How I Met Your Mother 8.13 Review, "Something New"

Monday night was the Season 8 finale to CBS's hit show, How I Met Your Mother, a night filled with great expectation. Last week on The Late Show with David Letterman, Alyson Hannigan dropped a major hint that we might get to see the mother revealed in Monday night's episode, which looks like we might have. The show starts off with Lilly (Hannigan) and Marshall (Jason Segal) packing up to move to Italy, with Lilly following The Captain (Kyle MacLachlan) to pursue her dream as an art consultant, with Marshall staying at home to take care of baby Marvin. Lilly is on the phone with Marshall's mother Judy, who doesn't know about the move, that is until Lilly tells her and leads to Judy freaking out over the phone. After the opening credits and theme song, Lilly and Marshall figure out what to do, so Marshall decides to fly to Minnesota to see his family, while Lilly stays in New York to get a week to herself, in which she will spend it with Ted. At McLaren's, Ted (Josh Radnor) convinces Lilly to come with him to West Chester to see the house Ted has been restoring for his future family. Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and Robin (Cobie Smulders) are in the restaurant of where they had one of their first dates as a couple, sitting at the bar celebrating a week before they get married when Barney breaks out two cigars for the couple to smoke, but they get interrupted by a snobby couple who tells them to put the cigars away. Barney and Robin declare that they are their arch rivals, and their hatred for the snobby couple heats up when they take their seats in the restaurant, which prompts them to plot revenge. At the house in West Chester, Lilly walks in to see all of the improvements Ted has made to the house, which once looked condemned. Lilly talks about how his kids will roast marshmallows in the fireplace, try recreational drugs on the porch, and then finds a For Sale sign, in which Ted announces he's selling the house and is moving to Chicago. We pan back over to the restaurant where Barney and Robin have been put at a table near the kitchen; Barney gets whacked in the elbow by a waiter who swings the door open. Barney and Robin mimic to themselves the potential conversation of what the snobby couple could be having. A server brings over a glass of champagne to the woman, who starts to drink it, but then sees an engagement ring inside. She starts to scream yes with excitement as she pours out the glass, in which the guy starts freaking out, saying that's a mistake, which leads to them fighting at the table. Robin lifts up her hand to reveal that she doesn't have her ring on, and it was her to set up the whole ring in the glass events, which then causes Barney and Robin to clink their glasses together in celebration for their revenge. Back to the house we go with Ted and Lilly with Ted telling her that he is leaving for Chicago the day after Barney and Robin's wedding, which clearly upsets Lilly because they are all supposed to sit around and talk about past times. Lilly figures out why Ted is moving; to get away from the pain that the "love of his life" is marrying his best friend; Robin marrying Barney. In Minnesota, Marshall gets a call from a man back in New York regarding his application about the judgeship he applied for a few seasons ago, and it is revealed that Marshall has been accepted to be a judge, which causes a major problem since he's supposed to be following Lilly to Rome. This prompts Marshall to ask him when it would start, which would be in a week, he couldn't move to Italy, but would have to stay in New York, and the guy asks him if he is really serious about becoming a judge.

rating: 3.5

In a park, Barney and Robin are smoking the cigars he had been told to put away, when the snobby couple approaches them and had figured out what they had done. They tell Barney and Robin they are in fact now, getting married. This makes Barney and Robin, and Robin says that in a week, they will be "legen....wait for it....married. Legen-married." Back at the house, Lilly wants to know what has prompted Ted to feel the way he does, which shows the week before, when Ted blows off a job interview to help Robin dig up the locket and they sit in the pouring rain holding hands. Ted tells Lilly that he always wants to make her happy, and wants to help her find the locket, in which Lilly tells him she knows where the locket it. That leads to Lilly telling Ted a story of her and Robin in MacLaren's before his wedding to Stella, where Robin is drunk and sad that she won't be able to get Ted back, so they go to the park to dig the locket up in her drunken state (which is why Robin goes back to look for it, she doesn't remember this.) Robin asks Lilly to bury the locket in her butt, then gets her to put it in a box, and then put the box in her butt. This leads Ted to tell Lilly that he has the locket, which has been sitting on his desk all along, and he wants to give it to her as a wedding present. The scene ends with Lilly telling Ted to be careful. The episode fast forwards to 56 hours before the wedding, with Ted putting the locket into a gift box that goes into his backpack, and he exits his apartment, which has been emptied out since he's moving. Barney and Robin are seen leaving their apartment, as they get ready for their wedding weekend. Marshall is being dropped off at the airport by his brother, in which he gets off the phone with Lilly and says he'll see her soon. Marshall's brother says to him, "So I guess you haven't told her about the judgeship," which leads us to believe Marshall isn't passing this up and wants to take the job. The final scene of the episode starts out with scenes of Ted and Lilly driving and Barney and Robin in the back of a limo along with Marshall still in Minnesota, all panning back and forth through head shots....and then the surprise. At a train station, we see a woman walking in furry boots for a few seconds (boots Lilly probably would like to borrow because as she mentions earlier, they're the same size) and then lowers down the yellow umbrella we keep seeing in previous episodes. The same yellow umbrella we've seen her holding, and the one Ted borrows from the nightclub. At the ticket window, the guy in front of her leaves, and we finally have gotten the first look at who the mother is. She walks up to the ticket window and asks for one ticket to Farhampton (Season 8's first episode was entitled, Farhampton), which is where the wedding of Barney and Robin is located. Analysis: We don't catch the name of the name of the mother, but now, we have a face. She's got dark brown hair, which we all knew from the photos of the girl blurred out from the dating site that Ted signed up for years ago. If you look at her really quickly, she almost looks like a younger version of Lilly. According to the credits; she is Cristin Milioti, an unknown actress whose biggest role was playing Catherine Sacrimoni in the HBO series, The Sopranos. She is young enough to be in the class that Ted mistakenly thought was his architecture class at the college he teaches in, and even though this is making an assumption, she looks like she has a bubbly, outgoing personality. The result: she's perfect for Ted. So now, we have four months until Season 9 to wait until they show Barney and Robin getting married, which is where Ted meets his future wife because she is supposed to be playing base in the band. Overall, it was a decent episode with not too much drama throughout the episode, except for Marshall getting accepted to become a judge, which will certainly throw in a wrench to Lilly and Marshall's plan to move to Italy. My money is on Marshall getting the job, because Lilly seems like she would be all right with staying in New York and being around her friends and family as opposed to moving clear across the continent. The ending was a good way to leave the audience with the cliffhanger for the next four months until September. After eight years of waiting, we now know what the mother looks like and what she sounds like. But now, we have to wait for Season 9 to figure out how she gets tied into the plot and the story of how Ted met her.