Warning: This article contains spoilers for How I Met Your Father’s season 1 finale.
While How I Met Your Mother cast member worked, the scene also acknowledged its own silliness in a rewarding way. It isn’t always easy for spinoffs to ground cameos from cast of earlier shows. At its worst, bringing back a member of the original show’s cast on a spinoff can smack of desperation and come across as an attempt to establish a firmer connection between the two projects.
However, How I Met Your Father’s first cameo from a How I Met Your Mother character avoided this fate for two reasons. For one thing, the spinoff waited until its ninth episode before bringing back a How I Met Your Mother star and for another, the character in question was a minor figure rather than one of the main cast. Continuing this successful streak, How I Met Your Father’s season 1 finale pulled off a more substantial cameo from a How I Met Your Mother cast member by keeping its tongue firmly in cheek.
It is a sweet idea for How I Met Your Father’s young heroine Sophie to get some unexpected life advice from How I Met Your Mother’s older, more independent star, Robin. However, finding a circumstance where this would occur organically is a tricky thing to pull off. As a result, How I Met Your Mother’s spinoff leaned on the fourth wall when establishing the cameo, and the cheeky moment of self-referential humor worked to help ground the scene. When Sophie came across Robin at McLaren’s and the How I Met Your Mother character started interrogating her about the troubles in her love life, How I Met Your Father’s heroine reasonably asked why a famous and successful reporter who had never met her before wanted to discuss Sophie's troubles in depth.
It was a nice acknowledgment that while Robin sometimes got sentimental, of the central How I Met Your Mother quintet, she was probably the least likely character to offer a stranger a sympathetic ear and life advice. Many expected the How I Met Your Mother spinoff would bring back Barney, since he often played this role for strangers (it was even how he met Ted) and Sophie’s freewheeling attitude is closer to his than that of Ted. However, grounding Robin’s cameo by having Sophie point out how unlikely it was made the scene more effective, as this gag allowed the finale to acknowledge the silly setup while still using the circumstances to facilitate a cute comeback for Robin.
The scene’s silliness was alluded to again later when Sophie attempted to analyze her problems deeper and Robin advised her to "save unpacking your whole childhood" for someone with more time and interest, bringing back the character’s cynical side. Similarly, the moment when Sophie entered McLaren’s and noted how weird it was that she and her friends never went to the bar in the basement of their building functioned a lot like The Simpsons spoofing its reliance on freeze-frame gags. By drawing attention to this hoary sitcom convention, How I Met Your Father’s cameo managed to acknowledge the inherent silliness of How I Met Your Mother’s Robin appearing to give Sophie life advice while still keeping the scene’s heartfelt elements intact.