In what must be Ted's own private hell, he is asked to design a two-story Stetson restaurant. Ted is excited and eager to get his company, Mosbius Designs, up and running, so he'll chase whatever work he can get. At least he'll have a legitimate reason to wear his red cowboy boots.
But the real story, as always, is how life led Ted to meet the mother of his children. And this day, when Ted heads out for a bagel with the infamous yellow umbrella (that we know once belonged to the mother) he meets … someone at the street corner. The story-telling could have been annoying, showing how events shaped Ted's day – why he turned left, why he bought that magazine, why he visited the homeless man and gave him a dollar. But it worked really well, a handful of mini-recaps through events in the recent days.
Marshall's wild misuse of charts and graphs was possibly one of my favorite bits from this season. Who else would make a pie chart of favorite bars and a bar chart of favorite pies? It was great how he'd pull out these huge visual aids during conversations at the bar to emphasize his point. And, not only did we get to see another group Intervention and catch a glimpse of Marshall's god-awful comedy routine about fish, but we also saw Marshall take down Barney's pride by numbers.
Never slimier, Barney carried his list of conquests around in his pocket, currently at 199. Somehow, Marshall's numbers showing that Barney actually only has sex with about one percent of the women he hits on makes it not as sleazy. How this show continues to redeem Barney - even after asking Marshall if Lily would help him reach his goal - I'll never understand. Truthfully, it was a little fun to see Barney get a bit of comeuppance in his plan backfiring.
And in the most time-filling scene ever invented, Ted imagined running back and giving thankful hugs to all the people who had affected his day and put him on that street corner to meet up with Stella. Now, either Stella being on the street corner is a huge decoy, or she really will be the mother. At this point, it could go either way – hopefully we'll find out for certain in the next two weeks.