elliott

Tim Gunn

Carrie Underwood

Mickey

Himself

Tiffany

Jane Seymour

Chi McBride

Enrique Iglesias

Professor Lewis

Rod

Gael

Maury Povich

Katy Perry

Jennifer Lopez

Himself

Honey

Anita

Eric Braeden

Paul Shaffer

Britney Spears

Robin Scherbatsky,

Himself

Abby

Sr.

15

CHAPTER

F.A.Q.

How many slaps has Marshall given Barney

01

In total, eight slaps. However, the original agreement was for five.

the Slap”, after Marshall’s announcement that no slap will occur during Thanksgiving.

The bet occurred because Marshall originally bet Barney the reason Robin hated going to the mall was because she was secretly married at a Canadian mall. Barney wagered she had done pornography. Upon finding a videotape of Robin under the name “Robin Sparkles,” Barney slapped Marshall, thinking the tape was porn when he saw a teenage Robin “ask” a teacher to get out of detention. However, when it turned out Robin Sparkles was Robin’s 80s teen pop name (in the 90s) and the tape was her music video Let’s Go To The Mall, Lily...acting as Slap Bet Commissioner...ruled Barney had wrongly slapped Marshall and had to make amends.

In “Disaster Averted,” Marshall and Lily renegotiated with Barney. In order for Barney to remove the ducky tie he was forced to wear since “Ducky Tie,” Marshall would be given three additional slaps to use at any time, bringing his total slaps to eight:

Initially, in “Slap Bet,” Barney agreed to let Marshall slap him 5 times at any time as opposed to taking ten slaps at the time of the bet.

1) In Season 2, Episode 9 “Slap Bet,” shortly upon Barney choosing the “five slaps any time” option; 2) In Season 2, Episode 16 “Stuff,” bringing Barney’s oneman play to an abrupt end; 3) In Season 3, Episode 9 “Slapsgiving,” after the Thanksgiving embargo is lifted; 4) In Season 5, Episode 9 “Slapsgiving 2: Revenge of

5) In Season 7, Episode 9 “Disaster Averted,” after Barney removes his ducky tie; 6) In Season 7, Episode 9 “Disaster Averted,” another slap is delivered directly after the last; 7) In Season 9, Episode 14 “Slapsgiving 3: Slappointment in Slapmarra” A slap is delivered in the early morning hours on the day of Barney’s and Robin’s wedding, in the woods, “a few weeks” after the night Marshall told Barney the story of how he learned “the slap of thousand (or million, depending on how you interpret it) exploding suns”; 8) In the penultimate episode, as they are standing at the altar one minute before Robin walks down the aisle, Marshall slaps Barney to snap him out of a moment of panic.

What are the main characters’ occupations

Ted is an architect and university professor. As an architect, he once worked for a big firm, but in Season 4 he gets fired from his firm and decides to become self employed, setting up a firm called “Mosbius Designs.” After his one major project falls through, Ted decides to take up an offer made to him by his ex-fiancée’s current fiancé Tony to teach architecture at Columbia University. In Season 6, in addition to his teaching position, he is working for Goliath National Bank, designing their new headquarters to be built on the site of an old building called The Arcadian.

Lily is an art consultant for the Captain, the eccentric millionaire who used to be married to Zoey Pierson, whom Ted dated. For most of the series’ run, Lily was a kindergarten teacher. For a time (early in Season 2, when she returned from studying art in San Francisco) she worked as a waitress in a Hawaiianthemed restaurant and as an administrative assistant in Ted’s architectural firm before returning to teaching. In Season 8 she is hired by the Captain to be his art buyer (“The Ashtray”).

02

Robin is currently an on-air talent for World Wide News, a national cable news channel. In the first season she was a reporter, then a news anchor for a small-time local cable station (“Metro News One,” presumably based on real-life station NY1), but quit for a brief stint at Tokyo Ichi (think CNN meets a Japanese game show) in Japan before quitting that job and returning to New York. She went through a period of unemployment but, with Barney’s help, was hired by Channel 12 to host their 4 a.m. morning news show, “Come On Get Up New York.” In Season 6 she leaves Channel 12 to become an associate researcher for World Wide News, a major news network. Later on, in Season 7, she becomes a co-host for World Wide News along with Sandy Rivers.

