Leading up to this year’s game-changing season finale of the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother, creators/showrunners Carter Bays and Craig Thomas had been teasing that the ninth and final season would see the show’s narrative take a dramatic shift.  Well, following the events of the season eight finale, we now have confirmation of just what kind of shift is taking place and it’s a rather curious move on Bays and Thomas’ part.  Hit the jump to read on, but beware that there are spoilers for those who have somehow managed to remain unaware of what happened in the season eight finale.

So, in this year’s finale Bays and Thomas finally fessed up and revealed the show’s titular mother.  It wasn’t someone that Ted has crossed paths with previously, but was instead an entirely new character played by actress Cristin Milioti.  We briefly saw Milioti buying a ticket for a train to Farhampton, which as we saw in the season eight premiere is the same train that Ted is headed towards after Barney and Robin’s wedding.

So just how do Bays and Thomas plan on following up these events in season nine?  Well the answer is apparently “very slowly.”  CBS entertainment president Nina Tassler confirmed to TV Line that the entirety of season nine will, in fact, take place over the course of the events of the wedding weekend:

Season 9′s entire run will, in fact, span the wedding weekend and just the wedding weekend, as the comedy details “how each character, before Ted, meets the mother. So, they each meet her independently before he does.”

How will Bays and Thomas manage to stretch 24 episodes of story over the events of just three days?  Well that’s the question, and I have to admit I’m a tad disappointed.  I was hoping the final season would focus on the burgeoning relationship between Ted and The Mother, as the burden of proof would be on the show’s writers to convince us why Milioti’s character is “the one” for Ted instead of the numerous other women we’ve seen him date over the past eight years.  However, it appears that Bays and Thomas are sticking closely to their plan of having Ted and The Mother meet in the series finale, after everyone else has already encountered her, apparently.

It’ll certainly be interesting to see how Bays and Thomas plan to pull this off next season.  Will we get flashbacks that show us events from the mother’s perspective?  Will there be more flashforwards?  It’s anyone’s guess at this point, but what about you, dear readers?  Are you onboard for the “one weekend” plan or would you have rather seen the show take a different route to introducing the mother?