'How I Met Your Mother' Season 8, Episode 1: 'Farhampton' Recap

Finally! Finally! “How I Met Your Mother” is BACK!  And we have a double dose of season 8 to start you off.

On the season premiere, we begin with Ted telling his story to a lady on the bench beside him in a little town called “Farhampton.” Man, that guy loves to tell stories.

The story begins in the future, a little way down the road, with the infamous Barney and Robin wedding, as Ted is called in to check on the bride, who looks amazing in her gown.

Robin asks if Barney is freaking out, and Ted reassures her that he is not, even though in the other room, Marshall and Lily are trying to keep Barney from escaping out a window while he yells, “I have a better tie at home! It’s cornflower blue! CORNFLOWER BLUE!”

The problem is, that doesn’t seem to help Robin, because she is the one having second thoughts!

Thus we return to current day.

Ted and Victoria

The happy couple are still driving off into the sunset where we left them. Everything is bliss and love, until Ted finds out Victoria did not leave her jilted fiancé a traditional goodbye note.

“When you leave someone at the altar you always leave a note! It’s common curtsey!”

So the two stop, and attempt to assemble an appropriate goodbye letter, although Victoria’s workings are not in-keeping with Ted’s standards.

Finally they hash one out that satisfies, and return to the church. Victoria wants Ted to climb up to the window she hustled herself out of, drop the note in the dressing room, and return to her. Only Ted is entirely unable to climb a drainpipe. So instead he takes her key and sneaks in through the church, heading upstairs to the dressing room where Victoria is supposed to be napping.

The dressing room, it turns out, is guarded by Klaus’ sister, an enormous and aggressive female wrestler, and she’s been instructed not to let anyone in. Ted solves the dilemma by enlisting Barney’s seduction abilities via phone.”

“You filthy, disgusting man! Yes, I will do that to myself at your instruction.”

With the distraction, Ted manages to sneak in and deposit the note. He realizes however, at his triumphant return to the car, that he has left the car keys locked in the dressing room. He rushes back, and encounters an escaping Klaus. Surprised, he discovers that Klaus has left a goodbye note—it’s common courtesy—and is planning to book it out of town.

Sneakily, Ted finally manages to make it up the pipe and into the window, where he finds the keys, takes back Victoria’s note, and throws some fake tears on Klaus’ letter.

But, troubled, before he can move on with Victoria, he seeks out Klaus at the Farhampton station and asks him why he ran away from a great girl like that. Klaus, using a lot of ridiculously long German words, basically tells Ted that she’s not the One. She is “the thing that is almost the thing that you want, but it is not quite.”

Ted wonders if maybe that thing can turn into the right thing, but Klaus tells him no. If he hasn’t experienced it, he won’t be able to turn the thing that is close into the thing that is perfect.

Barney and Robin

Lily and Marshall are entirely doped out on sleep exhaustion, and can’t follow a single sentence or produce a coherent thought. So Lily is confused when Quinn asks her to be a bridesmaid. Robin, however, is even more so. She confronts Barney, who finally admits that Quinn doesn’t know that the two were ever a couple.

He tells Robin that Quinn will never find out if she doesn’t spill it to her—he cut all evidence of Robin out of his life.

Robin tells Marshall and Lily they can’t let the secret slip, but the two are hallucinating pretty swimming fish at this point, and whatever Robin tells them is lost under the waves.

Unfortunately the secret doesn’t stay secret long, as Marshall and Lily discuss it in little Marvin’s room, completely forgetting that they had, only moments before, invited Quinn in there with them. Quinn demands an answer from Barney, and he gives an impressive run down of the entire history in less than one minute.

But Quinn isn’t satisfied, and she leaves.

“She let you fart in front of her?”

“Barney you go get that girl.”

Quinn confronts Robin in the living room, and Robin is surprised, especially because she had just told Marshall and Lily all about the new man in her life—a fact they missed in their hazy state.

The gang meets Nick at the bar, and yes, he is indeed yummy. Robin spends a few moments showing off his abs, and Quinn seems satisfied, and dashes off in hopes of having the well-shaped Nick do a shot out of her navel before Barney can protest.

Robin asks Barney how he could so easily erase their relationship. He gives her a key and tells her an address.

