Summary
Sophie tries to impress Drew by classing up her birthday party while Valentina and Charlie struggle to define their relationship.
This recap of Hulu’s How I Met Your Father season 1, episode 4 contains spoilers.
Read the season 1 review.
More than any other generation, millennials are getting married and having children (traditional markers of maturity, not to mention stable employment) later. As a result, the boundaries between youth and maturity feel more blurred than ever, and it’s hard to know at what point you should let go of one and embrace the other.
How I Met Your Father season 1, episode 4 recap
This dilemma is thrust upon Sophie in this week’s How I Met Your Father. Her relationship with Drew is coming along nicely, and she’s impressed by his maturity (he named a dog after one of the Golden Girls). But her thirtieth birthday party is coming up, and when she invites Drew last minute, she decides she cannot reveal her “party girl” nature to him and asks her friends to swap out the Christina Aguilera’s “Dirrty” themed decorations for something more classy. A raw bar, in place of Cheetos, for instance.
Meanwhile, Valentina tells Charlie she doesn’t want to define or pin down their relationship, which is a little more difficult for the one who uprooted his life to be with her. They spend the party competitively flirting with other party guests, both coming to the conclusion that they do want each other more than anyone else (much to the chagrin of the trail of strangers whose hopes of getting lucky tonight they raised).
At the party Sophie tries her best to maintain a classy demeanor, unfortunately realizing that shrimp aren’t supposed to be served raw much too late. Drew ends up burning his hand on a hot pipe, and when she takes him to the bathroom and starts to apologize they are interrupted by a naked Valentina and Charlie, who were hooking up in the shower. They meet again on the rooftop, where Sophie comes clean about the party and her own nature as well, but Drew admits that being mature isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. He still misses out on some things that are regular in Sophie’s life. The two kiss and make up, which is sweet but vaguely unsatisfying considering what Sophie revealed in the last episode, her confession to Jesse about her mom has apparently no impact on her party girl/classy dilemma?
The ending
The final storyline on this week’s episode involves Jesse and Ellen, the two half-siblings who realize they don’t really know each other. Jesse tries to wingman Ellen but she’s frustrated when he keeps getting basic facts about her life wrong. This leads to a somewhat deep (as far as this show goes) conversation about their parents’ divorce. Ellen moved to New York to get closer to the big brother that, at the time, seemed closer to her parents’ age than her own, and thus somewhat responsible for their family’s problems. Jesse responds that at the time he was just nine and that he wanted to visit Ellen all the time. The two make up and Jesse teaches her to jump the subway, a New York rite of passage!
This episode really tries to pull for the heartstrings, with each plot line culminating in a scene of the two characters opening up and sharing their feelings, and for the most part, it works, I just wish the show would try and become its own thing rather than chase barely decade-old nostalgia.
Additional points
- “Man-gagement ring,” is another joke that should remain in 2005, but people mistaking it for a virginity ring is pretty funny.
- A taxi guy isn’t retro, it’s much cheaper than an uber in Manhattan!
- “I make overnight oats, I’m an extremely put-together person.”
