March is finally here. Not only does that mean I will be turning another year older and March Madness is just weeks away, it also means that the season finale of How I Met Your Mother will be here before we know it. March 31st is coming too quickly. The latest episode entitled, “Vesuvius,” does not depict the wedding of Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and Robin (Cobie Smulders), but we are getting closer. Who knew a wedding weekend could feature enough exciting events to tell a whole season’s worth of stories?
The episode begins in 2024. Ted (Josh Radnor) and “The Mother” (Cristin Milioti) are staying at the Farhamton Inn during a snow storm. Ted is discussing the worst winter storms ever, and yet the winter of 2014 didn’t come up?! “The Mother” knows all of Ted’s stories, which makes them officially an old (and cute) couple. However there is one story that “The Mother” hasn’t heard, which is shocking because Ted never shuts up. The story of Robin breaking a lamp. Sounds like a good one…
In this story, Lucy Hale is back as Robin’s sister Katie and the two are doing what every bride and her sister does on the morning of her wedding: playing hockey and breaking a lamp. Granted I have never been married, but I have been in a few weddings and neither the bride or even the groom had time to play Candy Crush let alone hotel room hockey. Lily (Alyson Hannigan) has a different idea. She wants the three to look through a scrapbook, which is something Lily loves and Robin loathes.
It turns out the movie The Wedding Bride, the story loosely based on Ted’s life, has a sequel. Luckily, for Robin and Marshall (Jason Segel), who hasn’t been contributing much the last few episodes, the hotel has it on pay per view. Even though the wedding is only a few hours away, Robin still thinks she has time to do activities unrelated to the wedding. This makes Lily furious and she wants Robin to care more about her wedding. To make Robin angry and care about her big day, Lily decides to wear a wedding dress as her bridesmaid dress. She bought the dress to get new wedding photos taken of her and Marshall.
Elsewhere, Ted follows Barney into a hotel room full of suits. Barney is trying to “suit up” and has narrowed the list down to all of the suits he owns. The two go back and forth trying to decide which suit he should wear. Should it be the suit he wore to the Playboy mansion or the who we wore to bed a rodeo clown? Barney finally decides to try on the suit Tim Gunn made especially for him. After some convincing from Ted, he decides to select it. Though this concept would be totally something Barney would do, these scenes felt like a time filler in a very mediocre episode.
“The Mother” end up realizing she has already heard this story too. She proceeds to tell us the rest of it because WE still need to know how everything turns out! Lily then makes an announcement that no one really thought about. An announcement that made me sad when I heard it. Ted is leaving for Chicago the next day and the group doesn’t know the next time they will all be together again. So instead of talking about the future without one another, the girls sit and watch The Wedding Bride, too! and the guys grab a bite to eat.
In the end, Robin does have her, “Oh crap, I’m getting married moment.” As she is walking to the ice machine she stumbles upon a woman who turns out to be her mother, played by the very funny Tracey Ullman. This brings Robin to tears. Though Ullman doesn’t speak in this episode, I am confident she will have something funny to say in the next few episodes.
What started out to be a ho-hum episode turned into a truly sad, but oh-so good, episode in the last few minutes. After hearing the end of the story, “The Mother” casually asks, “What mother would miss her daughter’s wedding? This brings Ted to tears. Does this mean “The Mother” has a disease that will cause her to pass away and this is why Ted is telling his kids the story of how he met their mother? Hopefully, the creators can turn something as depressing as that into a really great ending that will leave us all crying tears of joy instead of tears of sadness.
[Photo via © 2013 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved]
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