The Big Picture

• Rewatching TV shows can offer new perspectives, comfort, and surprises, like early hints at major plot points.
• How I Met Your Mother subtly revealed the Mother's name in Season 1, building up to Tracy's reveal in the finale.
• Despite its flaws, How I Met Your Mother remains a well-loved show that continues to surprise fans upon rewatching.

After nine seasons, a decade, and a spin-off series, sometimes it's nice to sit back and watch How I Met Your Mother from where it all started: with Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) and the long, long (did we mention long?) story of how he met his wife. Even in the era of Too Much TV, there are multiple good reasons to blow off the new and rewatch a TV show you've seen many times before. Sometimes, it's valuable to revisit something you watched when you were younger, giving you an opportunity to appreciate it from a more adult perspective. There's also the comfort that comes from re-engaging with a familiar rhythm of storytelling, not to mention being reunited with all your old friends again. And there's the joy of discovering a detail that you might have missed in previous rewatchings — a secret surprise that's been waiting for years for you to discover it.

How I Met Your Mother is a fantastic example of the latter reason to rewatch, as over the course of nine seasons, the CBS sitcom's sharp jokes and gags built up an increasingly dense mythology of in-jokes and references that only occasionally circled back to that central question: Who is the unseen mother that Ted is taking his sweet damn time to meet? The titular question, though, did hang over the entire show's run, with clues as to the mother's identity dropped along the way well before Cristin Milioti finally made her first on-screen appearance at the end of Season 8. And it wasn't until nearly the very end of the How I Met Your Mother finale that we actually learned the character's first name: Tracy. Except, well, technically, the writers did tell us what her name was before then. Way before then. In How I Met Your Mother Season 1, actually.

'How I Met Your Mother' Dropped the Mother's Name In a Fakeout

Season 1, Episode 9, "Belly Full of Turkey," is How I Met Your Mother's first Thanksgiving story, though instead of Lily (Alyson Hannigan) hosting the big meal as she'd do in later seasons, the two plotlines feature her and Marshall (Jason Segel) celebrating the day in Minnesota, while Ted, Robin (Cobie Smulders), and Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) stay in New York. After shenanigans at a local soup kitchen lead to the latter three getting kicked out, they decide to enjoy the Thanksgiving buffet at the Lusty Leopard, where Ted meets a pretty stripper (Katie A. Keane).

The final bit of the episode plays out like this:

Stripper: I'm Amber.

Ted: Oh, I'm Ted.

They shake hands.

Stripper: Actually, I'm Tracy.

Ted: Still Ted.

Narrator (v.o.): And that, kids, is the true story of how I met your mother.

Cut to the year 2030 and Ted's son and daughter screaming, "What?!" and future Ted (Bob Saget) hastily following that up with "I'm kidding." (This is just one of many infuriating fakeouts delivered by How I Met Your Mother over the course of 208 episodes.) With hindsight, of course, it makes sense for future Ted to have used his future wife's real name as part of this gag — kids might not call their parents by their first names as a rule, but they at least know what those first names are by a certain age. But it's the sort of thing you might not notice the show doing until after many, many rewatches. And, honestly, since the audience missed the detail, it's impressive that the writers remembered so many seasons later.

'How I Met Your Mother' Is Worth a Rewatch

How I Met Your Mother had its flaws even while it was on the air, and certain elements have not aged well — there are the transphobic jokes, the painful absence of people of color, not to mention a solid percentage of most Barney stories, and let's not even get into the ending right now. Despite those issues, though, as a self-confessed apologist for How I Met Your Mother, I have rewatched every episode an unknowable number of times since its premiere in 2005, including "Belly Full of Turkey." But I never once noticed this early mention of Tracy's name until just recently, while once again rewatching the show from the beginning (instead of the many, many screeners I should be watching instead). Because not only is the best comfort TV the TV you've already seen before but sometimes, even years later, it can still find a way to surprise you.

How I Met Your Mother is streaming on Hulu in the U.S.

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