How I Met Your Father's Massive HIMYM Cameo Saves The Spinoff
How I Met Your Father's S1 finale sees a cameo from a major HIMYM character, which saves the spinoff's future while making the original ending better.
WARNING: This article contains spoilers for HIMYF's season 1 finale.
Alongside making HIMYM’s ending even better, How I Met Your Father’s Robin Scherbatsky cameo saves the spinoff by proving its future will succeed beyond connections to the original. After The Captain and Becky’s cameos in How I Met Your Father episode 9 marked the very first HIMYM character appearances, the spinoff upped the ante by bringing back Cobie Smulders for a brief cameo as Robin Scherbatsky. Sitting in MacLaren’s Pub, Robin and Sophie have a long chat about the good old days, with the two noticing significant parallels between their big romances with Ted and Jesse, respectively.
While How I Met Your Father season 1 initially received divisive reviews, the series has slowly grown into itself as it stands on its own two feet outside of its connections to the original series. While the major cameos by The Captain, Becky, and Robin may partially be seen as fan-service, they’re actually great connections to officially link the two series in-universe. As a spinoff/sequel series that takes place in the same city, it’s inevitable that these characters will show up from time to time. However, How I Met Your Father’s cameos actually serve a purpose in propelling Future Sophie's story, primarily by connecting Sophie’s romantic struggles to Robin Scherbatsky’s HIMYM experiences.
Since How I Met Your Father’s Robin cameo takes place in 2022, viewers are already in an interesting position where they know how her story turns out in 8 years’ time. HIMYM’s finale featured a series of flash-forwards between 2013 and 2030 that explained what happens to the main characters, with Future Ted’s story explaining that after her divorce from Barney in 2016, Robin increasingly drifted away from the group by 2020, partially because she still had feelings for Ted. Her highly-accomplished journalism career took off, with her and Ted finally getting back together in 2030 at his kids’ encouragement, six years after Tracy passed away. Since HIMYM never gave any details about Robin’s life in the year 2022, How I Met Your Father’s season 1 finale cameo fills in this gap in her timeline, which simultaneously works to make the future of Sophie’s story and HIMYM’s controversial ending better.
After Sophie and Jesse have a fight about him saying “I love you” too quickly, she heads down to MacLaren’s Pub for the first time, ordering a drink from Carl the Bartender. When she orders whiskey, Robin Scherbatsky strikes up a conversation with Sophie about her romantic problems with Jesse. Sophie instantly recognizes Robin as the world-famous journalist, even saying her favorite story was Robin’s bullfight career piece in Spain, which was from a deleted HIMYM season 9 finale scene. Robin and Sophie sit at the old booth together while Robin explains that she comes into the bar every time she’s in the neighborhood to reminisce about the old days.
Sophie then explains her problem with How I Met Your Father's Jesse, and Robin recalls that a guy once said he loved her on their first date, to which Sophie says he must be a piece of work. Robin then smiles and says “a good piece of work,” further telling Sophie that she shouldn’t ruin her relationship with Jesse just because she’s scared that he’s moving too fast. Robin says that the only regrets she has are about the things she didn’t do out of fear, which is meant to connect to how she regrets not being with Ted sooner just because she was scared of him moving too fast. Sophie then heads back upstairs, with Robin leaving MacLaren’s to go to dinner with Katie Couric.
While many figured the first character cameo from HIMYM would be Barney, How I Met Your Father bringing in Robin was the best possible choice, partially because she was one of the only characters who could make the original ending better. HIMYM’s ending was criticized because it killed off Tracy (the mother) in order for Ted and Robin to end up together in the future, with many fans upset due to the fact that season 9 was spent building up Robin and Barney’s marriage as well as Tracy and Ted as the perfect couple. Part of what many feared was that Ted had still had at least some feelings for Robin while he was with Tracy, but this was all put aside by a cut scene from HIMYM’s finale. In the deleted scene, Ted and Robin got lunch together in 2020 where she mentioned that she often wonders “what if” about their romance, but Ted kindly shuts this down by saying he’s genuinely happy with Tracy and their kids, so he doesn’t spend any time thinking about “what if.”
