How I Met Your Father Calls Back To An Unanswered HIMYM Lily Mystery
Warning: Spoilers ahead for HIMYF episode 5!
Sid’s traumatizing backstory in How I Met Your Father episode 5 is a clever call back to an unanswered Lily Aldrin mystery from HIMYM. How I Met Your Mother left several mysteries at the end of its 9-season show, which gives How I Met Your Father the advantage of finally being able to give more clues to them or connecting back to those frustrating plot points. Although Lily’s mystery is referenced indirectly in the episode, she’s already been explicitly included in a major connection to How I Met Your Father’s series, as she and Marshall sold the old apartment to Sid and Jesse.
When Sophie’s mom Lori (Paget Brewster) appears in How I Met Your Father episode 5, Sid (Suraj Sharma) is reminded of a particularly traumatizing moment from his youth. When Sid was preparing to masturbate in his room, he brought home a poster featuring Sophie’s mom. Sid’s mom began knocking on the door, leading him to quickly get up in a panic where he knocked over his lava lamp. As the lava lamp fell, it broke directly on top of the cage of his hamster, Slim Shady, and instantly killed his pet. In one of his most shameful memories, Sid explained that he still finished the task after burying his hamster that day.
Sid’s tragic backstory of killing his hamster connects back to one of How I Met Your Mother’s biggest unanswered questions about Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan), which deals with the mystery of her class’s pet guinea pig, Mr. Buttons. In How I Met Your Mother season 6, Barney blackmails Lily into not saying anything around Nora by bringing up her class guinea pig Mr. Buttons, which instantly gets her to agree. Later that season, Lily is seen bringing Mr. Buttons 2 into her classroom, explaining she and the kids have to be more careful after what happened to Mr. Buttons 1. Sadly, Lily vomits on the new guinea pig, creating yet another tragedy for her class pets. While Mr. Buttons is brought up twice in HIMYM season 6, the show never reveals exactly what Lily did to him.
Considering Lily mentions needing to be “very gentle” after getting an entirely new class pet in HIMYM, it can be surmised that she was responsible for killing Mr. Buttons - hopefully not in an instance of Lily's Aldrin Justice. Since Mr. Buttons is the one subject that Barney can hold over Lily’s head, it seems she harbors the same guilt about killing him as Sid does about killing his hamster. Sid’s How I Met Your Father backstory about the hamster was also kept secret for a long time, proving how ashamed he was over the event. He only admitted to killing the hamster when confronted with Sophie’s mom and Charlie trying to give him exposure therapy, but getting the story of Mr. Buttons out of Lily would seemingly take a lot more convincing.
The death of Mr. Buttons remains one of How I Met Your Mother’s unsolved mysteries, alongside what disease caused Tracy's death, what happened to the old lady at the bus stop, or who the mother of Barney Stinson’s daughter is. In the same episode of Barney blackmailing Lily, a few other mysteries about HIMYM’s characters were introduced in reference to what made each of them stay silent. For Robin, it was a dream about Mr. T, which was assumed to be a sex dream; Ted’s was about a thermos, which The Wedding Bride movie suggested had to do with masturbation; and Marshall’s was about a calzone, which HIMYM explains at the end of the episode. While How I Met Your Father’s hamster death doesn’t end with a mystery story for Sid, it does remind viewers of the unanswered question about Lily killing the guinea pig.