Marshall currently works for Honeywell and Cootes, one of the largest environmental law firms in the country. He was a law student in Season 1 and 2, with some time spent interning in the legal department of Barney’s company Altrucel; after passing the bar, he worked for the corporate law firm Nicolson, Hewitt and

West, but quit partway into Season 3. In Season 4, he takes on a job in the legal department of Goliath National Bank, a company recently acquired by Barney’s company, a position he maintains until late in Season 6, when he quits to seek work that is more in line with his passion for saving the environment. Aside from brief stints volunteering for the NRDC and representing Zoey Pierson in her attempt to save the Arcadian, he remained unemployed until Season 7 when he was hired by Garrison Cootes to work for his law firm. At the end of Season 8/the beginning of Season 9, he accepts a position as a judge.

Barney works for Altrucel, a large evil corporation (who prefer to be recognized as the company that puts the fuzz on tennis balls), but what *exactly* he does for the company remains a mystery, a running gag for the show (upon being asked what he does for a living, Barney immediately chuckles and dismisses the question with a “please.”) He has since apparently been assigned to work directly for Goliath National Bank, Altrucel’s newest acquisition. One of Barney’s titles is the “head of the search committee” at GNB, but it is not necessarily his full-time position at the company. Barney’s official title is finally revealed in the last season: Barney literally does PLEASE: Provide Legal Exculpation And Sign Everything. In other words, Barney’s company was setting him up to be a fall guy, signing off on all his company’s shady, illegal dealings in exchange for a large salary. In the end, Barney got the jump on his boss (the same guy who stole his girlfriend Shannon, from back in his hippie/ coffee shop days, away from him) by working with federal agents to implicate him for some good, old-fashioned revenge

Where’s the real “MacLaren’s”

Craig Thomas, co-creator of HIMYM, revealed in an interview with TV Guide that MacLaren’s is based on McGee’s Pub on 55th and Broadway in Manhattan, not far from the Ed Sullivan Theater (where he and co-creator Carter Bays worked as writers for The Late Show With David Letterman).

03

Where did Lily go in the last few episodes of Season 4

Alyson Hannigan (as well as Cobie Smulders) was pregnant during Season 4, and early in March 2009 left the show to have her baby. Her absence is partially explained at the beginning of #4.20 (“Mosbius Designs”) when she is so offended by a joke Barney tells that she refuses to hang out with the guys for four weeks (presumably she still spends time with her husband and with Robin offscreen).

Hannigan gave birth to daughter Satyana on March 24, the week that #4.23 (“As Fast As She Can”) was produced. The season finale (#4.24, “The Leap”) was filmed in January to accommodate the actresses’ pregnancies and to ensure Lily would play a role in the season finale.

04

Which “significant others� of cast members have appeared on the show

Alexis Denisof, Alyson Hannigan’s husband, plays the recurring character Sandy Rivers, Robin’s co-anchor at Metro News One and World Wide News.

David Burtka, Neil Patrick Harris’ partner, plays Scooter, Lily’s high school boyfriend, in multiple episodes.

Taran Killam, who plays Barney’s colleague Blauman in multiple episodes, is Cobie Smulders’ significant other; the two had a child together and became engaged in the spring of 2009.

Lindsay Price appeared in the 2007 episode “Spoiler Alert” as Ted’s chatty girlfriend Cathy; the two started dating sometime afterwards, and were together for about a year before a reportedly amicable breakup in November 2009.

05

In “How Lily Stole Christmas”, what was the real word Future Ted substituted with “Grinch”

Fandom is divided into two camps on this issue: Those who believe it’s the four-letter “c word,” and those who believe it’s the five-letter “b word.”

The “c word” camp’s argument is that the “b word” has been used repeatedly on the show (even by Lily herself) with no major negative reaction, so the word must be significantly more offensive, particularly to women, to get the reaction it did from the different people exposed to it in this episode.

A now defunct section of the official CBS HIMYM website had a glossary (“Motherspeak”) that defined “grinch” as “a four-letter word you can never call a woman.”

06

Those in favor of the “b word” note the rhyme shared by the two words, and contend that context plays enough of a part in the offensiveness of the word that Future Ted would censor it in this instance and not in others.

