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“He's fallen in love so many times now."
“Not like this. This is different.”
Did the Mother kind of ruin How I Met Your Mother,
by being too wonderful?
"Are you okay?"
"No. But there's nothing you can do."
“Want a cookie?”
“Yes.”
For nine seasons and over 200 episodes,
How I Met Your Mother teased its title character,
a woman so incredible that she would not only be Ted Mosby’s soulmate,
she would justify how long it took to tell the story of how they met.
And somehow, the show succeeded in rising to this challenge:
Tracy, played by Cristin Milioti, is a perfect match for Ted,
and kind of perfect just in general.
“Who is this person?”
“The bass player from the wedding band.”
“Oh, yeah, she's great.” “Love her!”
But, as we learn in the finale, the show’s framing is a red herring,
because this series isn’t actually about Tracy,
the Mother of Ted’s kids who we learn passed away six years before
Ted sat down to tell his kids this long-and-winding story.
It’s about Ted’s decades-long crush on Robin; basically his whole narration
turns out to be a long justification of his desire to try again with her.
“This is a story about how you’re totally in love with Aunt Robin.”
This pivot turns Tracy into a “stepping stone” love interest,
just a plot device along the way to the main event.
Usually, the character relegated to the “Stepping stone” or
“Runner-Up” Love Interest role is not deeply beloved by fans.
But Tracy is almost an angel– incredibly charming, loving,
and sweet right up to her tragic and untimely death.
And How I Met Your Mother’s final season inconveniently made Tracy
—a red herring character who gives birth to Ted’s kids and then dies—
a much better match for him than Robin ever was.
“But I can't believe you let Ted hang his jousting lance
from the Renaissance Faire on your bedroom wall.”
“Yeah. That's Ted's.”
So if the show wanted us to forget this gem of a person so quickly,
they made her too lovable.
Moreover, by relegating Tracy to the margins after all the reasons
it telegraphed she was the soulmate-love Ted had been resolutely holding out for,
How I Met Your Mother undercut the romantic ideals at its core.
Here’s our Take on why How I Met Your Mother betrayed itself
and underestimated its audience by treating the Mother as disposable.
“You made us sit down and listen to this story about how you met Mom.
Yet Mom's hardly in the story.”
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Though How I Met Your Mother included several other stories,
like Barney’s slow maturation, Marshall and Lily’s evolving marriage,
and Robin’s commitment to her career, Ted’s romantic life was always
the center of the show and the narrative’s driving force.
“Nothing hotter than a guy planning out his own imaginary wedding, huh?”
Ted is like the extreme Goldilocks of dating,
and the show takes great pains to show why each of his major love interests
isn’t quite the match for him.
His first serious partner during the show, Victoria,
is more of the idea of a girlfriend than a real person, a solid partner
who just isn’t the one—something that her German fiance Klaus articulates
about her, too, in the episode when he and Victoria both run out
on their planned wedding to each other.
“There is a word in German, lebenslangerschicksalsschatz.
And the closest translation would be ‘lifelong treasure of destiny.’
she is not my lebenslangerschicksalsschatz.”
Stella doesn’t want to move to New York, and ultimately
turns out to be already emotionally committed to her ex-boyfriend Tony,
“And that kids, was the perfect ending to a perfect love story.
It just wasn’t mine.”
while Zoey’s commitment to preserving old architecture
clashes with Ted’s professional dreams, in a mirror of how Robin won’t ignore
her career aspirations for the domestic life Ted wants.
With both women, the issue isn’t simply incompatibility;
it’s that there are certain things he’s unwilling to compromise on
in his search for love.
“New York is never finished, Theodore. Do not miss your turn.”
“The Arcadian has to go, doesn't it?”
And as much as Ted thinks he’s willing to go to any length,
we see this in shorter love plots, too—Ted’s not only quite specific
and picky about what he wants from a partner,
but also pretty unwilling to sacrifice or change much about himself or his life.
While Ted never fully accepts it over the course of the series, Robin, too,
doesn’t fit his criteria he’s unwilling to compromise on for the love-of-his life,
in the most major way of all: she doesn’t want to have kids
or the kind of traditional family life that Ted does.
“I don’t know where I’m going to be in five years,
and I don’t want to know. I want my life to be an adventure.”
By contrast, Tracy really is the perfect fit for Ted.
She’s deeply like him in her personality, outlook and life vision.
All of her tics and strange habits are things Ted finds adorable,
as we learn when he briefly dates her roommate Cindy.
“she does these bizarre paintings of robots playing sports.”
“That sounded awesome. Your mother’s robot volleyball watercolor is hanging up
in the den as we speak.”
