HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER Series Finale: Some Thoughts

[This post contains massive, massive, massive spoilers for the series finale of HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER. If you have somehow managed to avoid them all, and intend to stay spoiler-free, I’d advise against reading this post.]

It’s been a couple of hours since I’ve seen the HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER series finale, and I’ve found myself a bit numb to it.

Honestly, even though most of the events of the finale weren’t a massive surprise, I was still annoyed. I watched with lovely friends, most of whom had all seen it (and threatened to tape my reactions), and one of the blessings of that was we were able to talk out the finale, versus me immediately sitting down and cursing. (I’ll also admit to stalking the #HIMYMfinale tag on Twitter. I may have frustrations, but boy, many on Twitter were downright livid.)

If allowed, I could probably go on for hours about the finale, but I wanted to get to a few of the things that did and didn’t work for me…

What didn’t work:

• Are you telling me we spent an ENTIRE SEASON chained to this wedding weekend format for the marriage to be over within like 15 minutes of the next episode? Seriously? (I get the point of the wedding was for Ted to meet the mother. But they could have done the weekend in one or two episodes.)
• And to that point, if Robin and Ted were endgame — which became even more apparent when I rewatched the pilot hours before the finale, and I’m honestly surprised we didn’t get a shot of them with Ted’s perfect wedding in any of the flashforwards — why waste so much of the final seasons retreading Robin and Barney? They’ve been teasing this wedding for years — why not marry Barney off to Nora? Or someone else? It seems a bit fan-baiting to do what they did.
• One of the side effects of the Robin/Barney relationship was that, for me, Ted’s non-stop back and forth with whether he was OK with that relationship ruined any iota of interest I had in Robin/Ted. I was never a huge fan of theirs, but I got the appeal. But by having both Ted and Robin waiver for years about where they stood, only to come to a peace when she got engaged to Barney — but not really, because Ted almost immediately changed his mind, and then she got cold feet and they kept going back and forth and argh. It was sweet when Ted made his romantic gestures towards Robin in the show’s early years. I felt nothing when he came to her window in the finale. Based on their behavior for nine seasons, there’s no reason for me to think Ted and Robin are actually together, in, say, 2035.
• I hated that they killed Tracy, AKA the Mother. I discussed this a bit a few weeks ago, and even that was before we saw her wonderful first date/kiss with Ted. In many ways, it feels like if they wanted to kill off the mother, they should have stuck firm to their original plan of eight seasons and refused to do more. Losing Tracy after meeting her for only a few minutes would have been bittersweet. But this? I can’t — and won’t — speak for all fans, but for most of my friends and myself, Cristin Milioti’s performance as the Mother was one of the best parts of this season. We had a year to fall in love with this character and this relationship. (And learn about her tragic backstory. Come on. She needed a break.) If they were determined to kill her off, spotlighting all of her amazingness probably wasn’t the best move to make the decision any less brutal. Especially since she had been dead for six years by the time Ted started telling the story.
• How did it take seven years — and TWO KIDS — for Ted to marry Tracy? Even if she was pregnant, how did Ted freakin’ Mosby not make it clear he would marry her any time, any place, etc. That might have been the most shocking part of the finale.
• While I totally get why Robin couldn’t be a big part of Ted and Barney’s life, her isolation from Lily was just plain sad, and seemed fairly out of left field.
• Oy, it was so obvious the stuff with the kids was shot years ago.
• Television is a unique medium in that very, very, very few other pieces of work have to be crafted without knowing exactly when it will end. (Not to mention which actors will be around, etc.) HIMYM painted itself into a bit of a corner with that. On one hand, I respect the hell out of Craig Thomas and Carter Bays for making a plan very early on in the series and sticking to it. (The footage of the kids reacting to the end of the story was shot in season 2 of the series.) The number of shows that have crafted an ending that specific and stuck to it after running that many seasons is very slim.

  However, there’s also a danger in that: shows are in many ways, a living, breathing, growing beast. When they crafted that ending, they couldn’t have known the series would last nine seasons. (Again, they only planned eight. They went into last season thinking it was their end.) They couldn’t have known how amazingly Milioti would work on the series. They likely didn’t know that Robin and Barney would click as well as they did. By making a decision in season 1 and steadfastly sticking to it, the writers essentially handcuffed themselves and only allowed the characters to grow in the direction they set them out on originally, versus seeing what worked and rolling with it. There is no right answer here, but it’s a problem that’s pretty uniquely television-centric.

• It’s kind of crazy that out of all the characters, the only one I feel I got proper closure on was Barney. Sure, the show blatantly disregarded years of emotional growth as soon as he got divorced, but they got more mileage out of him becoming a father than anything else. I felt more closure for Marshall and Lily in the episode we found out she was pregnant than in the series finale. Tracy’s actual death felt super rushed, almost as if they hoped people who were only quasi-paying attention might miss it. And that’s not to mention how long Ted had been thinking about going after Robin, or how long Robin had been back in New York.
• So, how mad do you think the writers were when DEFINITELY, MAYBE came out and basically beat them to the punch by six years because of the nature of television? (Spoiler alert for that movie: the mom wasn’t dead, but the point of the story was while the father was telling the story of how he met his kid’s mom, the kid pointed out that her dad was still in love with one of his exes.)

What did work:

• The meeting scene was absolutely beautiful. For as beautiful as most of the Ted/Mother scenes were, the fact that Thomas and Bays were able to nail that initial meeting with the right amount of “this is it” and genuine payoff for the audience and characters is impressive.
• Barney meeting his daughter? Wow. One of Neil Patrick Harris’ (Barney) very best scenes of the series.
• I might not be wildly pleased with the finale, but I don’t think it ruined the series as a whole for me. I can’t see myself watching any Mother-heavy or Mother-significant episodes any time soon, but the finale did not taint the show for me.
• I didn’t care for Robin and Barney’s breakup, but I did appreciate that it mirrored Robin and Ted’s first breakup.
• The goodbye between the core five characters at the wedding was funny and touching.
• Ted and a tiny version of his daughter running into Robin was adorable.

(And look, I’m sure there’s more that did work, but right now, those first three are the only significant things that keep repeating in my mind.)

But that’s just my take. And for what it’s worth this is what Thomas tweeted a few hours after the episode aired:

Thank you all. I mean it: Every possible reaction to the last 44 minutes…thank you all…#HIMYM

— Craig Thomas (@HimymCraig) April 1, 2014

 

The fact that we have been a tv sitcom that has received this much passion from fans, for 9 years (not just tonight) — thank you.

— Craig Thomas (@HimymCraig) April 1, 2014

 

We wrote a comedy with dramatic elements till the very end. Thanks for taking that ride with us. #HIMYM

— Craig Thomas (@HimymCraig) April 1, 2014

 

We did a finale about life’s twists and turns and that is not always what happens…but THANKS!

— Craig Thomas (@HimymCraig) April 1, 2014

 

But what did you think of the finale? Are you OK with where things left off?