Last night’s episode of How I Met Your Mother was called “Happily Ever After” and dealt with the immediate aftermath of Stella leaving Ted at the altar. It’s only 24 hours later, but Ted is completely fine. He doesn’t need any cheering up or anything like that — though he does have a map of Manhattan that’s blocked out to indicate areas where he might run into Stella. Other than that, he’s ok.
But when the gang go out to dinner at a new restaurant, they see Stella come in for takeout. That’s when Ted totally flips, demanding that everyone hide under the table until she leaves. From there, we get various flashbacks of the gang telling about people from their own lives that they wouldn’t want to meet and that they’d hide under the table from. For Lily, it’s some kid from her freshman science class whom she blamed a particularly loud fart on. For Barney, it’s an inmate that he had numerous conjugal visits with, but who then subsequently threatened his life. For Robin, it’s her father, who wanted a boy so badly that he basically raised Robin as one. Marshall doesn’t reveal his person.
In the end, the group convinces Ted to follow Stella’s cab and confront her once and for all. Ted agrees, as his anger finally boils over, but when he sees her greeted by her family at the front door, the anger quickly dissipates and he really is ok with what happened.
My Reaction: This episode wasn’t all that interesting, but I realize there had to be some kind of follow-up regarding the Stella situation. Still, having an episode where the entire cast was basically under a table the whole time was kinda boring.
On the bright side, we got to see Robin’s backstory, which I thought was the most interesting out of the three. It’s too bad that she has typical daddy issues, though, because it would have been cool if she was into cigars and scotch just to be into cigars and scotch. It also looks like she comes from LOTS of money, so I can’t help but wonder if that will come up again.
Alas, no significant Barney-Robin interactions in this ep. I really want to see that angle pursued a bit more. I have a feeling that we’ll get something during November sweeps… crossing my fingers until then!