“Excuse me, hi.”
“Hi!”
“I’m--” “
“The best man!
Get in here.”
Few series finales remain as infamous
as the ending to one of the most-watched sitcoms
of the 2000s: How I Met Your Mother.
“Shame on you!”
But why was the 2014 finale so jarring for fans?
After all, the very first episode back in 2005
positioned this as a love story between protagonist Ted
and cool girl Robin, who likes him
but isn’t ready for a long-term thing
“Because that kids, is the true story
of how I met your Aunt Robin.”
And the series’ ending delivered on exactly that promise,
concluding the long story of how Ted Mosby ended up
with Robin Scherbatsky.
"Okay, suppose I were interested in Aunt Robin in that way--
it's not like I'd do anything about it.”
From its beginning, How I Met Your Mother
was built on avoiding the answers to its biggest questions.
“Challenge accepted.”
The series was propelled forward by the central mystery
of how Ted met his kid’s mother --
and who this woman would turn out to be.
“And that, kids, is the true story of how I met your mother.
“What?!”
“I’m kidding.”
After nearly a decade of dodging answers,
whatever ending showrunners came up with
couldn’t compare to the elaborate fan theories
viewers had spent years developing.
Here’s our take on why the show’s answer
to “How I Met Your Mother” could never deliver
on the promise of the series’ original question.
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Unlike other series with rocky conclusions,
“What’s this?”
“A song of ice and fire.”
How I Met Your Mother actually set its finale in stone
nearly a decade before it aired.
“Say it with me, LEGENDARY.”
Midway through airing the second season,
producers sensed that the popularity of the show
might extend its run for more seasons,
which meant it could be a number of years
before the show’s titular question arrived at an answer.
“Where’s my wife?”
This presented a problem: the passage of time
would make the actors playing Ted’s children
unrecognizable to viewers.
“What the f*ck is wrong with you?”
“What?”
“You sat us down to tell us the story
of how you met our mother EIGHT F*CKING YEARS AGO.”
So producers made the radical decision
to film the finale’s climactic scene
what turned out to be eight years in advance.
This road-map represented a firm sense of direction
often lacking in long-running television shows,
who often see a revolving door
of writers and actors over the years on the air.
On the other hand, television is a medium
that can take advantage of the luxury of time.
“My hands smell weird.
Smell this.”
“Yeah they do.
Yeah that’s new.”
A series can develop and expand the story
and characters in ways a 120-minute film can’t
"It is growth, then decay, then transformation."
and as a result of character growth,
the most satisfying conclusion for a show
will no doubt evolve as well.
Likewise, as How I Met Your Mother went on, the relationships between
Lilly, Marshall, Barney, Ted, and Robin
grew ever more complicated.
Thus, what felt right
at the start of the series didn’t necessarily fit
for the characters, or fans, by the end.
And this explains why many fans were upset
over the decision to make Robin and Ted endgame.
While this choice was in the works from the start
and evidently intended to make fans happy --
it was even an example of outright fan-service --
for many viewers it flew in the face
of years of character development.
“Right?
She’s like my best friend.
*groans* “My best FEMALE friend.”
What may have seemed an obvious pairing
at the start of the show became less so
after 9 seasons of arguments, break-ups, resolutions,
and finally her marriage to Ted’s friend Barney--
nine years of proof to the viewer
why the character pairing just didn’t work.
“Just tell me, do you love me?”
“No.”
Most saliently, fans saw this endgame pairing
as very out of character for Robin.
However many times she says or demonstrates
that she doesn’t want to be with Ted --
"It's a great look.
But you're looking
at the wrong girl.”
“No, I'm not.”
‘Yes, you are."
the show refuses to accept this.
“What do you want me to do Ted?
Run up to that roof
and knock the ring out of Barney’s hand
and say sorry to interrupt but you should be with me?”
And after spending years explaining
why they couldn’t be together, why she didn’t want kids
“I don't want to have kids in Argentina.”
“And I don't want to have kids in Argentina.”
and how the most important thing in her life is her career,
in the finale she seems to be waiting for Ted.
So by sticking to the firm destination
it had plotted out years earlier
the show let down and contradicted
the person Robin had shown herself to be
in all that time.
InTheseTimes’s Sady Doyle wrote of the harshness
with which Robin was treated in the finale,
“Robin, sans boyfriend, is condemned to a sad life
of bitter spinsterhood, distancing herself entirely
from the core group of friends she once loved
now that she's no longer dating Ted and/or Barney.”
And apparently, Robin --
the girl who was always happy being single --
needs to be saved from this spinster fate
by a man with a blue French horn.
