After nine seasons, including an entire season spent on one wedding weekend, creators Craig Thomas and Carter Bays ended How I Met Your Mother. Like many series finales that came before, this one will be hotly debated for awhile, but in all honesty, for this writer, HIMYM is over for good.
The hour-long finale is filled with callbacks to prior shows and some of our favorite moments, but only really gave us a couple of great ones. Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) finally got a love child, Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel) went from “Judge Fudge” to “Fudge Supreme” and Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan) got a third child and a genius Moby Dick costume. The Mother got the name Tracy McConnell (Cristin Milioti). Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders) and our beloved narrator Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) proved to be the most annoying characters of the hour. It’s a shame that their actions are what the whole episode hinged on, but then again, they are the main characters of the show.
Robin became an international journalist, which ended her marriage to Barney. Yes, after an entire season of getting them together and talking about how they’d love each other forever, the couple broke up after three years. To me, that just further proved that season nine was just there to keep the show going unnecessarily. Not every show has to go to nine seasons, but Thomas and Bays clearly thought their show had to.
But that wasn’t the only betrayal in the episode. It was all about that ending. Yes, there were hints that there would be a morbid ending. Considering the left turns this show had taken, there was still reason to expect that Tracy and Ted would live happily ever after. However, we learned in the final moments that Ted was telling his children how he met Tracy six years after her death. It was all just a ploy to get his kids to approve him going out on a date with Robin.
Considering how nasty Robin had been to everyone to break up the group, Ted still hadn’t changed and still has the hots for her. Does Ted really think that Robin is the same girl he loved years ago? And hadn’t Ted just gone to great lengths to prove that he didn’t love Robin any more?
There was also one other part of the episode that really annoyed me. Ted is a hopeless romantic and I can get that he and Tracy may delay their wedding after they have their first kid, but delaying it five years seemed off.
Thomas and Bays really did create a great group of characters, but their questionable ending will make it hard to revisit the show. It’s just not going to be as fun watching it all over again, knowing that everything Ted will tell Robin after she and Barney get engaged was just a lie. He always loved her and if that’s the way it was going to end, it should have happened four seasons ago.