How I Met Your Mother Season 8 Premiere Farhampton
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‘How I Met Your Mother’ Season 8 takes us for a ride with its first episode of the (potentially) final season "Farhampton," as Ted insists he and Victoria return to the church to leave a note for her fiancee, while Quinn learns the truth of Barney and Robin's former relationship, and poor Marshall and Lily struggle to stay awake!

Last season’s ‘How I Met Your Mother’ finale “The Magician's Code” saw Lily finally giving birth while Marshall raced back to the city to avoid missing it, Robin challenged Ted to go for the one that got away, and Barney’s future bride was finally revealed to be Robin, so what will the new season bring?  Will this be the last year for Ted, Robin, Barney, Marshall and Lily?

Read on for your in-depth recap of everything you need to know about ‘How I Met Your Mother’ season 8 premiere “Farhampton!”

A little ways down the road, we see Ted sitting at the Farhampton train station, reading a book while the rain pours around him.  An elderly woman sits next to him, and surmises from his tux that he must have just come from a wedding, but he dismisses it as a long story he doesn’t want to talk about.  So anyway, 10 hours earlier…

Returning to the moment when Robin called Ted into her dressing room, he assures her that Barney isn’t about to flee from their wedding (he tried).  Thoroughly pacified, Robin reveals a startling truth of her own: she herself can’t go through with the wedding!  Robin contemplates going out the window, to which Ted points out that it’s much harder getting in through it, reminding her that Ted had been through that exact same window at another date.

Back to what we know as the present, Marshall and Lily watch little Marvin contently, beside an equally content Barney and Quinn, while Robin picks her teeth.  When Barney and Quinn leave to get (some) champagne for the moment, Robin tries to have a moment alone with Marshall and Lily concerning the departed couple’s wedding.  Through their sleep-deprived delirium, they fail to contemplate anything she says, and hear most of her speech as if they were underwater.  When Quinn returns, she asks Robin and Lily to be her bridesmaids, not having many other friends, but Marshall and Lily forget both Robin’s concerns and Quinn’s question within moments.

Out on the open road, Ted and Victoria bask in their happiness, before Ted learns that she failed to leave a note for her jilted fiancée Klaus.  Remembering how much the note helped him through Stella, he turns around and insists that she leave some kind of word why she left the wedding.  Back at the apartment, Quinn and Barney gripe over their respective wedding ideas, and when she steps away Robin asks Barney why Quinn wouldn’t think it weird to have her as a bridesmaid.  Guess what relationship Barney never told her about!

Outside the church, Victoria fails to write an adequate note, leaving Ted to push her to write one full of passion.  Unfortunately, he has to be the one to deliver it, as she doesn’t think she’ll be able to leave the church a second time.  Back at the apartment, Robin presses Barney that he’ll have to tell Quinn about their relationship sooner or later, but Barney believes he’s covered his tracks by Photoshopping her out of all their old pictures!  While Robin gripes about being so easy to delete, Barney presses a delirious Marshall and Lily that they'll need to help keep Robin and Barney’s past relationship a secret too.

Back at the church, Ted finds the drainpipe up to Victoria’s window too difficult to climb, leading him to try a more direct approach.  Key in hand, Ted goes through the main way, but finds his entrance to Victoria’s dressing room blocked by Klaus’ burly German sister.  When Ted retreats to the car once more, Victoria insists they go through with the note, snagging Barney to seduce Klaus’ sister by phone!  Their plot succeeds, and Ted places the note in her bedroom, realizing upon getting back to the car that he left the keys upstairs, with the door locked.  Whoops.

Still delirious, Marshall and Lily tend to Marvin, remarking to themselves how silly it was Barney thought they couldn’t keep the secret of his and Robin’s relationship.  Of course, in their deprivation, they fail to notice that Quinn is actually in the room with them!  The commotion brings Barney into the room, who apologizes to his fiancée for keeping the secret, going so far as to list the entire history of the series in  a single minute!  Unmoved, Quinn bails.

Ted finally gets the courage to climb the drainpipe back up to Victoria’s room, but finds Klaus climbing out his own window at the same time!  Through his thick German accent, he explains that he left his own note, and will take the next train to the city.  Ted concocts a plan after Klaus leaves, shimmying up the drain pipe, reclaiming Victoria’s note, swapping it with Klaus’, and covering it in fake tears to absolve Victoria of any blame.

Quinn confronts Robin back at the apartment, though Robin insists that there’s nothing between her and Barney since she has another boyfriend, Nick.  Marshall and Lily are stunned, but Robin had told them earlier while they were deliriously unable to hear her.  The married couple admit to being overtired from the baby, but after they head to bed, Quinn still puts forth that she doesn’t feel she can trust Robin and Barney.

Until she sees Nick’s abs that is!  Nick (Michael Trucco) gently presses Robin that she shouldn’t have called him to the bar claiming an emergency, before departing with both girls’ tongues wagging.  Quinn departs for a shot at the bar off her navel, though Robin admits to Barney in private she’s sad he destroyed the evidence of their time together, something she couldn’t have done.  With that, he hands her a key and tells her to go to 622 West 14th street.

With Ted and Victoria seemingly freed, he finds one question scratching away at his mind, and takes them to the train station.  Finding Klaus waiting by the platform, Ted learns through muddled German words that for as wunderbar as she may be, Victoria was not his life-long treasure of destiny.  Instead, she was the thing that’s almost the thing you want, but not quite, a bond which forms instantaneously and not over time.

Montage time!  As Klaus extolls the virtue of that perfect love, we see Marshall and Lily watching Marvin, Barney holding Quinn in a taxi but looking out the window, as Robin finds in a storage unite that Barney kept all their old mementos and photos.  He teaches Ted that if he doesn’t know for sure that he’s found that love, he hasn’t, even if he will eventually

A ways down the road, Ted reads his book at the rainy Farhampton train station, when another passenger pulls up in a taxi.  Fetching her guitar from the trunk, she waits at the train station shortly down the platform from Ted, and opens up her yellow umbrella…

"Farhampton" is in something of a unique position as the premiere of 'How I Mother's eighth season, given that we don't yet know if it will end up being the lats.  Thankfully, the episode doesn't simply undo all the twists formed by its prior season finale, and offers up a thoroughly satisfying start to the season, if not all that funny of poignant.  Time will tell if we really have started the last leg of the journey, so for now 'How I Met Your Mother' seems to be playing it a bit safe.

Did you get your 'How I Met Your Mother' jollies from “Farhampton?”  Do you think it made for a satisfying start to the potentially final season?  What did you think about the episode? Join us next week for an all-new episode recap of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ “The Pre-Nup” on CBS!

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