Warning: Contains spoilers for How I Met Your Father season 1.
In the How I Met Your Father season 1 finale, the TV show highlighted a strange detail about Sophie’s son and the story being told. How I Met Your Father borrows much of its framing device from its predecessor, How I Met Your Mother. However, the spinoff makes the device its own, most notably by showing the 2050 Sophie and keeping her son a mystery.
In How I Met Your Father season 1, episode 10, “Timing Is Everything,” Sophie (Hilary Duff) gets freaked out when Jesse (Christopher Lowell) tells Sophie that he loves her in his sleep. After first avoiding Jesse, she eventually goes over to his apartment to straighten it out, rather than letting her fear of the relationship ruin things. Sophie in 2050 (Kim Cattrall) narrates the moment by saying “I showed up at the guys’ apartment before my gallery show.”
While it is a small detail, the fact that Sophie in 2050 says “the guys’ apartment” and not, for example, “Jesse’s apartment” or “Sid and Jesse’s apartment” is a crucial giveaway about how the story is being told in How I Met Your Father. While it might seem unlikely, the Sophie narrating the story in 2050 at no point says the name of any of the four candidates for the identity of the father (Jesse, Sid, Charlie, and Ian). In fact, the only character that Future Sophie names is Drew (Josh Peck) who was not included among the people she met in the first episode when Sophie stated that she met the father. All of this suggests that Sophie’s son does not know which of the men in the story is his father.
This is not to say that Sophie’s son does not know who his father is. Her son is clearly familiar with a more basic version of events as he says so in the first episode, and he presumably knows his father’s name. However, Sophie’s storytelling in 2050 never uses their names, even awkwardly passing off to present-day Sophie to say Ian’s name in episode 1, implying that she is telling the story without ever naming the characters to her son. While it might seem that Sophie’s son should know who his father is by described mannerisms or other stories, this could be a hint as to how little he knows about his father, suggesting that How I Met Your Father might repeat How I Met Your Mother’s controversial twist.
While not including the names in her storytelling might seem like a strange choice on Future Sophie’s part it is actually a call back to How I Met Your Mother’s very first episode. In that episode, Ted meets Robin, but does not divulge her name to his kids until the end of the episode with the twist that she is “Aunt Robin.” The kids were upset by this aspect of the story thinking that the story was supposed to be about their mother and grow tired of Ted’s storytelling knowing that she is not in the story and wanting him to get to the point. However, with How I Met Your Father, if Sophie’s son does not know which member of the cast is his father himself, it would explain why he remains so engaged and gets frustrated by cliffhanger endings in How I Met Your Father: this is a story he truly doesn’t know the outcome of.