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As How I Met Your Father continues the mystery of who ends up with Sophie, it may be repeating a similar mistake from How I Met Your Mother.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for How I Met Your Father, Season 1, Episode 3, “The Fixer,” now streaming on Hulu.
A third of the way into its ten-episode first season, How I Met Your Father has introduced a whole host of potential suspects for who will ultimately father Sophie’s child. However, as Sophie grows closer to her tentative love interests, the show is moving perilously close to repeating a similar mistake from its predecessor How I Met Your Mother, specifically in regards to setting up what’s quickly appearing to be a twist ending regarding the identity of the eponymous father. The lesson in question from How I Met Your Mother‘s own finale is that if one sets up a big narrative twist, it should be one that the audience will enjoy.
How I Met Your Mother‘s series finale has been one mired in controversy and divided fan reaction since it first aired in 2014. After nine seasons of bracing the audience for the introduction of Ted Mosby’s eventual wife Tracy McConnell and to care about the blossoming romance between Robin Scherbatsky and Barney Stinson, the finale revealed that Tracy eventually passed away and Robin and Barney divorced three years in to their marriage. Ted and Tracy’s teenage children encouraged their father to rekindle his romance with Robin, ending with Ted echoing his initial romantic overture to Robin from the start of the series by approaching her window with an infamous blue French horn.
Fans were less than glowing in their response to the How I Met Your Mother finale, to the point where the home video release included an alternate ending that didn’t alter the story itself but ended before the divisive epilogue to Ted’s lifelong love story was recounted. Years since that initial broadcast, fan reception to the finale remains mixed, with many still creating fan theories to rewrite what actually occurred on-screen to something less tragic for Tracy and their tight group of friends.
While How I Met Your Father has introduced a whole set of potential love interests for Sophie right from its pilot episode, going as far as to claim that one of the men Sophie met over the course of the opening episode will be the father, the show has also clearly established a strong connection between Sophie and Jesse. The two have steadily grown closer together within the series’ first three episodes, though they indicated they were more interested in simply being friends, with Sophie botching Jesse picking up a woman at a bar and hesitant to go on a date with a friend of Jesse’s.
For as much as it’s telegraphed, How I Met Your Father has kept plenty of its cards close to the chest but is practically trumpeting that a twist ending to the father’s eventual identity reveal is coming. The Sophie of 2050 isn’t wearing a wedding band while speaking with her child, suggesting that either the father is not the final love interest for her or that he met an untimely end like Tracy did in How I Met Your Mother‘s own finale. And with a twist likely incoming, hopefully the writers will remember that a fake-out and subversion of expectation shouldn’t alienate all the goodwill they are actively building along the way.
To meet all of Sophie’s love interests, How I Met Your Father releases new episodes Tuesdays on Hulu.
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