The creators once mentioned in an interview that the incident in this episode was based on real-life events, and the word in the real-life instance was the “b word.”

What happened to Robin’s crush from Season 6’s “Hopeless”

In “Hopeless,” Robin runs into a crush (played by Michael Trucco) whom she had first met while she was with Ted. The evening ends with the two not getting together, but Future Ted tells us that “it wasn’t the end of that...more on that later.”

The writers hoped that Trucco’s character would be one of Robin’s major love interests in the subsequent season; however, “Fairly Legal,” the show Trucco was a regular on, was renewed for a new season, making him unavailable to HIMYM in the capacity that they originally intended. The character of Kevin (Kal Penn) was created as Robin’s new romantic foil for Season 7.

In the first half of Season 8, Trucco was booked for an arc as Robin’s boyfriend Nick on the show, finally paying off the original setup.

07

Whatever happened to Ted’s house

In “Home Wreckers,” Ted buys a house in Westchester that turns out to need a lot of work, and while not shown onscreen, it’s to be presumed that Ted works on fixing the place up from time to time. In “Legendaddy,” the gang revisit the house in order to hold an intervention for Barney, and the house looks like it’s being worked on. The house apparently suffers a setback a few months later, however, as Ted recounts in “Disaster Averted” that an oak tree fell into the living room as a result of Hurricane Irene. In the season 8 finale (Something New), Ted takes Lily to his now fullyrenovated house to tell her that he is selling it, and moving to Chicago. However, Future Ted noted as early as “Home Wreckers” that the living room is the living room in which he and his children are sitting as he narrates the story so it is presumed that he did not sell it, whether or not he ended up moving to Chicago at any point.

08

Which episode did the quote “I just awesomed all over the place� come from

HIMYM T-shirts with the phrase “I just awesomed all over the place” were sold beginning the summer of 2010. While this is an awesome slogan, Barney has not actually said this exact phrase on the show. The actual quote is as follows, from Season 2’s “Something Blue,” after the happy newlyweds drive off, and Barney still thinks Robin is pregnant: BARNEY (to Ted) “You’re gonna miss out on a lot of awesome stuff. You’ll be at home with the kid, while I am out awesome-ing. All over the place.” (to Robin) “And you’re going to get fat.”

09

What is “How I Met Your Dad”

“How I Met Your Dad” is a prospective spinoff of HIMYM that is currently in the pilot stage and will be produced sometime in March or April after HIMYM wraps production.

CBS will announce the new Fall 2014 series in mid-May, at which we will learn if HIMYD has been picked up to series.

The show will NOT be about the Future Mrs. Ted Mosby (played in HIMYM by Cristin Milioti); her backstory was already largely dealt with in the HIMYM episode “How Your Mother Met Me.”

10

HIMYD is what the creators are calling a “format spinoff” of HIMYM, and utilize the same basic premise (decades in the future, a character tells their children the story of their young adult life), but will revolve around a completely different set of characters (in this sense it is more akin to the spinoffs in franchises like NCIS, Star Trek, CSI, and Law & Order). This time the story will be from a female perspective, with Sally Javits (played by Greta Gerwig) stepping into the main protagonist/narrator’s shoes, and her own circle of friends and loved ones helping her navigate the trials and tribulations of her love life and career.

HIMYD will be produced by HIMYM’s creators, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, alongside Emily Spivey (“Up All Night”). Greta Gerwig, who wrote and starred in the indie film “Frances Ha,” is also expected to be part of the writing staff.

Bonus CHAPTER

The Mother

Tracy

McConnell

Episodes she appears:

Lucky Penny

The Lighthouse

Wait For It

Platonish

No Tomorrow

Bass Player Wanted

Girls Versus Suits

Unpause

No Pressure

How Your Mother Met Me

Farhampton

Rally

Band or DJ?

Vesuvius

The Time Travelers

Gary Blauman

Something New (first full appearance)

The End of the Aisle

The Locket

Last Forever - Part One

Coming Back

Last Forever - Part Two

Trivia about her: Like Barney and Robin, she doesn’t appear to age in any of her future appearances.

In all of her appearances in the future except for Rally, Gary Blauman, and Last Forever, she is at the Farhampton Inn. In Rally she is first seen in the back of a limo with Ted, and again with him at their house on New Year’s Day. In Gary Blauman she is on her first date with Ted. The flashforward of Rally tells us that the mother ends up writing a book.