More centrally, Tracy is the right partner for Ted
because she has a similarly quaint and idealistic view of romantic love
“I guess I’m old-fashioned. I believe that each of us only gets one.”
—which is really Ted’s defining trait.
In the one episode that actually shows us Tracy’s backstory,
we learn that her journey has been a mirror image of Ted’s:
Tracy’s boyfriend Max dies unexpectedly on her 21st birthday, and in a reversal
of Ted’s incessant dating and poor choices, Tracy refuses to open
herself up to the possibility of another romance for several years.
“I have been holding myself back from falling in love again”
“But you’re not here anymore.”
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The technique of talking so much about the mother
throughout the series worked to pique our interest in this character
who’d by the end become a near-mythical figure.
It’s a technique we’ve seen in iconic stories like Apocalypse Now
or Saving Private Ryan, where a character who’s offscreen
for the early action is used as a Macguffin for the plot,
but all the focus on the idea of this person
can get us really hyped up to finally meet them.
Often this character ends up having only a brief role to play,
or they might turn out to be fairly mundane.
But even though How I Met Your Mother creates incredibly high expectations
for The Mother, against all odds, she meets them.
After teasing the idea of her so long,
the final season gradually lets us get to know her in small, tantalizing doses.
Scenes of her meeting all the other characters
concisely flesh out a special person
who’s quirky, funny, kind and sweetly silly.
“You just met me. I could be a serial killer.”
“I like to believe in people.
Plus, what are the chances that we're both serial killers?”
Most of what we do learn about and see of Tracy suggests that
we really would have enjoyed getting to know her better, for longer.
She knows about all of the obscure, obnoxious trivia Ted does
“I still can’t believe he dragged me to the childhood home
of some stupid bucklesmith no one’s ever even heard of.”
“Yeah, who cares about Florian Van Otterloop.”
“I never told you his name.”
She seems to put up with Ted no matter how annoying he gets.
She's even inadvertently responsible for Barney and Robin getting together
for real after a lovelorn Barney tries to hit on her.
“It’s going to be okay. You’re a good guy.
You will get through this.”
Most importantly, Ted’s and Tracy’s connection
is the conclusion that makes sense for his story and his romantic ideals.
In the Season eight premiere when Klaus describes the idea of destined soulmates
and why Victoria isn’t that magic person (for him or Ted):
“She is my Beinahelei- denschaftsgegenstand
"the thing that is almost the thing that you want... but it's not quite."
Klaus’ speech about how you feel that soulmate love
coursing through your body is accompanied by significant visuals:
of Lily and Marshall’s love for their baby, and
Robin getting emotional over pictures of her with Barney (who’s then with Quinn
but staring out the car window, perhaps thinking of Robin).
When Klaus asks if Ted’s felt this yet, the answer is evidently no
“Have you ever felt this way about someone?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“If you have to think about it, you have not felt it.”
—which we have to take to mean that
neither Victoria nor Robin is really this for Ted.
The sequence then gives way to a foreshadowing of
Ted meeting the Mother at this train station,
“Unfortunately, the ‘when’ of it was still a little ways down the road.”
clearly making the point that The Mother is Ted’s “Lebenslangerschicksalsschat.”
And in the scene when they at last meet,
we see them feeling this immediate connection
“Funny how sometimes you just find things.”
Significantly, in the conversation with Klaus,
Ted raises the question of whether people can become or grow into soulmates,
“maybe as the years go by, she'll get Lebenslangerschicksalsschatz-ier.”
but Klaus emphatically rejects this,
declaring that the feeling is immediate and innate.
“Lebenslangerschicksalsschatz is not something that develops over time.
It is something that happens instantaneously.”
And this is very much in keeping with How I Met Your Mother’s mystical,
classically romantic view of love.
Whereas numerous characters on other sitcoms—like Friends’
Monica and Chandler—support the argument for creating one’s soulmate
“I don’t think that you & I were destined to end up together.
What I do believe is that we fell in love
and that we work hard for our relationship."
How I Met Your Mother and especially
Ted are all about the supernatural magic of love and having the stamina
to keep believing in romantic fate no matter how long it takes.
The challenge, in this world view, isn’t putting in boring,
tough relationship work like it might be for a Monica-and-Chandler,
but spiritually persevering—waiting for the real thing to finally show up,
without letting your doubts get the better of you,
and without settling for a lesser love that’s not-quite-right.
“And you're absolutely sure you'll find that someday?”
“Of course. Everyone does eventually.”
“You just never know when or where.”
Robin (in contrast to Ted’s sparks- flying-right-away meeting scene
with Tracy) may inspire instant feelings in Ted,
but she herself is put off when he comes on too strong in the pilot.
She’s the person who’s around Ted for many years
and whom you could argue “grows into” his soulmate
by being there long enough—but this is not the philosophy of the show.
