How I Met Your Father Telegraphs the Dad - Is There a Twist Coming?

 How I Met Your Father subverts expectations by laying out its major clues early... or does the sitcom have a big trick up its sleeve the whole time?

WARNING: The following contains spoilers for How I Met Your Father, Season 1, Episode 1, "Pilot," now streaming on Hulu.

The spinoff series How I Met Your Father presents the romantic history of another lovestruck parent recounting how they met the co-parent of their eventual child decades into the future. But whereas How I Met Your Mother played out the identity and long-promised meeting over the course of its nine seasons, How I Met Your Father reveals right from its opening episode that one of the men the show's protagonist Sophie meets will eventually become her baby daddy. And in subverting that formula, How I Met Your Father is set to prove that it's on track to be a very different show with some potential tricks up its sleeve.

How I Met Your Mother left clues throughout its run -- some blatant, like Ted Mosby's eventual wife carrying a yellow umbrella and playing bass -- while others were more subtle, like her name being Tracy revealed in Season 1. Across its run, How I Met Your Mother was accused of spinning its wheels by prolonging the mystery behind the identity of Ted's soulmate. The series ended with the twist that Tracy would eventually pass away years after the events of the main story, with Ted's children encouraging him to rekindle his romance with his on-again, off-again paramour Robin Scherbatsky, a narrative decision that was met with controversy upon its initial airing in 2014.

By contrast, How I Met Your Father opens with the older Sophie's son claiming that he knows how his parents met, with the story he's hearing more about how the couple would eventually find love with each other. Instead, the show posits that one of four different men Sophie meets over the course of the pilot episode will eventually be the father to her son, despite the young woman not embarking on a romance with any of them. This inverts the twist at the end of How I Met Your Mother's pilot episode, with the older Ted definitively declaring to his children that Robin is not their mother, leaving the mystery to be followed over the course of the series.

In openly claiming that the eponymous father has already been introduced right at the start of How I Met Father, the new sitcom immediately sets to ensure that the prolonged mystery of How I Met Your Mother does not appear to be in the cards; the alleged suspects are right there in the pilot episode, it's just a matter of which love interest will ultimately pan out. This also suggests that more twists and turns are in store for audiences over the course of the series. The older Sophie is visibly not wearing a wedding ring, hinting that just because the eventual love interest will father a child with Sophie, he may not be the one she ends up with by the story's conclusion.

How I Met Your Father wears its influences from How I Met Your Father on its sleeve, right down to several of the main characters living in one of the preceding series' apartments. Despite this, the new show is aware of the narrative pitfalls and audience expectations that surrounded its predecessor and actively seeks to subvert this by forging its own path right from its pilot episode. How I Met Father has laid out its own mystery but also narrowed down the possibilities, daring the audience to predict who will end up with Sophie from its newly introduced core cast.

To see how How I Met Your Father flips the script, new episodes release Tuesdays on Hulu.