It is interesting to note that in all of the Mother’s future appearances she is only seen with Ted or Luke & Penny.

She had never interacted with Robin, Lily, Marshall, or Barney until the two part finale, where she even invites Robin to her and Ted’s wedding.

The last 20 seconds of the song on tedmosbyisajerk.com sounds like gibberish, but if played backwards, it plays: “Wendy the Waitress is The Mother of the goat”.

Carter Bays joked that Nora was The Mother.

Before her appearance in Something New, The Mother has been played by a variety of ‘stunt actresses’, including Jennifer Birmingham and Pamela Fryman.

Josh Radnor has said that he wants The Mother to be played by an unknown actress: “I don’t think it should be any sort of stunt casting. I think it would be more interesting to have this fresh, exciting face that Ted has never seen before and neither have people who watch the show.”

When Future Ted was imagining what his kids would look like if he married Stella, they had blond hair. The Mother has brown hair instead of blond.

In all episodes involving flash-forwards to Barney and Robin’s Wedding, Ted is seen wearing a lilac boutonniere on the suit he wears to the wedding. A lilac is the flower he gives to The Mother the very moment they meet.

On October 19, 2012, Lyndsy Fonseca said in an interview with The Huffington Post, in response to the question “Do you have any hunches on who The Mother is?”, she says “there was a time when we were told who it was and to never give the information out.”

However, Cristin Milioti was only cast in the spring of 2013.

But, although she was cast in 2013, the staffs and writers have been eye-ing Cristin for the role of The Mother since they discovered her long ago. So, it might resulted to why Lyndsy said that in 2012.

Tracy has met all the members of the gang except Ted prior to

Barney and Robin’s Wedding. It seems as if they have all been helped by her in some form.

Barney is the first to meet Tracy in Platonish. She helps Barney realize he wants to win Robin and marry her.

Lily meets Tracy in The Locket. She helps Lily cope with her separation anxiety from Marvin. Inadvertently this helps Marshall by giving him more time to delete the picture about Marshall’s judgeship.

Marshall meets Tracy in Bass Player Wanted. She picks him and Marvin up from the side of the road on their way to the Farhampton Inn. She helps Marshall prepare for his coming argument with Lily while Marshall helps her build up the courage to stand up to Darren, one of her fellow band members who was prepared to kick her out of the band she created.

Robin meets Tracy in The End of the Aisle. She helps Robin in getting off her cold feet by telling her that sometimes three deep breaths can change everything.

Ted is the last to meet Tracy in Last Forever - Part Two in the Farhampton Train Station.

Tracy is the main reason why Barney and Robin got married in the first place. It is also vice versa, because without the wedding, she and Ted would have not met, and their kids would have never been born.

Tracy dies in 2024.

What we know before season 9:

At the end of Lucky Penny, Future Ted says: “Kids, funny thing about destiny. I thought I was destined to get that job, but I was wrong. My destiny was to stay in New York.

Because if I hadn’t, I never would’ve met your mother.”

This strongly suggested that Ted meets The Mother in New York.

During Future Ted’s narration, the scene flashes forward to Ted at the altar with the Mother, whose head is obscured by a bridal veil. Barney and Marshall are also present.

At the end of Something Blue, Future Ted closes the episode talking about his and Robin’s futures: “And as hard as it was at the time, in the end we both got what we wanted. She did eventually go on to live in Argentina, and Morocco, Greece, Russia, even Japan for a little while. And I? Well, I met your mom.”

At the end of How I Met Everyone Else, Ted asks Marshall and Lily where his wife is, at his college reunion. As the reunion was held in 2020, it is revealed that, by 2020, Ted would have already gotten married.

In Wait For It, it is revealed by Future Ted that The Mother’s yellow umbrella factors into the story of how she and Ted met.

In No Tomorrow, Future Ted states that his future wife was at the same St. Patrick’s Day party he went to, but that they didn’t meet

each other. When going back to the party to find his phone, he picked up the yellow umbrella that belonged to her. However, Ted does bump into some seemingly arbitrary woman whom he seems to notice and who seems to notice him, now proven to be a red herring.

In The Three Days Rule, Future Ted told his children that when he got their mother’s phone number, he called her right away.