What Robin finds there is a storage locker, with a large box. Within are pictures and memories of their relationship, preserved, not destroyed as he had originally told her.

Barney, meanwhile, is looking thoughtful as he and Quinn drive off in a cab together.

We head back to the future for a minute, as Ted waits in the rain at the station bench. A cab pulls up, the trunk opens and a guitar comes out. Shapely heels traverse the wet path, leading a woman under a yellow umbrella only feet from where Ted sits.

And a Season 8 Episode 1 Guest Recap from Kelly:

‘How I Met Your Mother’ returns for season eight on CBS. This popular comedy still features its regular characters including Ted, Lily, Marshall, Robin and Barney along with a few last season regulars and a few new characters. The question remains; will we ever meet the woman that started a conversation with Ted’s two children seven years ago?

Before moving on to the season eight premiere, it is important to remember just what happened at the end of last season. Several different monumental, life-changing events happened. Lily and Marshall reveled in the birth of their first child, a son, whom they named Marvin after Marshall’s recently deceased dad. They relinquished their house on Long Island to remain in the apartment above the bar in the city. Barney proposed to his stripper girlfriend, Quinn, but a flash forward revealed Robin standing as the bride in the ceremony. Ted ended season seven by rescuing former cupcake making girlfriend, Victoria, from her wedding to a German man named Klaus.

The season eight premier starts in the rainy train station of Farhampton with Ted sitting on a bench in a tuxedo reading a book. An older woman at the stop remarks that he must have been at a wedding. Ted responds that he doesn't want to talk about, yet he regales her with a scene where he is talking to Robin wearing a wedding dress and realizes that both Barney and Robin want to climb out the window away from the church to freedom.

Three storylines emerge from the past as the main cast plus Quinn gather in Lily and Marshall's apartment in the baby's room. First, Lily and Marshall have that “deer in the headlights” look of most new parents who are not getting enough sleep and they continually look through a watery fog at everything that is going on. All they want to do is sleep, but they keep reassuring everyone they are just fine.

Quinn asks Lily and Robin to be her bridesmaids, and it is revealed that Quinn never knew about Barney’s relationship with Robin. He wiped her clean from photos and from his life. Due to the zombie-like fog of Lily and Marshall, Quinn finds out about the relationship and attempts to leave Barney. Robin explains that she has no interest in him anymore as she has a new boyfriend, which she calls for them to meet in the bar. After seeing the admirable abs of the boyfriend, Quinn is no longer worried. However, Robin exhibits disappointment that it was so easy for Barney to erase her from his life, but later he gives her a key and address where she finds a storage unit with a single box in the center. Inside the box are all Barney’s memories of their time together.

Meanwhile Victoria, in her wedding gown, and Ted, in casual attire, drive away from the church. Victoria never even left a note for Klaus and Ted convinces her, after many mediocre tries, to write a sympathetic note. Victoria asks Ted to deliver it and he tries to sneak it into her room, but Klaus's Gestapo-like sister guards the door. After a phone seduction from Barney to the sister, Ted is able to leave the note. Unfortunately, Ted also leaves the car keys in the room with the note and as he contemplates climbing up the drain spout, Klaus climbs out the window and runs from the church. Ted climbs up the spout, removes Victoria’s note and replaces it with the note left for Victoria from Klaus sprinkling it with water to look like tears. Victoria is now off the hook with Klaus to blame.

Ted follows Klaus to the train station and through all kinds of humorous German word explanations; he explains how he realized she was not the right one for him. The heart and soul knows if they are the right one and there should be no question. He asks if Ted had ever felt that way and he says he thinks so.

The last scene returns to the Farhampton train station with a tuxedo clad Ted sitting on the bench reading next to an older woman. A taxi drops off a person who stands on the platform dressed in a trench coat and bejeweled stiletto T-strap shoes. In one hand she holds a guitar and in the other she holds a bright yellow open umbrella that hides her face.

We leave the premier pretty much not knowing much more than when we started. Will Lily and Marshall ever get any sleep? Will Robin and Barney get married and what happened with Quinn? What happened to Victoria and who is the mysterious woman standing on the platform. The future continues to be just down the road.