The philosophy is that love shows up and fully overwhelms you—
and that, after a very long wait, is the magic that Tracy represents.
Oddly, after telling us all this repeatedly, though,
How I Met Your Mother has other plans—
because it had already made up its mind
to make Ted’s relationship with Robin the destination.
When How I Met Your Mother suddenly reveals
its last-minute endgame, that Ted really winds up with Robin,
just like that The Mother is transformed into an intermission
or abstraction, even a distraction.
Though Ted meeting Tracy does feel special,
the series begins with the dramatic,
romantic meetcute between Ted and Robin,
“It was like something from an old movie.”
and it evidently always planned to end with the couple as well.
The showrunners secretly filmed the concluding scene
with Ted’s future children in 2006, during production on the show’s
second season (in order to avoid the child actors aging too much
before the series’ conclusion).
Though it may have made sense at the time,
especially given how compelling Ted and Robin were as a couple
in the show’s second season,
the series ended almost a decade later in 2014.
The nature of television means that How I Met Your Mother
had to draw out Ted and Robin’s relationship for that entire period,
and therefore make repeated,
convincing arguments that they weren’t right for each other,
“We have an expiration date, don’t we?”
only to ignore all of that evidence at the end of the series.
And by setting the ending in stone so early, the show
denied itself the freedom to have its characters change
in unexpected and exciting ways along the journey
(like for example, falling in love and committing to a brand new person
and not staying hung up on another lead character
in a way that’s not really satisfying or believable).
The beginning of the series teases a bigger “picture,”
which initially seems like it should be about Ted’s future marriage,
“I was just too close to the puzzle to see the picture that was forming”
but in reality Ted commits to Robin in the pilot,
and everything that follows was (despite many diversions)
just about Robin and the obstacles to them finally being together.
While initially, the main thing separating them
is Robin’s prioritizing her career and not really
desiring the family life Ted wants, over time the biggest obstacle
becomes Robin’s relationship with Barney.
“We both think the marriage commitment thing’s a drag.
We both want something casual and fun.
And we clearly get along really well.”
“Wow, that actually did make a lot of sense.”
Though Barney and Robin weren’t pre-written
into the script the same way Ted and Robin seemed to be,
their chemistry emerged organically from near the beginning of the series—
so as a result, it felt much more satisfying and real.
And though their relationship doesn’t work out the first time,
How I Met Your Mother spends much of its final two seasons
arguing for Barney and Robin, with Barney’s elaborate,
classic Stinson proposal,
“prove your loyalty to Patrice by burning The Playbook.
And actually burn it. You don’t need it anymore.”
and moving through all of the obstacles
they encounter (both external and internal)
over a long, winding wedding weekend
that’s the focus of the show’s entire last season.
“I am always gonna be honest with you cuz I love you.”
Their partnership evolved naturally from their interactions
and has entailed a lot of both characters
working through their emotional issues in a realistic way.
In fact, the last major beats of Ted and Robin’s relationship
involve Ted telling Robin to marry Barney.
First, he tells her that Barney is planning
to marry Robin’s co-worker Patrice, which is part of Barney’s plan
to confirm that it’s okay for him to marry Robin.
“It means your best bro in the world
has let go of Robin and has given you his blessing.”
Then Ted talks Robin out of ditching the wedding,
which ironically is used to “prove” that Ted is the one
who actually “deserves” to end up with her
(even though his argument against himself feels quite convincing)
“I don’t love you like that anymore, and you don’t love me. You love barney.”
And after several seasons of work
to demonstrate Barney’s determination to change
and grow, the series concludes by repudiating his arc
and suddenly sending him right back to square one.
“That woman is half your age. Haven’t you changed even a little?”
“No. I haven’t.”
Instead, the thing that finally “actually”
changes Barney is the birth of his daughter
with a woman who goes entirely unnamed,
buying into the absurd “father of daughters” trope
that suggests that the only way for men to treat women
as people is to be involved in creating one.
Though the finale attempts to have it both ways by treating Barney
and Robin’s marriage as an “adult” failure,
“This isn’t a failed marriage, it’s a very successful marriage
that happened to only last three years.”
this doesn’t fit into the storybook terms
of the rest of the show (which may sometimes
claim not to believe in fairytale endings, but still returns to them
again and again and again).
A big part of the problem here is structural.
A mere one episode after Robin and Barney tie the knot,
the show flashes forward to their divorce
(thus skipping most of their actual marriage).
And even worse, it flashes forwards at warp speed
from Ted’s and Tracy’s happy ending to Tracy’s death—
the episode runtime between their wedding and the scene
of Tracy in her hospital bed is a mere 17 seconds.