“Everybody brings flowers.”
After 208 episodes and too many close encounters
to keep track of, in the series finale Ted
finally meets her, the future Tracy Mosby.
Tracy is intimately woven into the final season,
which takes place over the three days
of Barney and Robin’s wedding weekend.
Over the last season, fan favorites return,
and the slap bet is finally completed,
but by the finale, there’s still one more promise
left to fulfill.
Ted still has to find
his mystery woman with the yellow umbrella.
“Wait a second, this is my umbrella.
I left this umbrella at Cindy’s you totally stole my umbrella.”
“What?
No I didn’t”
Of course, in true How I Met Your Mother fashion,
Ted is the LAST person to meet Cristin Miliotti’s character.
She’s revealed to have crossed paths with each of Ted’s friends
at one time or another, either crashing into them
over the course of the wedding weekend
“I’m so sorry are you okay that was totally my fault.”
“You’ve gotta do it right.
Can’t be messing around
picking up girls in drug stores.”
Fans fell in love with the charming new character
as she made her way into Ted’s life through his friends
“Sometimes even three deep breaths
can change everything.”
She proved herself to be worthy of the gang,
before she had ever laid eyes on her future husband.
“Linus, whoever that best man is,
I would like to buy him a double
of your finest scotch."
Ted and Tracy come together
in the perfect “meet-cute” scene,
but it’s infamously undercut by the simultaneous reveal
that Tracy has passed away.
“Even then, in what can only be called the worst of times,
all I could do was thank God… that I had the guts to stand up”
This whole time, Ted has been a widower,
and this story he’s been telling about his kids’ mother
hasn’t been a rom-com but a romantic tragedy.
“walk over to her, tap her on the shoulder,
open my mouth, and speak.”
And then we’re shown the scene filmed nearly a decade ago.
Ted has reached the end of his tale,
and his children are frustrated with their father.
“You made us sit down and listen to this story
about how you met mom, yet mom’s hardly in the story.”
So it’s quickly revealed that this still is a rom-com -
they’ve just done a bait-and-switch
with the female lead.
“No.
This is a story about how you’re totally
in love with Aunt Robin.”
One key reason that the finale backfired
is that the writers evidently didn’t give enough thought
to how much screentime they offered audiences
to emotionally process important developments,
versus the amount of time those same events
took for the characters in-story.
“Mom's been gone for six years now.
It's time.”
Even though Ted only met the mother of his children
in the finale, the show's audience
had just spent an entire season falling in love with her
“It’s the TITULAR ROLE.”.
Thus her sudden death felt unsatisfying and brutal--
not the answer to “How I Met Your Mother”
that audiences had waited nine seasons for.
The joke in the pilot that this story
is really about Ted and Robin
“Aunt robin?
I thought this was how you met Mom”
feels sinister when these two get together mere minutes
(in screentime) after the death of a beloved character.
“What, I just... just call her up on the phone
and ask her out on a date?
“Yes."
And then there’s Barney and Robin.
In a quick fix in the finale episode,
Barney and Robin break up just one episode
after being pronounced man and wife
“I know I’m always traveling.
We both hate it when I’m gone,
you hate it when I drink, neither of us is happy.
Is this just not working anymore?”
Sure, in their lives, this uncoupling happens
three years after their entry into holy matrimony,
but viewers had just spent twenty-two episodes
literally AT their wedding, only for their pairing
to be ripped away like a cruel joke.
“We got divorced.”
The casualness with which show-runners threw away
Barney and Robin’s marriage, and the life of the titular mother
were severe shocks to long-time viewers.
This harshness felt out of step
with nine seasons centered around
the importance of friendship and the care we should give
to those closest to us in our lives.
“The friends, neighbors, drinking buddies
and partners in crime you love so much
when you're young, as the years go by,
you just lose touch."
And beyond whether viewers were happy
with the narrative conclusions for each individual character,
there’s the question of what ultimate message
the show sent with its final choices.
"When you love someone you don't stop.
Ever.
Even when people roll their eyes
or call you crazy!
Especially then!"
You could interpret this ending as stressing
the importance of friendship.
By having Ted end up with Robin
instead of the Mother, the writers make the case
that you’re supposed to end up with
the person you really know best,
even though your relationship is messy and not perfect
“Robin Stinson.”
“Robin Mosby.”
“Robin Stinson.”
Ted Scherbatzky.”
“I'll take her name.
I don't care."
as opposed to looking for that ideal stranger-soulmate
who will magically transform your life.
