How The Final Season Began

It looks like most,  if not all, of the ninth and final season of "How I Met Your Mother" will take place in Hamptons hotel where Barney and Robin are getting married.  The one-hour season premiere began with a countdown to 55 hours before the wedding, and things are only beginning to come together.  Marshall still has to get there with his son, and he's traveling from Minneapolis by car with a loud, boisterous kidder named Daphne, who could have stepped out of one of  those Discover Card commercials . . . on what promises to be a hilarious road trip.  Ted found Robin's locket and hopes to give it to her in perhaps a last-ditch effort to win her over (which will fail, of course).  Only one character has already met The Mother (as Ted Mosby's future wife is called, for now) - Lily, who parted company with Ted on their trip to Long Island for the wedding and took the train instead.  She met Ted's future wife, a member of the band playing at the wedding, who was on her way to the gig by train.   And Lily likes those "sombitch cookies" of hers!   We not only know that Ted will meet his future wife during the weekend (details to follow, though we know the magic moment is in a severe rainstorm at a train station) but we know they will return to the same hotel in September 2014. 

Several variables remain.  The wild card that could adversely affect the wedding is still out there, perhaps in the form of the locket belonging to Robin that Ted found or in Lily's indignation of Marshall's acceptance of a judicial post in place of their plans to move to Italy.  One hurdle has already been cleared; Barney still has no doubt in marrying Robin after his gay half-brother James (played by the great Wayne Brady) reveals that his marriage to his domestic partner - no, wait, I'll say it, his husband - is over.    

I'm sticking with my prediction that virtually the entire season will take place at this hotel.  We could see the wedding take place during the November sweeps and leave enough time for Ted and his future wife to tie the knot in the series finale, but, no, I predict this wedding will be the climactic end to the series.  Everything that happens after Barney and Robin are wed will be left to the imagination. Maybe even Ted's wife's name.

The ball has been set in motion after an excellent start.  It's going to be a fun ride through May.