Sarah Chalke Gets Me Thinking

Last night Sarah Chalke guest starred again on How I Met Your Mother, and it got me thinking — what if Scrubs wasn't going to be picked up by ABC for the fall?

As this season began, Scrubs was, for all intents and purposes, headed into its final year. Then, the writers' strike happened and the number of episodes produced of the show for this year got cut drastically. Apparently, the producers may have felt that they needed the full amount of episodes in order to end correctly though and the show is produced by an arm of ABC. In a fit of serendipity and vertically integrated corporateness, the show is all but assured of a slot on ABC next fall. Will this new season now be the last season? Who knows? What I'm more concerned with today is what that means for How I Met Your Mother.

You see, Sarah Chalke, a star of Scrubs, had been cast in a multi-episode arc as the new girlfriend of Ted (the main character on HIMYM). The entire premise of HIMYM is that Ted is telling the story to his kids of how he met their mother (hence the title). This season of the show followed up on the ending of Ted's relationship with Robin, who is not Ted's kids' mother. So, ostensibly, the show was on the right track to actually inform us about how Ted met the future mother of his children this season.

Now, Ted has a new, possibly long-term girlfriend, Stella (Sarah Chalke), and at the time this was all in the planning stages, people may have thought that Chalke's schedule would be more open for next season than it now appears to be. So, that leads me to wonder – was Stella at one time the intended mother of Ted's children? If she was, now that Chalke seems to be busy next year, has that changed?

Of course, this is all purely theoretical as HIMYM hasn't yet been renewed for next season (seriously, CBS, we need to talk about this, you don't have a funnier show on your schedule and while the ratings aren't stellar, they're not bad). But, just because it's theoretical doesn't mean that it isn't something that has been bothering me for a goodly long time.

These are the questions that keep me up at night, these are the questions I feel compelled to ask, these are the questions I never really get answers for.

I guess we can't have everything.