‘How I Met Your Mother’ Brings Back Victoria, the Original Maybe-Mother

CBS's "How I Met Your Mother" returned last night for its seventh season, and though it's starting to feel like parsing episodes for clues to the question the show's title suggests, we did learn some information. Like: The future wedding teased all of Season 6 is, in fact, Barney's (Neil Patrick Harris); and that Barney's eventual bride is someone who knows and likes Ted (Josh Radnor) enough to ask for him in the moments before her nuptials (though...okay, yeah, that COULD just be for him to relay a message to Barney, given that Ted is Barney's Best Man.)

The bigger bombshell, though, came at the end of last night's two back-to-back episodes: Victoria (Ashley Williams), the very first possible Mother from way back in Season 1, has returned from her culinary study in Germany and is, once again, parading her cupcakes before Ted. Does this mean she is, once more, a possible Mother? Given that there is apparently no end in sight for the series, that is anyone's guess. The producers seem to have an infinite number of tricks at the ready to delay the end of the story Older Ted keeps telling to his long-suffering children.

In the first of the night's two episodes, we also learned of Ted's reputation for embarrassing himself at weddings by giving toasts so laughably maudlin that Punchy, the groom in the series premiere, even auto-tuned one and turned it into a viral hit in Finland. CBS is so proud of this gag that it's released an extended version online (though maybe whoever cut it should have been informed that Ted's failed architecture firm was MOSBIUS Designs — not "Mobius," as it's rendered in the clip.)