How I Met Your Father Just Set Up Its First HIMYM-Style Mystery
Warning: Contains spoilers for How I Met Your Father episode 7.
In How I Met Your Father episode 7, “Rivka Rebel,” the spinoff series sets up its first ongoing mystery (other than the father’s identity) that echoes some of the puzzles from How I Met Your Mother. How I Met Your Father directly reuses the original framing device from How I Met Your Mother with the older version of the main character telling their child a story. However, How I Met Your Father has worked to put a new spin on the elements that it has borrowed from the original.
In How I Met Your Father episode 7, Sophie (Hilary Duff) and Valentina (Francia Raisa) attend a celebrity-filled Bat Mitzva as photographer and assistant where they briefly believe that they have accidentally drugged a group of teenage girls. As Sophie and Valentina have a heart-to-heart about the fact that Valentina has been lying about the nature of her job, Sophie brings up the fact that their friendship is built on the code of never lying to each other and never speaking about what happened on Halloween 2018. The scene cuts forward to 2050 and Sophie’s son tries to ask what happened on Halloween 2018 but Sophie (Kim Cattrall) shuts him down saying “I’ll never tell.”
The How I Met Your Father reference to Halloween 2018 keeps alive a tradition that helped to keep How I Met Your Mother engaging, and in one question presented a question that some viewers are still asking about almost a decade later. Halloween 2018 sets up an ongoing mystery for How I Met Your Father that can be hinted at throughout the seasons of the TV series. In How I Met Your Mother, Ted accidentally told part of the story of “the goat” before remembering that he had got the timing wrong, leaving audiences waiting a long time to find out why there was a goat in Ted and Marshall’s apartment. Similarly, Ted told the story of how he got blackout drunk and woke up next to a pineapple and had no recollection of how it got there. This mystery was only answered in a scene for the final season of How I Met Your Mother that was ultimately cut from the main broadcast, leaving most viewers still in the dark. Sophie and Valentina’s code around Halloween 2018 shows that How I Met Your Father is learning from this trick and is repeating one of the better elements from the original show.
In How I Met Your Mother, the only big mystery introduced in the first season was the identity of the mother. All the other long-running mysteries arise in later seasons at a point when How I Met Your Mother could be relatively confident that they would be renewed and have an opportunity to answer the mystery down the line. How I Met Your Father introducing the Halloween 2018 mystery late in season 1 suggests that either the mystery will be answered very soon in an anti-climactic way, or the showrunners were confident enough that How I Met Your Father would be renewed that they would have an opportunity to tease it out more later. As it turns out, the showrunners would be right in the latter scenario as How I Met Your Father has been renewed for a 20-episode season 2.
As a spinoff series set in the same universe, How I Met Your Father has had to walk a delicate line between nodding to the original format and storylines while also setting itself apart. How I Met Your Father has done this more successfully in some places than others, with its corrections of old controversies helping the show, but other attempts to mimic the original falling flat. However, How I Met Your Father’s Halloween 2018 mystery is more directly similar to How I Met Your Mother in a way that works well within the show’s larger framing device.
How I Met Your Father releases new episodes Tuesdays on Hulu.