The Not-So-Lengendary “How I Met Your Mother” Finale
After nine years, 208 episodes, and one great pop culture mystery, we deserved a better ending to “How I Met Your Mother.” The eagerly-anticipated finale that aired last Monday, March 31, was not only shallow, but a slap in the face to the series’ dedicated fan base, who were told by the end of the episode that they had misunderstood the show’s basic premise all along.
The biggest problem with the finale lied not in one incident, but in the execution of the ending, which felt like both a betrayal of the characters and their fans. The hour-long episode, while containing some distinctly funny and heartbreaking moments, served only to undo nine seasons worth of character development. Ultimately, we were left with an episode that more or less reflected the show’s first season, resolving storylines that had been irrelevant for years.
When Carter Bays and Craig Thomas first launched their sitcom in 2005, they introduced us to a group of twenty-something friends living in NYC. The series might have faded from the pop culture radar had it not contained a revolutionary twist: it was a love story in reverse, narrated by endearing architect Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor), as he sits down to tell his kids about how spending his post-college years with friends Marshall (Jason Segel), Lily (Alyson Hannigan), and Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) led to him meeting his future wife.
In the pilot episode, we are introduced to Robin (Cobie Smulders), a newcomer to NYC whose sole purpose seems to be playing Ted’s love interest. He quickly falls for Robin, declaring his love for her by presenting a blue French horn that had been hanging on the wall of the restaurant where they had their first date. The gesture is quirky, romantic, and even a little desperate – but it doesn’t work. In that moment, Bays and Thomas declared the type of show they wanted to make: one that defies conventional relationship definitions and abolishes the cliché idea that if you’re persistent enough, you’ll always get the girl.
Robin is perhaps the most fascinating character in the show, because her story arc is expanded to reflect that of a real human being who is never once defined by a her relationships. Strong, independent, and driven, Robin doesn’t have to love Ted simply because he’s charming; she’s free to decide that she values having a career over having children. When Ted learns to accept Robin as an equal, the show marches into unprecedented territory: the existence of a ‘friendzone’ is completely denied, and Robin’s supposed undesirability for her inability to have kids is negated when she finds unexpected love in Barney.
Bays and Thomas completely invalidate this development in the finale. After spending 22 episodes building up a wedding between Robin and Barney, we learn in the finale that they divorced three years later, supposedly unable to handle the constant travel from Robin’s very successful job as a newscaster. The Barney we know would never just call it quits, and to say that he would want a life that was anything but legendary is a complete betrayal of the character.
Post-divorce, Barney regresses to his old ways, hitting on girls half his age with the help of his “Playbook.” Even worse, he’s now in pursuit of a “perfect month,” in which he sleeps with a different woman thirty-one days in a row. Barney succeeds, but not before getting Number 31 pregnant (and prompting one of the best lines of the night: “Number 31… that’s a pretty name. What is it, French?”)
As Barney meets his baby girl for the first time, and declares his undying love after holding her for all of four seconds, Bays and Thomas establish two things: that Barney’s respect towards women had to be forced upon him instead being a conscious choice, and that he needed a child to be happy, something that completely goes against a character who once created a holiday called “Not a Father’s Day.”
While Barney and Robin are pushed farther apart, Marshall and Lily come closer together. Marshall makes the ultimate sacrifice for his family by working at a job he hates to support his wife and children. His crappy work life becomes even more important when Lily announces she’s pregnant with her third child, but things quickly look up for Marshall: he’s offered his dream job to become a judge in NYC.
This is all well and good, except for the fact that Lily and Marshall have exhausted these plotlines three times over. The resolution of their story in the finale felt like nothing more than an unnecessary continuation of a problem that had already been solved.
The only storyline of the finale that still seemed to retain its potential was that of Ted and the Mother, who is finally given both a name (Tracy McConnell) and a face (Cristin Milioti). We were treated to scenes that we had been waiting the last nine years for: Ted and Tracy becoming parents, building a life together, and ultimately having the perfect wedding ceremony. And then, in the blink of an eye, every fan’s worst fear was confirmed.
It was revealed that the Mother had died six years before Ted started telling his story, and Bays and Thomas deemed it fitting to portray Tracy’s passing through a montage and a voiceover. After waiting nine years for Ted to meet his dream girl, she dies in mere seconds, and is granted not a cause of death nor a single scene of mourning.
We do, at least, finally see the moment when Ted and Tracy meet: at a train station under a yellow umbrella, an iconic symbol of the show over the years. The interaction is heartbreakingly adorable, and the chemistry between Radnor and Milioti cannot be understated.
If the finale had ended here, fans probably could have forgiven Bays and Thomas for an otherwise disappointing episode. But in the show’s last moments, we skip ahead to the version of Ted that had been narrating the story, who finally utters the line, “…and that’s how I met your mother.” Despite everything that’s happened so far, this is a fitting conclusion – until the kids speak up.
“That is not the reason you made us listen to this,” Ted’s daughter declares. “…This is a story about how you’re totally in love with Aunt Robin.”
And just like that, “How I Met Your Mother” is flipped upside down. Rather than dedicating the show’s remaining moments to Ted’s undying love for his deceased wife, both he and his children treat the matter in the most callous and insulting way possible: by insinuating that Tracy had just been another obstacle in Ted’s quest to win over Robin. After some encouragement from his kids, Ted works up the nerve to ask out Robin one last time in the show’s final frame, which echoes the pilot by having Ted stand outside Robin’s window, holding up a blue French horn.
Not only does this rushed time-skip open a door that has been closed for years, but it has the audacity to declare that a show called “How I Met Your Mother” hadn’t been about the Mother at all; every character and relationship deconstruction had been devised solely to ensure that Ted and Robin got together in the end.
This flawed narrative decision resulted in perhaps the most egregious insult of the finale: Bays and Thomas took beautifully-developed female characters, and reduced them to nothing but plot devices. It started when Lily was written into yet another pregnancy plot, her admirable passion for becoming an artist never again mentioned. Then came the rise and fall of the Mother, who gave Ted the marriage and children he always wanted before being quickly dismissed to make way for the other thing Ted always wanted: Robin. The show begins and ends with Robin, who was always smart enough to understand that she and Ted wanted different things out of life. That they somehow wind up together in the end is nothing but contrived manipulation on the part of Bays and Thomas, so that they could tell the story they always wanted as opposed to the one that should have happened.
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