At St Patrick's Day three years later, Kelly encourages the Mother to go out and date again, bringing her to the same bar where Ted and Barney are celebrating.
The Mother acts on the wisdom from the naked orchestra teacher revealing her desire to end poverty by taking up economics in college.
Louis asks her to give him a call if she changes her mind and she leaves just before Ted appears to Lily and Barney in a green dress.
They begin dating not long after, but they are not really a perfect match (for example, Louis is not amused when The Mother has her English muffin sing show tunes).
The Mother's band is eventually booked for Barney and Robin's wedding in 2013; she stays at Louis's summer cottage not far from the Farhampton Inn.
In a flash-forward to the eve of the wedding, the Mother discovers Darren's ad for a replacement bass player and heads down to the Inn to confront him, eventually picking up Marshall and Marvin along the way.
Interpreting a gust of wind as Max's answer, the Mother bids him one last goodbye and declines Louis's proposal, later checking in at Farhampton Inn.
In interviews before it aired, Carter Bays stated that the episode is "a fun little Disneyland tour through the series from the perspective of someone outside the group".
I can quibble with a couple of things here and there—they were stuck with Darren, for instance, even though I'd have been fine never seeing him again—but overall it did about as good a job as possible as a single episode could at both telling a story of the Mother's last seven years, while weaving her into the larger continuity of the series.
"[9] Jessica Goodman from HuffPost said the episode was "pure delight for "HIMYM" fans with encyclopedic knowledge of the gang's universe", complimenting its many Easter eggs.
Gonzalez said it changed her perception of what the Mother was like, replacing a mental image of "this Dream Girl put on this Earth solely to be the opposite end of Ted Mosby's two-piece puzzle life" with "a real woman" going through heartbreak.