Top 10 Small Details in HIMYM You Never Noticed
For this list, we're looking at all the best Easter eggs from “How I Met Your Mother.”
#10: Time Remains the Same at Marshall & Lily’s
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You’d need to have an eagle eye to pick out this detail, and even so you’d probably have to be pausing your TV every few seconds too. The average viewer likely didn’t notice the fact that at Marshall and Ted’s apartment and later at Marshall and Lily’s, the clock is always stuck on the same time: 4:20. In the episode, “The Duel,” where they flashback to various instances that took place in the apartment, it is clear that this clock has been broken for years. Now why did they choose 4:20, you ask? If you don’t know, then you may not be old enough for us to tell you.
#9: Marshall Predicted the Weather
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For fans of “HIMYM,” one of the biggest draws of the show are the long-running gags that are scattered throughout the seasons. All the way back in Season 2, Marshall and Barney make a slap bet, and for the rest of the series slaps are doled out with much anticipation. In the Season 7 episode, “Disaster Averted,” Marshall gains three additional slaps and immediately uses two, saying that he’ll save the third for a rainy day. And in the end, Marshall uses the last slap on an actual rainy day in “The End of the Aisle.”
#8: Some Extra Sandwiches
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In Season 3, Ted introduces the concept of using the term “eating a sandwich” as a metaphor for smoking marijuana. Characters are seen throughout the series literally eating sandwiches when viewers know what’s actually up. Interestingly, though, a full season before its explained, in the episode “How Lily Stole Christmas,” a story is told involving her eating a sandwich in college. A neighborhood teen “eats a sandwich” at Marshall’s house in Season 7 and in the Season 9 episode, "Mom and Dad", we see a Rastafarian “eating a sandwich” on the beach.
#7: What’s the Story, Wishbone? So, it seems that in Season 1, Lily wore a wishbone shaped necklace and in Season 6, Zoey wore a strikingly similar one. Coincidence, right? Not on “HIMYM!” Remember in the third season when Marshall and Lily are broke, so Marshall creates lilyandmarshallselltheirstuff.com to make a little extra cash? Zoey mentions the fact that she bought some of Lily’s artwork online, so maybe, just maybe, she also bought some jewelry while she was at it! Considering how thorough the writers of this show are, we wouldn’t be surprised if this was intentional.
#6: Barney’s Magnum Opus
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In the second season, Lily has her friends come see a play she’s putting on, and Barney isn’t very nice about it. When Lily claims that she would find something polite to say about a play he was in, he tries to test her resolve. He creates the most awful and irritating play you could possibly imagine, involving repeating the word “moist,” playing the recorder, and spraying the audience with water guns. Though it’s never said out loud, a screengrab of one of the programs shows that the play was titled simply “Suck It, Lily.”
#5: A Lifetime in a Minute
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If you’ve watched “HIMYM,” you know that the writers take great pains to include details that casual viewers just wouldn’t pick up on. This is definitely one of them. In the Season 9 episode, “The Rehearsal Dinner,” the gang spends some time making jokes about Canada to bug Robin. To show just how many jokes they manage to come up with and imply the passage of time, there is a couple in the background whose lives are progressing before our very eyes. He proposes, she gets pregnant, their kid graduates college, and one of them even dies all in the background of this silly scene.
#4: Marshall Fulfills a Lifelong Dream
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Throughout the series, we learn that Marshall has a certain, shall we say, reverence for the Loch Ness Monster. In fact, Lily and Marshall actually take their honeymoon in Scotland in an effort to spot the mythic creature. In a Season 3 episode, we get to see into Marshall’s future as an elderly man in the year 2029 and it looks like his life is pretty good. Most importantly, though, if you look closely, you can see a newspaper article framed behind him that reads ““N.Y.C. Lawyer Captures ‘Nessie’”.
#3: A Sinister Countdown
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For a sitcom, “HIMYM” does delve into darker territory at times. The saddest the show gets is definitely in the sixth season when Marshall’s father suddenly dies. Marshall gets the news from Lily just before the credits roll, but throughout the entire episode, there’s a subtle countdown taking place in the background that you would only notice on a second viewing. Numbers counting down from 50 to 1 are displayed in a wide variety of ways, on books, beer bottles, TV screens, and winning lotto numbers. You should definitely rewatch the episode and try to spot them all!
#2: The Fake Websites from the Show Are All Real
The people behind “HIMYM” really go the extra mile when it comes to offering up Easter eggs to fans. All of the websites mentioned on the show were created by the producers, including canadiansexacts.org, Barneysvideoresume.com, and theslapbetcountdown.com. The very best one might just be guyforceshiswifetodressinagarbagebagforthenextthreeyears.com. While some have become defunct over the years, even today many are still in operation.
#1: We Learned the Mother’s Name in Season One
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Some people watched “HIMYM” for the comedy and lovable characters, but others were in it for the mystery of who the mother was. The creators dropped hints throughout the series, but there was a big one that you may very well have missed. In this first season episode, Ted meets a stripper named Tracy, and tricks his kids by saying that’s how he met their mother. They’re understandably shocked, and he quickly says he’s kidding, but viewers do eventually find out that the mother’s name really IS Tracy, making this a much better joke.
