How I Met Your Mother - Series Finale - Review: What Worked, What Didn't, and Why
Recap and review of How I Met Your Mother - Series Finale - Last Forever:
Credit: CBS
Right off the bat, the episode adopts a conceit that's incredibly strange given the previous twenty-two episodes of the season. In having a two-parter that focuses on the gang as they live their lives, grow farther apart, have kids, take on new careers, and generally take on the weight and wonder of life seems...well, it kind of seems stupid. Instead of spreading those infinitely more interesting stories out over twenty-two episodes, we got an entire season that focused on a wedding that ended up being almost completely useless to the show's endgame. Instead of having a series of episodes in which Robin (Cobie Smulders) is around less and less, prompting the gang to start questioning her commitment to their friendship; instead of having a season in which Robin and Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) start to question their marriage, culminating in a divorce; instead of having a season in which Barney gets some random woman pregnant and discovers exactly the thing he needed to give his life meaning; and instead of having a season in which Ted (Josh Radnor) meets Tracy/The Mother (Cristin Milioti), courts her, and falls in love with her (allowing US to fall in love with her in the process), we got twenty-two episodes of slap training, Billy Zabka, Sherri Shepherd and Marshall (Jason Segel) getting stuck on the world's most interminable road trip, Lily (Alyson Hannigan) just sort of existing, and an entire episode dedicated to a guy whom we'd never met before and would never see again save for one brief shot at Barney and Robin's wedding.
All this instead of getting to know Tracy or having her become more than what she, ultimately, ended up becoming -- which is, strangely enough, the same thing Robin ended up being: an object for Ted to claim. Because, make no mistake, The Mother existed far longer, and far more vividly, in the abstract than she ever did as a real person. And that's a huge problem. Sure, I imagine when Craig Thomas and Carter Bays thought up the ending to this series nine years ago, they didn't know what they would have with Cristin Milioti. She took what was basically a threadbare, idea of a character, and make her three-dimensional, and lovable, and perfect for Ted. So I can definitely understand why people feel this is a betrayal of everything the show had been building towards.
And yet, in the show's defense, it's not as if a happy ending in which The Mother lives was ever part of a contract with the audience, unwritten or otherwise. We all read what we wanted to read into the story. For instance, if The Mother dies, why are Ted's kids, in the future, rolling their eyes to have to hear the story of how he met her? Wouldn't they want to know where they came from, assuming they didn't get the chance to know their mother all that well? It was a valid point at the time, and we kind of get a valid answer here. Yes, The Mother dies, but the kids' reactions to Ted's story is couched entirely in their belief that, because it's been six years, it's time for him to finally move on. Moreover, they've come to the recognition, from listening to his story all this time, that he's clearly in love with their Aunt Robin. They give him their blessing and plead with him to go get her, and Ted decides exactly how he's going to do it: by swiping a blue french horn and playing it outside Robin's window in one of those classic Ted Mosby Grand Romantic Gestures.
And you know what? It's kind of a cute ending.
In theory.
Credit: CBS
It's long been written that Bays and Thomas had this planned from the beginning, and even shot this ending footage with the kids way the hell back in the first season, if memory serves (either way, Lyndsy Fonseca and David Henrie deserve some kind of medal for keeping the secret of the Mother's fate all these years). Yet this ending suggests that Bays and Thomas didn't necessarily realize how much the show had organically evolved away from their original vision. In fact, it drifted so far off-course from where this ending places it, that I wonder if Bays and Thomas even had a hand in, say, the last three seasons or so. Just to recap, we spent an entire season building a wedding that was rendered narratively irrelevant within the first twenty minutes of tonight's finale, in addition to spending nearly as long focusing on reasons why Robin and Ted just aren't meant to be together. All this, in addition to spending nine seasons solidifying the moment at which Ted meets The Mother as THE event where all the struggles of the past nine years are validated. Having The Mother exist as an abstract concept is one thing, but to actually see Cristin Milioti interacting with Josh Radnor is another, wonderful matter entirely (seriously, how perfect was that scene at the Farhampton train station where Ted and Tracy go back and forth about who owns the yellow umbrella?). In essence, I don't really care how long Bays and Thomas had that ending in the bank. I'd have gone with something else. Hell, anything else but The Mother dying.
