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After a nine-season, seven-year run, How I Met Your Mother has finally reached its end. And it is bittersweet. The conclusion of the story has been the talk of the Internet for the past six months and online communities are buzzing with conspiracy theories and predictions. The amazing thing about this anticipated end is that most predictions on Reddit and other blogs and discussion forums were CORRECT. So if these things were expected, why were people so upset by the finale? Here are the issues I can see; feel free to discuss.
1. The entire series is entitled How I Met Your Mother. Yet in the finale, it is made clear that the entire series could get away with being entitled How I Met Your Stepmother. The elusive mother, throughout all 200 episodes, is present onscreen for a total of probably 20 minutes.
2. The mother’s death is a huge let down. Viewers don’t have as much time getting to know her as they do getting to know Barney, Marshall, Lily, Robin or Ted. We finally learn her name – Tracy, but the producers couldve at least made the title character’s presence more meaningful. Instead, they skim over her death in one ten-second scene. I think viewers would’ve liked to see more of Ted’s grief; he lost his wife after searching for her for nine seasons, and the show makes it seem like their entire relationship is just a detour to the relationship that he has with Robin. Ouch.
3. Season 9 takes place over the course of one single weekend, the weekend of Barney and Robin’s wedding. It was extensively publicized by the network through commercials and on all their social media sites. Then they finally get married in the penultimate episode, and subsequently divorced within the first 15 minutes of the finale. So why did we just watch an entire season centered around this one big event that was erased immediately after?
4. The finale reverts every character back to how they were in the pilot of the series, so that no one really grows or changes at all. Marshall and Lily are the only pair untainted by this: they were in love at the beginning of the series, and they end the series still in love with a family and good jobs. However, after getting divorced, Barney goes back to being the same womanizer he was throughout the early seasons of the show. The script erases the past three seasons of character development for him, seasons revealing that he is capable of commitment. That being said, I’m happy the writers gave Barney a child; if he is incapable of falling in love in a romantic manner, it makes sense for him to fall in love in this parental way. Then there is Ted, who, after all of the universe-knows-all speeches, and the falling-in-love-too-fast pattern, and the “pining after the girl, losing her, then finally getting over her” routine, doesn’t actually grow or change at all because he STILL refuses to give up on his first girl, Robin.
5. Based on the finale, viewers realize that the entire story Ted tells his kids about meeting the mother is essentially him fishing for their approval to date Robin. Obviously no one knows this until the finale, but would it have killed them to give Ted and Tracy a little bit more relationship development? Ted’s narration tells us how much he loved her and how this love was different from all the others, but we are barely shown their love and their life together. The mother’s part essentially shows that even a love so different couldn’t make Ted get over Robin.
The finale may have come as a huge disappointment for some, and for others it was heartwarming and adorable. Regardless of what people think, it should be understood that for an epic like this one, it is virtually impossible to craft a finale and an ending that will satisfy everyone. I thought the finale had a lot of issues, but before people start a riot, I think it’s important to remember how amazing the entire series as a whole was. The temporal displacement theme, the character developments (up until the end), the inside jokes and one-liners, and the ways the producers were able to make a sitcom emotional and tear-jerking, are truly spectacular and genius. It was just a show, but it means so much to people, and the lessons taught throughout the series apply to real life. I’m certainly going to miss this show immensely and it will always be, in my mind, LEGEN – wait for it……..
…..DARY.
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