Top 20 Unanswered How I Met Your Mother Questions

In the pilot, Ted steals a blue French horn from the restaurant for Robin when they go on a date. Later, Ted and Robin are forced to return the horn to the restaurant as they decide they’re on different paths. So, with a controversial final move by Ted, he gets back with Robin and brings her a blue French horn to represent the start of their new love story. Symbolism? We see you. But, where did Ted get the horn? The restaurant kept theirs locked up after the incident. Did Ted buy and paint one, or did he have one hanging around for when he decided to go for it? I guess we’ll need yet another spin-off to find out.

Lily and Marshall both have complex relationships with their respective parents, but you’d think they would have at least had all of them at their wedding. Lily’s mother was there, but not her father. It’s mentioned later in the show that he wasn’t invited, but at one point Lily also talks about her dad paying for the wedding. The most shocking, though, was the Eriksens’ absence. Marshall is extremely close with his family, particularly his father, yet none of them are seen at the wedding. Were they still mad at Lily for calling off the first wedding, or did they just hang out in the shadows, out of the audience's line of vision? Who’s to say?

Bernice is the older woman who sits next to Ted at the train station on the night he meets his future wife. She hears Ted talk about the dreamy bass player from the wedding before she points out that the girl he’s describing is standing just a few feet from them. She is more excited about the two of them meeting than Ted is, saying she’ll sing at their wedding, and hoping that said wedding is a big one. She encourages Ted to go meet her, and the rest is history. So, did she end up singing at their wedding? Did they ever track her down and thank her for helping bring them together? We need justice for Bernice.

Throughout the many years that the gang lived in the apartment above MacLaren’s, there were a number of mishaps that left the place in less than pristine condition. In a Season Four episode, Marshall and Ted reminisce about how everything got damaged, including Barney punching a hole in the wall and Ted’s bookshelf giving and ripping the wall apart. Ted initially volunteers to pay for the damage deposit when they all move out, but plans change, and it’s actually Lily and Marshall who finally turn in the keys to the apartment many years later. Did they get their deposit back? Since almost every member of the gang caused damage, did they at least split the cost?

The mother of Ted’s children had her own band called “Superfreakonomics,” where she was the bass player and also did some singing. Her ex-roommate Cindy even told Ted that they were the greatest wedding band in the tri-state area, so, what happened to the band after Barney and Robin’s wedding? Tracy goes on to be a successful author in the field of economics, but nothing is said about what happened to her band. Did they eventually disband, even though they finally got rid of Darren? Did they still play occasional gigs? Or were they a huge success? Let’s be real, we are given a criminally low amount of information about the titular mother, and we need answers.

Ted is in his late twenties at the start of the show, which means he’s already well into his adult life. So, why’s another actor voicing him in the future? There is a 25-year gap between the start of the show and when he is telling the story to his kids, but his voice couldn’t have changed that much. We love Bob Saget, and his voice and demeanor are fitting to Ted’s personality, but why couldn’t Ted himself have been the narrator? Like Peter Griffin pointed out, he’s not going to grow up to be Bob Saget, which we saw in the finale as the Ted we know ended up narrating the final moments. So, what was that about?

Ted tells his kids that there are some stories you tell, and some you don’t, but we gotsta know the answer to this one! When Barney and Marshall refuse to join Ted at the bar, he meets up with his previous hook-up from the pineapple incident, Trudy, and her former sorority sister, Rachel. Luckily for Ted, not only are they both into him, they are both very competitive with one another. There are lots of obstacles that prevent Ted from riding the tricycle, thanks to his friends and also his own fear, and we never find out if he does it or not. Barney even tries to tempt him with the threeway belt, but Ted leaves this question unanswered forever.

In the first episode, Ted falls for Robin at MacLaren’s, where she reveals that she’s hanging out with her friends after one of them got dumped. But, once she starts hanging out with Marshall, Ted, Lily, and Barney, she doesn’t seem to hang out with anyone else. She gets jealous when Lily hangs out with coworkers, no one shows up to her bachelorette party, and when she tries to make friends with other women, she struggles. So, what was up with that group of gal pals we saw in the pilot? If she ditched them that fast for this new gang of pals, it’s no wonder she had a hard time holding onto friends.

Future Ted loves to tease some future storylines through his narration. While he always seems to circle back to these foreshadows, there is one that never got an explanation. When Ted tries to cheer Robin up, he puts on a Christmas light show for her in their apartment. During the festive display, Ted narrates how Robin goes on to do great things in her life, and one of the things he mentions is how she was briefly a bullfighter. But, this never gets brought up again. Yes, a deleted scene from the finale and a conversation during Robin’s cameo on “How I Met Your Father” do include conversations about it, but the core show seemed to have forgotten about this.

Ted is nothing if not a romantic, and his journey to find his soulmate is equal parts exhausting and inspiring. So, when he finds out that the dating website he signed up for got him a perfect match, we thought he had finally found the one. She checks every box, including her age, favorite book, and desire to have two kids. But, when Ted realizes that he’d rather have Robin than any seemingly perfect girl, he stands her up. Because of this, we never get to learn who Ted’s perfect match was, and we are disappointed that this never got brought up in a storyline later in the show.

Since Marshall was a kid, he dreamed of becoming an environmental lawyer and saving the world. But when he finally did become an environmental lawyer, it wasn’t exactly what he expected. His own boss was discouraged and accepted miniscule court settlements – that is, until Marshall inspired him to fight the good fight again. After a major win over an evil corporation, Marshall says that they are going to save the planet, and Future Ted assures us that they did. Yet, throughout the rest of Marshall’s career, he goes back and forth between corporate and environmental law. Though he eventually becomes a judge, we never get to see exactly what Marshall did that saved the world.

Future Ted has admitted that as the gang grew older, they drifted a bit. Whenever he’s talking to his kids, though, he still calls them all aunts and uncles, so they obviously still see each other on holidays, birthdays, and of course, Slapsgiving. But there was also a huge portion of the finale dedicated to Robin disappearing from the group and they barely saw her. However, at Ted and Tracy's wedding, everyone seems to be okay with each other again. So even though they may not speak daily anymore, hopefully that means at least every now and then the gang reunites and closes down MacLaren's.

It’s a long-running joke throughout the series that every member of the gang has a doppelgänger. In fact, finding Stripper Lily, Mexican Wrestler Ted, and Barney’s Dr. John Stangel all happened at very crucial times in their lives. This begs the question: did the Mother have a doppelgänger? When she became an official member of the gang, it only stands to reason that they might be in search of her doppelgänger. There have been entire episodes and story arcs around finding the doppelgängers, but even just a quick flash forward to meeting the Mother’s would have been awesome – or maybe she was just of a kind.

In the final season, we got to see quite a bit into the gang's future, but we never got to see what happened in Rome. Throughout the show, we saw most of the characters grow in their lives and careers, so we feel a little cheated that we never saw Lily thrive when she finally got her dream job. In some short clips, Lily obviously did well, we just wish we got to see a bit more of her Roman adventure. Also, what did Marshall end up doing in Rome? Lily was working, their parents were looking after the kids… did Marshall just sit around all day eating Funyuns? We want to know!