I get that HIMYM never promised us a "happy ending," and that this is a show that has always been about the journey, but I honestly don't think many viewers would have stuck around for that journey if they knew this was waiting for them at the other end. Realistically, we could have learned of The Mother's death at any point within the past X number of seasons, but we learned about it now. And only then, in passing. I don't know that anybody really wanted this ending. I'm not nearly as excited to revisit the series to rewatch through the prism of the completed arc as I was before, and I imagine many people might not get the same joy in watching in syndication as they might have if they'd actually delivered Ted and The Mother riding off into the sunset. I preferred one theory online that suggested that The Mother needed a transplant of some sort, and Robin was a match, meaning that because Ted refused to give in to every ex-girlfriend's request for him to cut Robin out of his life, the love of his life was able to live. This would explain why the story was so Robin-centric, since the night he met Robin would have been the natural beginning of his story, given that it ultimately led to his happy ending. I'm not necessarily going to adopt it as "head canon," but I would argue it's better than what we got.
Credit: CBS
But here's why the ending actually kind of works. No, the show was never really about Ted meeting The Mother. Not in the way that any story is ever really about getting from Point A to Point B. In premise, it's Ted telling his kids the story of how he met "The One". But what this ending, and the series in retrospect, implies is that sometimes, there isn't just a "one". The story of a life, and the journey in which a person (or two people) are made whole can be comprised of many different "ones", each of which contributes to making that person more complete. Just because Robin wasn't the mother of his children doesn't mean their relationship didn't have meaning, any more than Tracy's death makes her time with Ted pointless. One relationship doesn't invalidate the other. So the story of How I Met Your Mother ends up being the tale not of how one man met the mother of his children, but rather how he and someone he loved very deeply came to be the people they needed to be in order to find their happy ending together. Before now, Robin and Ted could never have been married. He wanted kids, and she wanted to travel and have a successful career. Ted wasn't any more the man he needed to be in order to win Robin before tonight than he was to meet The Mother eight seasons ago. So if we take it as an example of HIMYM being the story of how Ted and Robin wandered separately through the necessary labyrinth of life to find each other at the other end, then this is the ending we needed.
But if you were sick of the Ted/Robin coupling years ago and took the show at face value every time it seemingly promised we would finally move past it? Well, I could see how this wasn't your cup of tea.
Credit: CBS
And yet, I'm still not entirely done defending it yet. I'd argue this finale had some of the best acting I've seen from the cast across all nine seasons, redeeming on-screen what failed on the page. For instance: after Barney and Robin get divorced, Barney reverts right back to his horndog ways. And really, I have a hard time getting a grip on whether the show intended for us to see this as funny or sad; probably a mixture of both, but mostly just sad. The episode skips around the timeline of these friends' lives, two years at a time, so that we see where each of them end up. Marshall eventually becomes a judge, and is nominated for the Supreme Court; Lily gives birth to a third child; Ted and the Mother have Luke and Penny, in addition to a comfortable suburban life after finally getting married following a seven-year engagement; and Barney has...well, a new playbook. And it results in him getting a woman pregnant. A woman referred to only as #31 (for the day of the month on which Barney slept with her). A woman whom we never see. A woman whose sole function is to be the vessel for Barney's daughter, Ellie, the little girl who inevitably becomes the guiding light in his life (and we'll get to that in a bit).
When Barney holds his daughter in his arms for the first time, and his eyes fill with tears, and he commits to her everything he has or will ever have, it's an absolutely gorgeous moment. Barney is essentially revealed to have been a man who really did change, but couldn't face the failure of his marriage, and so he couched his identity in the terms of his past personality as a playboy in order to cope. But seeing his daughter brought him back to maturity, to recognizing that the old Barney just wasn't who he was anymore, and it eventually showed. So yes, I was blubbering like a small child. Straight up Ugly-Cry Territory. It was almost enough to wash away the questionable gender politics of a finale that contextualizes both Robin and The Mother as little more than Ted's Goal Lines, and #31 as merely a womb to birth Barney's redemption. (Seriously, couldn't we have met a "Mother" for Barney over the past season who could serve this function, instead of some anonymous woman with no real character of her own?) Alyson Hannigan and Cobie Smulders are also devastating as two best friends charting the slow, painful demise of a friendship, particularly in the scene in which Robin finally lets loose on how ridiculous the concept of "the gang" is as they enter their late 30s/early 40s. It's a punishing scene that basically marks the moment at which the two-parter stops being anything even remotely resembling a comedy, and instead pushes forward into outright drama. Which is why it's a good thing the show does drama so damn well.
Credit: CBS
Ultimately, I can't convince you whether this ending is a treasure or a travesty. It all depends on you. How invested were you in Ted and The Mother? How invested were you in Ted and Robin? How invested were you in Barney and Robin? How invested were you in the endpoint over the journey? These are all questions only you can answer. But even though I'd give the finale a solid B (leaning towards a B+; I might disagree with the ending, but I felt the ending they gave us was done very well), I do know one thing...
Bays and Thomas are going to have a hell of a time getting audiences to give them another nine seasons when How I Met Your Dad hits the airwaves.