‘How I Met Your Mother’ season 9, episode 9 preview: First look at Bryan Cranston’s return
Have you been waiting for the return of Hammond Druthers to “How I Met Your Mother”? Were this a character not played by Bryan Cranston, we would imagine that he is probably not someone we would be seeing on the show again. But once you remember that this was the man who turned Walter White on “Breaking Bad” into a phenomenon, it’s a no-brainer that Hammond would turn up on the show one more time.
This character, in case you forgot, was Ted’s one-time boss turned one-time employee after Ted got a promotion, and he famously had the worst day ever when his wife left him on the same day that Ted tried to fire him and he suffered a heart attack. Given that this character is so far in the past, though, it is somewhat unclear just what sort of role this guy could be having in the story moving forward.
One possible theory, at least based on the preview below, is that we are in for a mock clip show a la “Community” to give us a few odds and ends that were left behind over the past several years, but only in the standpoint of the characters’ lives. All of this is new footage. The major reason we feel like this is because there isn’t any actual coverage of present-day Ted and company in the promo, which means that this is entirely a flashback episode, or there are frequent flashbacks that are framed within a loose narrative.
We do have one little part of this clip that makes us particularly upset: Barney using a dolphin noise to hit on a woman, and it is the same stock dolphin noise presumably that we’ve heard a billion times on other shows. This is one of those clips where if you watch enough TV, you hear this all the time. There is another audio stock of children laughing that we have also heard on about a dozen or so shows over the years. We’re sure that there aren’t too many soundbytes of dolphins out there to use … but still.
What do you think about this promo, and do you worry about us being stuck with a waste of an episode? Be sure to share your thoughts below, and click here if you want to read our full review of “The Lighthouse.”
Photo: CBS