Viewed through this lens, Ted’s ending up with Robin
could be seen as a rejection of his perfectionist search
for the over-the-top fairy-tale romance.
“Hi, you probably don't remember me,
but..."Halloween, ten years ago."
On the other hand, this show -- whose creators reportedly
rejected the inevitable Friends comparisons --
decided to follow in that show’s footsteps
by forcing an ending where two thirds
of the original gang finish coupled up.
"You got off the plane..."
The comparisons between the two series were,
of course, inevitable -- both sitcoms
set in New York City follow an insular group of friends
who gather every day at the same location,
and never seem to acquire any new pals.
“Carl the bartender!
Dude from my bodega!
Steam cleaning coupon guy!
Mom!"”
The main thing that set How I Met Your Mother
apart from Friends in a serious way
was the titular question at the heart of the show.
The mysterious mother spoke of an outside world,
a stranger from the future -- someone our protagonist
has not yet had the chance to meet.
There is something more waiting out there,
we were promised.
“But I did get a little bit closer
to meeting the woman of my dreams.
And your mom?
Well, she got her yellow umbrella back.”
So when the series abandoned this promise,
it ended up reinforcing Friends’ implicit message
of insularity -- that the only people
who really matter are the ones that we
(and the audience) already know.
As Megan Garber wrote for the Atlantic,
because the mother was a “relative stranger”
while Robin was well-known to us,
the conclusion sent the message
that Tracy was, quote, “ultimately just as expendable
as everyone else.
She was, by sad circumstance
but also by the show's circular logic,
a stepping stone on Ted's way, ultimately, to Robin.”
"The point of the story is that…
Is that you totally, totally,
totally have the hots for Aunt Robin."
Unlike Friends, How I Met Your Mother
has a central narrator.
“I never thought I'd see that girl again,
But it turns out, I was just too close
to the puzzle to see the picture that was forming”
This was conceived as Ted’s story.
Yet over time, The success of HIMYM
wasn’t due to the strength of Ted as a protagonist,
but rather the dynamism of those he surrounded himself with.
The finale of How I Met Your Mother
reverts to putting Ted’s happiness before all.
He should be with Robin.
Why?
Because he wants to be.
“8 years ago I made an ass of myself
chasing after you and I made an ass of myself
chasing after you a bunch of times since then”
The audience plays an important role
in the development of television.
Gaps between seasons provide viewers
with time to speculate, form fan theories,
and engage with creators online and in other fan spaces.
"I have to fangirl because Neil Patrick Harris is awesome!"
In Hillary Robson’s “ Television and the Cult Audience,”
she differentiates between two types of TV viewers:
the casual and the ritual.
The casual viewer engages with the material
on a semi-regular basis, while the ritual viewer
is a “die hard” fan who dedicates time
and energy to dissecting major plot points
and retaining character details
in order to enrich their watching.
Robson’s “cultists” are often associated
with more stereotypical “cult tv” like Battlestar Galactica,
Star Trek, Game of Thrones or Star Wars
“Ted the only people in the universe
who haven’t seen Star Wars
are the characters in Star Wars
--and that’s cause they LIVED them Ted.
They LIVED the Star Wars.”
but How I Met Your Mother’s central mystery
and serialized plot lines also made this episodic sitcom
ripe for fan theories and cult viewership.
"Now a lot of you guys have requested
a conspiracy theory about How I Met Your Mother"
In the weeks and months after the finale aired,
one way that viewers processed the finale’s unpopular decisions
was by creating fan edits.
One of the most popular online edits was just three minutes long.
Now removed from YouTube, it ends moments after
Ted and Tracey meet on the train station platform,
as Ted announces
“And that kids, is how I met your mother.”
No matter where you stand on the How I Met Your Mother finale,
at the end of the day, the show was never really about
who turned out to be the love of Ted’s life.
How I Met Your Mother was a show about friendship.
“I love you guys so much I can’t even--”
“Just move to the second part.”
“Okay, okay.”
As Garber wrote in the Atlantic, “
“They were friends who were more family than family.”
Sometimes we fail to appreciate
these platonic relationships because we’re fixating
on the need for a perfect romantic partner.
“There's millions of people in this city.
How in all this mess is a guy supposed to find
the love of his life?”
How I Met Your Mother reminded us that even
when we’re looking for our “soulmate,”
we shouldn’t forget about the people who are already there.
So when we look back at How I Met Your Mother,
it’s not the final meeting that we’ll remember,
but the “How”, and all the moments in between.
Because the “How” is the real heart of any story.
“Because sometimes, even if you know
how something's going to end, that doesn't mean
you can't enjoy the ride.”
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