In The Leap, Ted is shown teaching his first class at Columbia University. Future Ted narrates how this was the best job he’s ever had, and that if it weren’t for that job, he never would have met their Mother. However, in Definitions, it’s revealed that Ted was in the wrong room for his first class, and all the students there were Economics students, and that The Mother was one of them.

In Double Date, Future Ted told his kids that when he first told their mother his “shellfish-selfish” joke, she laughed.

In Last Cigarette Ever, Future Ted reveals that he eventually quit smoking two weeks into dating The Mother.

In Girls Versus Suits, Ted dates a girl named Cindy. Cindy’s roommate is The Mother, as revealed by Future Ted. Although they never meet, while in Cindy’s apartment Ted looks around and discovers things about the roommate/mother that shows they have very similar likes and hobbies, such as making breakfast foods sing show tunes, painting pictures of robots playing sports, and playing bass guitar. Ted also sees what Future Ted states was probably The Mother’s feet, as she leaves the bathroom to go into her room.

In Big Days, Future Ted reveals that Ted will meet The Mother on the day of a wedding and that “a little ways down the road” he will be the best man at a wedding, later revealed in Challenge Accepted and The Magician’s Code - Part Two to be Barney and Robin’s wedding.

In Garbage Island, in a scene that flashes forward to 2021, Ted meets Wendy the Waitress at an airport and tells her that he is now married to “a wonderful woman” and has two kids, revealing that he will have met and married The Mother by this time. This fits into the continuity of the series, given that Ted’s kids are in their late teens by 2030.

Later in The Exploding Meatball Sub, a scene set in April 2021 (ten years into the future) shows Ted wearing a wedding ring, further implying he will have met and married The Mother by this time.

In No Pressure, it is stated that the last person he said ‘I love you’ to before The Mother was Robin.

In Trilogy Time, it is shown that by 2015, Ted is watching the Star Wars trilogy with Barney, Marshall, and his baby daughter - implying Ted has met The Mother and has had a child by that time. Ted is also seen to be wearing a wedding ring in the scene as well which means he has already married The Mother by 2015.

In Farhampton, it is shown that while Ted is waiting for the train back to the city at the Farhampton train station, after Barney and Robin’s wedding, The Mother also comes there, holding up her yellow umbrella in the rain. Craig Thomas confirmed in an interview that this is the place where Ted and The Mother finally meet.

In Band or DJ?, it is revealed that The Mother is the bass guitar player in the band playing at Barney and Robin’s wedding In Bad Crazy, Future Ted reveals that the last girl he dated before meeting The Mother was Jeanette.

In The Time Travelers, it is revealed that in April of 2013, 45 days before she met Ted, The Mother was dating a Finance guy named Louis, living at 317 West 115th Street in apartment 7A and still getting her Economics degree.

In Something New The Mother’s appearance is finally revealed: She’s short, has mid-length brown hair, large brown eyes, and a wide smile. In this episode she is buying her ticket for Farhampton where eventually she’ll meet Ted. In How Your Mother Met Me, It is revealed that The Mother’s 21st birthday was in September 2005, this makes her birth date 1984 which also makes her 28 by the events of Barney and Robin’s wedding. Her birthday also falls on the same date Ted met Robin, and when Marshall and Lily got engaged.

In Vesuvius, she and Ted are addressed as “The Mosbys,” implying that she may have taken Ted’s surname after their marriage in 2020.

It is revealed in the Finale that the Mother died 6 years prior to when Ted started telling the story. This means that she died around 2024.

Tracy’s history after season 9:

In 2005, while celebrating her 21st birthday with her friends at a MacLaren’s Pub on the west side of New York, she receives a phone call giving her the news that her deeply loved boyfriend Max has died. She returns home after the funeral that night to find a packaged ukulele he had gifted to her, which she keeps as a reminder of his spirit and presence. This event deeply traumatizes her and put her off dating ever again.

In 2008, she reluctantly attends the St. Patrick’s Day party seen in No Tomorrow after being talked into it by her roommate and best friend Kelly.

