How I Met Your Mother: Episode 8.01 "Farhampton" Recap

Wow. This summer has flown by – which is both sad and awesome. With the arrival of Fall comes the return of some of our favorite TV shows – including How I Met Your Mother. If you need to catch up on the season 7 finale, you can check out our recap, but if you have a great memory and don’t need a refresher, continue reading the recap of the Fall premiere of season 8!

The Condensed Version:

Future Ted is hanging out at the train station in Farhampton, where it is revealed he is [FINALLY!!] meeting his future wife and mother of his kids. Marshall and Lily are exhausted and not getting any sleep now that Marvin Waitforit Eriksen is here. They accidentally tell Quinn that Barney and Robin used to date, which naturally causes some problems. Robin eases the tension by announcing her new relationship with Nick. Ted finds out Klaus didn’t want to marry Victoria any more than she wanted to marry him. He asks Klaus why, and Klaus tells him that he realized Victoria wasn’t the one for him – and it gets Ted thinking about the idea that Victoria may not be the one for him either.

The Extended Version:

What else would we start the season off with than “Story Time with Ted”? Of course, the episode opens a bit into the future – at Robin and Barney’s wedding, to be exact – but quickly jumps back to the end of season 7 when “Future Ted” (not the “Future Ted” who’s married and telling his kids the story of how he met their mother, but Future Ted who was just at Barney and Robin’s wedding) finds a stranger to which he can tell the story.

Back in the present, Quinn asks Lily and Robin to be her bridesmaids. They both agree, but Robin doesn’t understand why Quinn doesn’t feel weird about the situation since she and Barney used to date. It turns out, Barney never told her! Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) asks the gang to keep his past relationship with Robin a secret. However, Marshall and Lily are having a rough adjustment to the new baby. Thanks to their lack of sleep, the two can’t keep up with anything that’s going on around them. So, Marshall and Lily accidentally tell her when they talk about it later – not realizing that Quinn is in the room with them.

Quinn (Becki Newton) wants to know the “whole story”, which Barney manages to tell in 60 seconds [you can check out CBS’s YouTube video to watch that impressive scene]. Anyone else forget that Ted had a “Tramp Stamp”? Fortunately, Barney didn’t forget – and was kind enough to remind us. Anyway, with the quick speech, viewers get to catch up on everything that has happened in the last seven seasons, and Neil Patrick Harris delivered a a quick, well done, and comedic monologue. [I’m not sure what that says about this show that the last seven years of it are able to be summed up in one minute. Maybe all it really means is that Ted should hand over the telling of this story to Barney.]

Quinn is worried that Robin might still have feelings for Barney, but Robin (Cobie Smulders) takes this opportunity to announce that she has a new boyfriend Nick (Michael Trucco) [as discussed in the Season 8 spoilers, you’ll remember him as Robin’s secret crush from Season 6] – who she didn’t want to talk about yet because she didn’t want to jinx the new relationship. Barney thinks she’s making it up to make Quinn feel better, so she calls him to come up to MacLaren’s for the two to meet him.

Satisfied, Quinn and Nick leave Robin and Barney alone for a few minutes. Robin takes that opportunity to tell Barney that she’s upset he threw away everything from their relationship so easily – to which he responds by handing her a key and directing her to a storage unit. Robin goes and checks it out, where she discovers the storage unit only contains one box – full of all his mementos from their entire relationship.

Meanwhile, Ted and Victoria (Ashley Williams) are heading off into the sunset. When Ted finds out that Victoria didn’t leave a note for Klaus (Thomas Lennon), he makes her write one and takes it up to the room for her – only to find Klaus sneaking out the window to ditch the wedding himself! He ends up not leaving Victoria’s note, making everyone think Victoria left because she found Klaus’ note telling her he was skipping out.

He gets back to the car and drives off with Victoria, but ends up stopping by the train station to go after Klaus. He wanted to ask him what made him decide to back out of marrying Victoria – and Klaus tells Ted he knows Victoria’s not “the one” for him. Klaus asks Ted if he’s found “the one,” to which Ted replies that he thinks he has. Klaus disagrees with Ted, telling him that if he had found the one, he wouldn’t have to think about it; he’d know.

The episode wraps up back with Future-ish Ted sitting back at that train station after Barney and Robin’s wedding, and a taxi pulls up. A woman gets out, grabs her guitar from the trunk, and goes to stand on the platform – with her yellow umbrella. With that, the episode comes to a close – but it’s quite an ending, even if we can’t see her face yet!

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Final Thoughts:

-So far, we’re off to a good start. It has been so long since we’d gotten any real information about Ted’s wife that I’d forgotten what that felt like! It looks like they’re taking this season seriously – and if the cast interviews are any indication, it is looking more and more like this will be the last season, even if Carter and Bays are able to get a renewal from CBS. Fortunately, Bays already put the question to rest as to whether or not they’ll return if they don’t have the entire cast on board. The answer? No. Fortunately, they’re going with the all-or-nothing rule here.

-This episode had a couple of unique points, for a season premiere. For one, the kids weren’t shown at all (presumably because they’re now too old to be believed as the same age as they were all those years ago when the show started), and Ted tells a story to a random stranger instead. Also: the episode took place in the same time frame as the season 7 finale – whereas normally the seasons have picked up some time after the finale episodes.

-As co-creater Craig Thomas told press at an advance screening of the episode that the scene is legitimate and not going to end up in a fake-out, like what happened last time we saw the yellow umbrella. That really was the mother – and that really is where Ted meets her!

Tune in next Monday, October 1st, at 8/7pm for episode 8.02 “The Prenup”: Barney’s extensive and comprehensive prenup leads the guys to put forth their own relationship principles, which their significant others do not find agreeable. Meanwhile, an incensed Quinn responds with her own prenup.