How I Met Your Mother 'How Your Mother Met Me' Review: How We Met The Mother (For Real This Time)

In my How I Met Your Mother Season 9 wish list, I wrote that the show needed first and foremost to let us get to know The Mother and show us why she is the perfect girl for Ted Mosby. We got glimpses throughout the season so far, but the show's landmark 200^th episode, "How Your Mother Met Me," delivered in ways like never before on this series.

The episode took us through some of the more important installments in the series and showed us what The Mother was doing while we were watching Ted. The night he met Robin, the St. Patrick's Day party, Ted's first class as a professor and more were all shown from The Mother's perspective. The episode crammed eight years of development into 30 minutes, but it never felt rushed. Sure, it would have been nice to spend a few more episodes focused solely on The Mother, but the structure of the 200^th episode worked.

And right off the bat, the episode succeeded when it dropped the revelation that her true love, Max, died on her 21^st birthday. It was a dark way to start the episode, but it immediately added an entirely new dimension to the character. For eight years, we've come to know that Ted Mosby could be as broken as anyone, but his true love heals him. And now we know The Mother was as broken, if not more so, than Ted. He is as important to fixing her as she is to him. They need each other and they find each other at the perfect time in their lives. This was excellent writing from Carter Bays and Craig Thomas.

As for Cristin Milioti, good grief this woman stole the show. She had the task of making us invested in a character that we barely knew, and by the end of the episode, I felt like I had watched eight years of How I Met Your Father (not the upcoming spinoff). She conveyed The Mother's quirks, was adorably dorky when necessary and then unleashed the emotion in the final two scenes. Bravo, Cristin Milioti, on a phenomenal piece of acting.

Louis' proposal was unexpected, and The Mother's rejection of his proposal might seem like she hasn't fully let go of Max. And maybe, like Ted, she is still holding on to the last shred of her former love. But maybe she has moved on, and she knows that Louis isn't the one. Luckily for her, her true love is close at hand.

I thought we might get to see the actual meeting between her and Ted, but it seems almost certain now that the writers are saving that for the series finale. But they are clearly closer than ever before, as Ted held back tears as he heard his future wife singing "La Vie en Rose" (and man, oh man, can Milioti sing!) and playing her ukelele from the balcony of the room next door. Nearly all that is left is for them to meet, and this episode showed that HIMYM is up to the lofty expectations.

Notes and Quotes

-       The references and callbacks in this episode were too numerous to mention, but they included The Naked Man (including how he learned that his move works two out of three times), Barney's genie play and more.

-       Remember how Cindy (Rachel Bilson) said everyone falls in love with her roommate? Apparently she is not immune to her, either.

-       How did we not learn The Mother's name?!

What did you think of HIMYM's 200th episode? Let us know in the comments below.