That night she runs into Mitch (The Naked Man) who is revealed to have been her music instructor some years back, before either had moved to New York. Tracy offers Mitch her cello back at home. They prematurely leave the party and she forgets her Yellow Umbrella at the club. Back at her house she brings out the cello to find Mitch standing nude before her. As she hands him the instrument to cover himself up, he tells her it’s worked 2 times already (this being his third time) and that it’s become “his thing.” The two sit down and have a conversation about what Tracy wants to do with her life. She admits wanting to end world poverty which inspires her to get a degree in economics. In this moment she realizes that she’d forgotten her umbrella and returns to the club to get it, running by Kelly, who has just returned home. By then, though, the club had closed, and when she returns the next morning to grab it, Ted had already found it while looking for his phone.

In 2009, she meets Cindy in her Econ 305 class. As Kelly has since moved out, she invites Cindy - who is without a place to live - to become her new roommate. Cindy agrees, and Tracy tells her that she’s taken herself off the dating radar because of what happened with Max. She describes herself as “old fashioned,” stating that she believes that everybody has only one

soul-mate that they can truly connect with and that she’d already met him, but he’s come and gone. Ted then walks into the wrong classroom and begins giving his lecture to the class that was seen in Definitions. It is here that Tracy first absentmindedly hears and laughs at Ted’s infamous “shellfish” joke. Once Ted begins teaching architecture, Tracy believes she’s in the wrong room and hurriedly runs out. However, it is Ted who is in the wrong room.

The two briefly cross paths again as Ted is running to the correct classroom and Tracy realizes she needs to go back.

Later that year Ted dates Cindy and breaks up with her a short time later, leaving the Yellow Umbrella behind in Tracy’s apartment. Tracy notices her missing possession where Ted had left it by the door. She enters Cindy’s room to ask her about it to find her friend distraught. Cindy reveals to her that she had been dating “the architecture professor that walked into the wrong room first term,” and that they had parted ways because Ted was unwittingly “already in love” with Tracy. She objects that this is not possible as he hasn’t even met her, and Cindy begins lovingly describing Tracy’s favorable traits.

Cindy then kisses Tracy rather passionately. Tracy tells Cindy she probably has things of her own to figure out, and Cindy agrees.

In 2010 Tracy meets Darren, who sucks up to her and tells her that he’s been a longtime fan of her band, “Superfreakonomics”. She offers to let him sing vocals at their next show, which leads into Darren progressively corrupting the band and later trying to kick her out.

In 2011, as Tracy and an unhelpful Darren are packing up equipment from a show, a man named Louis (Seen in The Time Travelers) appears and offers to load the rest of her equipment into the car. Tracy and Louis begin talking, and he asks her out for a drink. She objects, but when Louis hands her his number she accepts and meets him at MacLaren’s. Tracy explains to Louis that she doesn’t date because years earlier she bought her “Jackpot lottery ticket” that went “Kaboom” (Max’s death) and she personally believes she’ll never have anybody like him again. However, she eventually gives Louis a chance, and they begin dating. Yet it is seen that her relationship with Louis wasn’t true love.

Tracy and Barney: Six months before Barney and Robin’s wedding, seen in a flashback in Platonish: Barney goes to a drug store to hook up with a random woman to complete a challenge to which he runs into Tracy during the period of time she was still dating Louis. As Barney attempts to get her number, she stops him, begins giving him relationship advice, and tells him he’s a nice guy. Barney gets offended at her advice and chases after her asking for clarity on his situation. They head outside and sit on a bench, and she tells Barney that she thinks he’d failed falling in love and now he’s been trying to keep himself busy to escape it, and asks Barney, “Do you want to continue playing the game or do you want to win?” to which Barney begins realizing he’s wanted Robin all along. He tells Tracy he could easily win the love of his life in 20 minutes, and she stops him, and tells him it’ll be a long process, and it’ll take all he has and is willing to give. Barney sits on the bench deep in thought as Tracy gets up and heads to the nearest subway. It is that night that Barney begins to write “The Robin” which culminates with his proposal later in the year.

Before Barney and Robin’s wedding, Tracy was offered a place to stay in Farhampton where Louis owned a beachside house. This is where she would be staying until Sunday night of the wedding weekend.