Robin’s cameo also proves that she had gone through a lot of personal growth during the time in which she drifted away from the group, as she hints to Sophie that one of her biggest regrets in life was not being with Ted out of fear. It seems that Robin truly was in love with Ted from the time she and Barney got divorced until the time she and Ted got together in HIMYM's future 2030 timeline, she just never acted on it because of how happy he was. Robin repeats that in her experience, the one thing that gets in the way of romances (particularly with Ted) the most is timing. How I Met Your Father’s Robin appearance gives more details to her state of mind in 2022, essentially explaining that while HIMYM’s nine seasons documented Ted falling in love with Robin and learning to let her go to be with Barney, it wasn’t until after she and Barney got divorced that she truly realized Ted was the love of her life. Rather than spend her time watching Ted and Tracy live happily together while she wishes it were her, Robin drifted away from the group, similar to how Ted was going to move to Chicago after she and Barney got married.
By hearing Robin’s side of the story in How I Met Your Father, HIMYM’s ending is further justified as making sense in the bigger picture. Part of why HIMYM’s ending was so divisive was that the mother was revealed to have died six years before, with the series showing Ted pursuing Robin only a few minutes after finishing his story. While Ted and the kids had six years to grieve Tracy before he went after Robin, viewers only had a few moments. Now that eight years have passed since HIMYM’s finale, fans have had proper time to grieve Tracy and understand that Ted and Robin getting together six years after her death makes perfect sense. He wasn’t still into Robin the entire time he was married, nor did he just go after her the minute Tracy died.
Not only is Ted and Robin’s endgame romance justified, but How I Met Your Father’s episode also proves that Robin wasn’t the “cold and aloof” person the group perceived her as in the future timeline. She reveals that she comes back to MacLaren’s whenever she’s in the neighborhood to reminisce on the good old days with the gang, and was just as sentimental about this era as the rest of the characters– she just needed time. Robin's investment in Sophie's story is genuine because she wishes she could be back in the booth with Ted, Lily, Marshall, and Barney happily wasting away their days by talking about their love lives; HIMYM's characters just didn't realize she had this warm nostalgia in the future timeline.
Robin’s How I Met Your Father cameo was brief but ultimately special and important, as it not only helps resolve problems with HIMYM’s finale, but also makes Sophie and Jesse’s romance more meaningful with its parallels to Ted and Robin’s love story. Robin’s cameo was effective in giving many viewers what they wanted by bringing back HIMYM’s iconic characters, but it wasn’t done in a way that distracts from the conflict at hand with How I Met Your Father’s story. Rather, Robin is introduced as a way to help Sophie through her romantic struggles, which gives HIMYM’s character an important role in Sophie’s story while not making her appearance feel forced. In this way, How I Met Your Father proves that it doesn’t need HIMYM characters or connections to succeed, with minor links like Robin’s cameo being enough for it to maintain a place in the original show’s universe.
Going into the spinoff, many feared that the How I Met Your Father modern spinoff would need to over-rely on HIMYM connections in order to succeed, but Robin’s cameo proves that it only needs to do so in small amounts. As such, How I Met Your Father is demonstrating that the spinoff can stand on its own two feet as a separate entity from its predecessor. Robin’s cameo is used to officially exhibit the parallels between her romance with Ted and Sophie’s with Jesse, which is just about all that a HIMYM cameo requires without it feeling inorganic.
Even if viewers aren’t particularly drawn to How I Met Your Father’s new take on Ted’s story, Robin’s cameo is still an excellent incentive by including details that make HIMYM’s ending stronger. That said, How I Met Your Father’s Robin cameo makes the spinoff better by establishing it as a series that benefits by being in the same universe as HIMYM, but doesn’t actually need many connections or appearances to still be a strong story on its own. Despite Robin’s incredible cameo, How I Met Your Father still made sure viewers were primarily invested in Sophie’s story during her appearance.