How I Met Your Mother season 6 featured a special guest appearance by Jorge Garcia and with it came an amusing lottery reference that most Lost fans would appreciate. In total, Garcia appeared in two episodes on the CBS sitcom. His character was named Steve Henry, but his numerous misfortunes gave him the nickname of "The Blitz." Here's how an element from Lost was tied into How I Met Your Mother and how it was made even funnier later in the series.
Steve was an old friend of Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) and Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel) since the trio went to Wesleyan University together. He had a habit of leaving certain events early and missing out on epic moments in which he would always learn about it later. Steve ended up inheriting the "Curse of the Blitz" named after a Wesleyan student who left just before the college became co-ed. Due to the curse, most of Steve's friends referred to him as "The Blitz."
Garcia made his first How I Met Your Mother cameo in the season 6 episode "Blitzgiving." The day before Thanksgiving, Ted decided to leave the bar early and missed a fun night with his friends. Coincidentally, Ted's friends were joined by The Blitz at MacLaren's and lifted his curse. Steve was briefly freed and Ted took on the curse instead. While detailing the events of the wild night, Marshall was dared to send an explicit picture to a random number. Steve popped up next to Marshall and quickly threw out "4815162342." To those not familiar with Lost, the number may have seemed random, but it held a deep meaning to Garcia's time on the ABC drama.
Why The Number Sequence Was Significant In Lost
Garcia played Hugo "Hurley" Reyes for all six seasons of Lost, spanning from 2004 to 2010. Prior to being on a plane crash that sent Hurley to a mysterious island, the character was involved in a tragic accident that caused him to seek psychiatric care. A fellow patient had a habit of repeating the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42. When Hurley got out of the facility, he used those six numbers for the lottery and ended up winning the $114-million jackpot. Following the big win, Hurley immediately started to experience bad luck. The numbers then appeared periodically throughout Lost and even represented factors of an equation that predicted when humanity would end.
Even though Ted became The Blitz, he found a way to pass the curse onto Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris). Barney, in turn, passed the curse back to Steve by the end of the season 6 episode. Garcia made a second cameo in the How I Met Your Mother season 9 episode "Gary Blauman", which revealed that Steve's bad luck continued after he acquired a gambling habit. In fact, he just missed out on winning the jackpot on a slot machine at the casino. Steve had previously claimed that his misfortune was like "being stuck on an island for ages" as a reference to Garcia's time on Lost. Let's just hope that Steve stayed away from any travel on planes.