Tracy and Lily: In The Locket, The Mother offers Lily some of the cookies (which she calls “sumbitches”) that she brought with her on the train to Farhampton, after seeing Lily distraught about missing Marvin. She later sits beside Lily, who rants to her about her previous car ride with Ted and some of the annoying habits he’d displayed during their drive to the wedding. Tracy mocks Ted with Lily, but she also possesses all of Ted’s habits while traveling. She later suggests to Lily that perhaps Ted deliberately got Lily to leave his car, which helps her realize that Ted wanted to beat Lily to the Farhampton

Inn so she couldn’t stop him from giving the locket to Robin in hopes of winning her back. She then tries to look at her phone to see Marvin, but Tracy takes her phone away, telling Lily it only makes her upset. They get into a cat-fight on board the train, and eventually Tracy gives in and allows Lily to have her phone to see if any new Marvin pictures have been uploaded. Just as she’s about to see a photo revealing Marshall accepting his judgeship, Marvin accidentally deletes the photo elsewhere in the Minnesota Airport, and Tracy gives Lily a hug to help her feel better.

Tracy and Marshall: The night before Barney and Robin’s wedding, during Bass Player Wanted, Tracy finds Marshall and Marvin on the side of the road on their way to the Farhampton Inn and offers them a ride. In the car, she reveals that Lily told her all about his plans to move to Rome with her. Marshall asks if Lily said anything to her about his accepting of a judgeship, and Tracy guarantees he’ll be having quite the talk with his wife once he arrives.

She tells Marshall that she’s heading back into the city because she recently quit being the bass player for the band she created in college, “The Superfreakonomics,” before her lead singer, Darren, could fire her.

Darren is revealed to be the man who’s been causing trouble between Lily and Robin and between Barney and Ted by revealing some large secrets, such as Ted’s moving to Chicago. Tracy has a talk with Lily in the Farhampton Inn Bar prior to meeting Marshall, where Lily recommends she steal Darren’s van and head back to New York. Tracy does so, but Marshall convinces her to stand up for herself and kick Darren out of the band she created instead of just giving in. Once they arrive at the Inn together, she immediately heads back to the bar and orders the “Kennedy Package”, just as Lily had in Coming Back and even says “Thank you, Linus” after every drink. Linus is shown to have fallen for Darren’s same charm, and Tracy sits, feeling down on her luck.

Meanwhile, Ted has stolen a 30-year-old bottle of Glen McKenna from a nearby liquor store to prove his friendship to Barney. After Marshall reunites with the gang, Darren rounds the corner and bumps into Ted after he begins pouring his friends glasses of the Glen McKenna. Ted turns around and punches Darren in the face, knocking him out. After hearing this news, Tracy tells the bartender she wants to buy “whoever the best man was” a glass of 35-year-old Scotch and leaves the bar just before Ted and the gang arrive cheering, Ted on. After Tracy leaves, future Ted remarks, “Kids, that was the first drink your mother ever bought me”.

Ted listens tracy singing: The same night, a few hours after Bass Player Wanted, she returns to Louis’ house, where he proposes to her. In a panic, she walks onto his front porch and looks into the sky, asking Max if it’s finally okay to let go of him, and if she should. She accepts that perhaps it’s best to move on and find love, but when she returns to Louis she turns down his proposal in tears, grabs her umbrella and belongings, and goes to the Farhampton Inn. That night, she gets a key from Curtis,

the desk clerk, who gives her the room right beside Ted’s. She puts her stuff down, gets out Max’s ukulele, walks onto the balcony of her room, and starts to sing a personal rendition of “La Vie en Rose”.

Ted, sitting just a few feet away on the balcony of his room, listens to the song, and Future Ted states that he has heard her sing “La Vie En Rose” many times since meeting her, but that time on the balcony would always be his favorite.

Tracy and Robin: A few minutes before Barney and Robin’s wedding ceremony, Robin runs away from the church in her dress and accidentally knocks Tracy down while she is setting up for the wedding reception. Tracy recognizes her as the bride and that because she was hurrying away that she was probably planning on ditching the wedding. When a distraught Robin asks for her help, Tracy places her hands on Robin’s shoulders and advises that she should simply take three deep breaths, and that doing so can sometimes change everything. (The End of the Aisle)

At the reception, Ted sees Tracy for the first time, playing the bass with the band. Barney sees and recognizes her and tells Tracy that he “got the girl” she once advised himt to go after, referring to Robin. When he finds out that Tracy is now single, he tries to introduce Ted to her but is side-tracked when Ted announces that he is leaving. Later that night, Ted is waiting at the train station when Tracy arrives. Ted gathers up the courage and talks to her. Tracy tells him that he knows him through the Econ 305 class, and Ted knows that she was Cindy’s old roommate. They then realize that they both owned her yellow umbrella at different points and realize that they found each other.

