How I Met Your Father Season 2 has brought back a key character from How I Met Your Mother. Find out who and why they returned.
How I Met Your Father returned for Season 2 on Hulu last night (January 23) – and made sure to leave their biggest surprise until the end.
As the title suggests, this series (created by This Is Us and Love, Victor showrunners Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger) is set in the same universe as hit CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother.
There were some connections established in Season 1 – such as Jesse (Christopher Lowell) and Sid (Suraj Sharma) living in Marshall’s (Jason Segel) and Lily’s (Alyson Hannigan) old apartment from the original show.
Most notably, the character of Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders) made a cameo appearance in the How I Met Your Father Season 1 finale.
What happens?
So, where does Season 2 take us?
The show brings back another How I Met Your Mother vet, in a surprising way. More on that later…
We pick back up with Sophie (Hilary Duff) and her chaotic love life. This episode sees her involved with three men, in one way or another.
As well as Jesse, there’s school teacher Drew (Josh Peck). You might remember that he was Sophie’s boyfriend for most of Season 1. Until, however, she broke up with him only 24 hours before the events of the Season 2 premiere.
Last but not least there’s marine biologist Ian (Daniel Augustin). He moved to Australia for career purposes back in the series premiere last year.
However, Ian has now returned after a series of convoluted events resulted in him losing his job over there.
If that wasn’t crazy enough, we also still have future Sophie (Kim Cattrall) telling this story to her as-of-yet unidentified son in the year 2050.
That’s an important detail to remember about How I Met Your Father; it essentially takes place in two time periods. Present day (2022-2023), as well as 2050.
Nevertheless, the Season 2 premiere introduces a third timeline for its most shocking scene. Still in 2023, just a little later from where Sophie’s currently at.
Ready? Wait for it…
That’s right, Emmy and Tony-award-winning actor Neil Patrick Harris reprises his role as ‘legendary’ womaniser, Barney Stinson!
In the ‘slightly future’ timeline, we see Sophie crash into the back of Barney’s Audi. Its license plate reads “LGNDRY”.
Co-creators Aptaker and Berger elaborated on this shock twist in an interview with TVLine.
“Whenever we talk about bringing back a member of the original crew, you want it to serve two purposes: You want to give some tidbits about what is going on in their lives, where they’ve landed and where they’re at, but it’s also about how they impact the How I Met Your Father story, and how they send one of our characters in a new, unexpected direction. Similar to Robin last year, we’ll learn some more about where Barney’s at, but it’ll also have a major impact on the trajectory, and main narrative, of our season.”
Isaac Aptaker (TVLine, 2023)
The TVLine interview also confirmed that Harris would return as Barney for more episodes later in Season 2.
