Did Sophie Just Meet Her Dad on ‘How I Met Your Father’?
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for How I Met Your Father Season 2 Episode 12, “Not a Mamma Mia.”]
The first half of How I Met Your Father Season 2 ended with Sophie (Hilary Duff) deciding to track down her dad, and she doesn’t waste any time doing so!
In the Hulu comedy’s return, Sophie asks her mom Lori (Paget Brewster), to share everything she can remember about her dad. “I met him at Lollapalooza, he lolla’ed my palooza, and bam, here you are!” Lori tells her. When Sophie shows her a photo from that day, Lori does remember he had a barbed wire tattoo around his bicep. Sophie also spots a badge that reveals he was working at the festival, and his name ends with “ick.”
Thanks to a deep dive on LinkedIn and a little blackmail, Val (Francia Raisa) helps Sophie narrow it down to three men, and the group splits up to track them down: Nick in Staten Island, Rick in New Jersey, and Dick in Yonkers. Rick’s out once they see he’s Asian, but Ellen (Tien Tran) and Charlie (Tom Ainsley) end up hiring Dick as a stripper for Ellen’s “bachelorette party” (consisting only of them and Ellen’s girlfriend Rachel), so they can see if he has the tattoo. (The others forget to tell them, so that goes on much too long.)
Sophie, Val, Jesse (Christopher Lowell), and Sid (Suraj Sharma) go to Nick’s, a hot dog restaurant, and find out Nick is dead. They visit his gravestone and even sing a bit of “Amazing Grace” … only for a man (Clark Gregg!) with a barbed wire tattoo to show up. “That must be my much older half-brother, and he got the tattoo to honor our dad,” Sophie decides. The others have to clue her in on the fact that, no, this is her father.
The four of them follow him back to Nick’s, and Sophie decides to approach him and introduce herself, but she can’t do it. “I’ve been waiting for this moment my entire life, imagining what my dad would be like,” she explains. “What if he’s terrible? What if signs me up for basketball and pushes me to my limit until I finally break down and have to tell him, ‘Dad, basketball is your dream, but it’s not mine’?”
And so the others give him some dad tests to make sure he’s dad worthy. He easily passes all of them (he’s compassionate, fun, and not creepy) and even gets a bonus (he’s a feminist). But still, Sophie again hesitates, this time walking out after seeing him in the back cheering on the Mets.
When she rejoins the others at the bar, she explains, “I was about to introduce myself, and then I realized he’s a Mets fan. … I realized that him being a Mets fan is just one of a thousand things that I don’t know about him and catching up and learning all of those things and then having to tell him every little quirk about me, I don’t know, it felt like too much, and maybe it’s just too late for us.” Sid suggests it just wasn’t the right day, but Sophie disagrees. “Even if we did get caught up on all the little things, who knows if he would even like me,” she says, leaving it at waiting until she’s ready.
Patrick Wymore/Hulu
But that’s when Nick walks into the bar. “Hi,” he says.
Has Sophie (finally) met her father?
How I Met Your Father, Tuesdays, Hulu