They hit it off, and the following day, Ted calls her and invites her to dinner.

Three days after Barney and Robin’s wedding, she and Ted go on their first date. Ted tells her the story of Gary Blauman, and she sees Louis, which makes her uncertain she is ready to date again. Ted walks her home and finishes the story. Tracy and Ted share their first kiss and continue to walk around.

In 2014, a year after Barney and Robin’s wedding weekend, seen in a flashforward in Coming Back: Tracy and Ted are checking in to the Farhampton Inn, where Ted tells her a story of how one year earlier, he sat in the very chair across from them almost to the moment and told himself, “I’m coming back, and I’m bringing you”. She remarks that Ted hadn’t even met her a year ago, but Ted tells her he knew he would. He gets up and leaves to check them in, and Tracy looks around the room and eventually her eyes land on the very seat Ted from 2013 had been sitting in.

Less than one year later, as seen in The Lighthouse, Ted stands with Tracy on top of the Farhampton lighthouse, staring out into the sunset. She says it’s “almost like going back in time”, which Ted remarks was exactly what he’d said when he visited there with Cassie in 2013. She remarks how she pukes whenever Ted does, and she doesn’t want that to ruin “the perfect evening”; Ted tells her he’ll try to make it even better. He sits on one knee and opens up a box, revealing a ring, and begins to propose, but before he can say her name and complete his sentence she automatically says yes without question, multiple times. He stands up, they kiss, and are officially engaged.

In 2015, Ted and Tracy are planning to get married in a grand ceremony in France in September that year. However, they postpone their wedding indefinitely when Tracy announces that she is pregnant. The couple continued living together in their house, unwed.

In 2017, at 2:17 in the morning, seen during a flash-forward in Unpause, Ted & Tracy are once again staying in the Farhampton Inn. Tracy appears pregnant at this point, and she begins having contractions. They quickly get into a car that’s waiting outside, placing their two-year-old daughter in a carseat, and Ted tells Tracy that he’s proud of her, as is their daughter, Penny. As Ted hurriedly drives toward the hospital, Future Ted tells his kids that the one exception to the “nothing good happens after 2 a.m.” rule was the birth of his son, Luke.

In 2020, Ted re-proposes to Tracy, and they get married in a simple ceremony attended by the whole gang.

On New Year’s Eve of 2022, Tracy and Ted go to a celebration of releasing a book written by her. In the limo outside of the event, Ted recalls the vow he made before (Rally) of not drinking as much as Barney drank in the night before his wedding (Unpause) so he wouldn’t get such a terrible hangover. The next morning, Tracy gets a hangover, and Ted makes her the Stinson Hangover Fixer Elixir.

In 2024, Tracy and Ted are back at the Farhampton Inn. Ted attempts to tell her stories like he told his children, but they both discover that they have told each other every story they have, finally considering themselves, “an old married couple.” She then says that he should not live in his past stories but instead live life moving forward. (Vesuvius) This is possibly indicating that they already knew about Tracy’s illness by this point. Tracy dies of her illness sometime that year.

The year is 2030. Ted Mosby is relaying the story of how he met his wife to his daughter and son. The story starts in the year 2005, when then twenty-seven year old architect Ted was spurred on to want to get married after his best friends from his college days at Wesleyan, lawyer Marshall Eriksen, who was his roommate at the time and kindergarten teacher Lily Aldrin, got engaged after nine years of dating each other. Ted’s new quest in life was much to the dismay of his womanizing friend, Barney Stinson. But soon after Marshall

and Lily’s engagement, Ted believed that his life mate was going to be news reporter and aspiring news anchor Robin Scherbatsky, who, despite having had a romantic relationship with her after this time, ended up being who the kids know as their “Aunt” Robin. As Ted relays the story to his kids, the constants are that their Uncle Marshall, Aunt Lily, Uncle Barney and Aunt Robin are always in the picture and thus have something to do with how he got together with their mother.