Warning: This post contains spoilers for the How I Met Your Father season 1 finale.
The creative team behind How I Met Your Father explains what Robin Scherbatsky is up to at this point in the HIMYM timeline. As of Tuesday, the first season of Hulu's HIMYM spinoff has come to a close, and it has left its core characters in some surprising places. How I Met Your Father tracks the romantic and professional obstacles of bright-eyed Sophie (Hilary Duff) and her NYC-based friend group, while in the future, a grown Sophie (Kim Cattrall) recounts the story of how she met her son's dad. The season 1 finale didn't give any answers on who that dad might be, but it still offered plenty of twists.
One such twist involved the return of a key How I Met Your Mother character: Cobie Smulders' Robin Scherbatsky. Having just had a fight with her friend-turned-new-boyfriend Jesse (Chris Lowell), Sophie retreats to the bar downstairs, which is, naturally, frequent HIMYM location MacLaren's. Sophie goes to down her sorrows, only to run into a wiser and more reflective Robin, who is willing to impart some advice on the lovesick 30-year-old.
When it comes to the HIMYM timeline, this How I Met Your Father episode takes place after Robin's divorce from Barney (Neil Patrick Harris), but years before she gets back together with Ted (Josh Radnor). Following the finale, How I Met Your Father director Pamela Fryman and co-creator Elizabeth Berger explained to TVLine where Robin is in her life at this point. Berger revealed that HIMYM creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas had some input on Robin's scenes, and that they agreed that while "Robin is between romances at this moment in time, she doesn’t seem sad, she doesn’t seem depressed." Still, Robin comments on how "timing is everything," and Fryman agreed that has something to do with Ted. She said:
More than anything, I think when when she walks into that bar, there are ghosts of her past. She’s sitting at the bar, and she takes that glance over to that booth… and she talks about how somebody said that he loved her on their first date. It’s all of that. We all walk into places where we’ve been in different times of our lives and say “What if I went this way? What if I went that way? Should I call that person?” That’s life, and that’s what is so special about this to me. We get to see Sophie on this new journey and we get to see somebody that we’ve known and loved for so long reflecting on hers — and she’s not done yet. I mean, clearly! She’s getting together with Katie Couric and Savannah Guthrie! [Laughs]
Love it or hate it, the HIMYM series finale does confirm that Robin reconnects with Ted on a romantic level. However, as that happens years from now, How I Met Your Father has given fans a unique look at Robin in between various points of that much-debated episode. Her love story with Barney has fizzled out, and she might have some regrets, but this isn't a Robin that is overly caught up in the past. As Fryman said, the MacLaren's setting helped with her nostalgia for the How I Met Your Father scene. It's not hard to imagine that after she leaves there and focuses more on her current life, she isn't quite so bogged down by the past.
How I Met Your Father will return for season 2, and that can perhaps pave the way for appearances from other HIMYM characters. The last two episodes of the season did contain silly cameos from the Captain (Kyle MacLachlan) and Becky (Laura Bell Bundy), reaffirming that everyone from the HIMYM universe is still around somewhere. Now that audiences have gotten to check in with Robin, perhaps other characters can get their turns in season 2.
Source: TVLine