'How I Met Your Mother' Season 9, Episode 21 'Gary Blauman' Recap

This week's episode of "How I Met Your Mother" had some fans on edge in advance of its airing because of the episode's title. Gary Blauman, a co-worker of Barney and Marshall at Goliath National Bank, is a minor character, and there was some worry that the episode was going to go off on a tangent and ignore the series' central characters. Turns out, the episode was perhaps more focused on the series' main premise than any other episode this season.

The episode is a series of flashbacks revolving around each of the gang's past encounters with Gary Blauman (played by Taran Killam, Cobie Smulder's real-life husband), who has shown up at the wedding uninvited.

The stories are framed, though, by a flash forward to Ted and the Mother's first date, three days after the wedding in Farhampton. Ted launches into a story about Blauman, and we're off on a typically meandering Mosby tale-telling journey.

In addition to the funny Blauman stories—there's not very much gratuitous filler or over-the-top silliness here—we also get to witness some key events in the overall story arc. So far, we've been seeing Ted and the Mother mainly after they've been together for awhile, and their first-date awkwardness here is charming—and the moment when they both realize that this first date is really the beginning of something important is arguably the biggest event that the writers have delivered to us yet.

The episode closes with a whimsical wrap-up of the futures of a bunch of minor characters, a sequence that is cleverly constructed and pitch-perfect.