Then, it’s not even five minutes of screentime later
that he’s declaring his love to Robin with the blue french horn.
Maybe six years have passed for the characters
when Ted’s kids give him their weirdly-enthusiastic
blessing to go for it with Robin,
“Mom's been gone for six years now. It's time.”
but viewers barely got time to catch their breath,
let alone adjust to these huge emotional shifts.
And having these narrative-altering beats happen in such limited screentime
implicitly gives Ted’s and Tracy’s romance less value
and respect, belittling their importance to the story—
which is what leads to the viewers feeling, on some level,
that the Mother was done wrong.
How I Met Your Mother did such a good job
of establishing Tracy as a character that,
even though she had only recently been introduced,
fans and critics felt “betrayed” by how she was treated.
Since the series ended, fans have gravitated
toward the show’s “official” alternate ending,
which scraps the Ted-and-Robin story in favor of letting Tracy
and Ted simply be married and happy.
And there’s something about that re-edit that does work better
even purely from an artistic standpoint—
as the speed and screen-time issues in the actual finale
make the final blue-french-horn scene feel almost artificially tacked on.
Throughout the show’s run, fans correctly theorized
that The Mother had actually been dead
throughout Ted’s entire story.
The How I Met Your Mother creators described Tracy’s death to Milioti
as being “lifelike,” and in keeping with a history of loss,
disappointment and lowered expectations throughout the series—
as seen in events like Marshall losing his father,
Robin’s discovering having biological children isn’t an option for her,
“it’s one thing not to want something it’s another to be told you can’t have it.”
Lily’s coming to terms with having put her personal life priorities
over her artistic dreams, and the characters all
making sacrifices and having to give up on some of their dreams.
“That’s life… you never end up where you want to be.
I’m not helping the environment. Ted’s not a philosopher,
Lily’s not a world-famous artist.”
Yet in this case, the tragedy of losing a spouse is suspiciously
convenient to the fantasy of letting Ted date Robin.
Tracy’s primary character function ends up being to serve as a bridge
between Ted and Robin, even a third wheel in their relationship.
She’s someone who can give Ted the children
and domestic life he craves (which wouldn’t be in Robin’s character
for multiple reasons) but then get out of the way
and also give him the opportunity to pursue his real love interest later on.
The practice of “fridging” a female character
(having her hurt or killed to motivate a male character’s story)
usually happens in action, thrillers or superhero stories,
but Tracy is more or less the romantic sitcom version of this,
“What mother is gonna miss her daughter’s wedding?”
Her existence and her death are used solely to motivate Ted,
and to give him the having-it-all happy ending of being with Robin
and still having kids.
The fact that she expires tragically due to an unnamed illness
is a deus ex machina, removing any potential sense of wrongdoing
or messy guilt that might have resulted from Ted
wanting to pursue Robin if Tracy were still alive.
He’s even spared the obstacle of his children’s disapproval:
In the finale, those kids get the most dialogue
they’ve had over the entire series, in order to aggressively push him
to go after Robin,
“I just... just call her up on the phone and ask her out on a date?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“And that... that's something you guys would want?”
“Yes! Yes!”
What’s sad about this is that Tracy’s whole love story
(which culminated in Ted becoming her husband
and father to her kids) and even her life are somewhat devalued,
treated as a short interlude in the real story.
How I Met Your Mother sometimes makes us aware of how each of us
crafts narratives around ourselves— notably, when Ted is so unsettled
because, in Stella’s and Tony’s love story,
he’s not the romantic hero, but the obstacle and villain,
“This is a terrible movie! And it got everything wrong!”
Like any two people who belong together,
Tracy’s and Ted’s love narratives seemed to be in sync,
mirrors leading to each other.
Ted claimed as much through his story’s very framing (and the show’s title).
But it was a false sell that ultimately cheapened
the meaning of the commitment he made to her and their family.
“In exactly 45 days from now, you and I are gonna meet,
and we're gonna fall in love we're gonna have two kids.”
How I Met Your Mother was nostalgic even in its time,
and its creators evidently expected its viewers
to want that gooey final reunion of its
Ross-and-Rachel-type on-again-off-again central couple.
But this assumption didn't give viewers enough credit.
The show’s fans understood that people change,
and the first person you set your sights on isn’t necessarily
the best person for you to be with forever.
Viewers went along with where the story actually took them,
and that was (in a real sense, or at least it should have been) toward Tracy
“Right from the moment I met your mom I knew,
I have to love this woman as much as I can, for as long as I can,
and I can never stop loving her even for a second.”
The series ends with images of the cast from the first episode,
showing how young they were and giving us a concrete sense
of the length and weight of the narrative.
Tracy is included as the final member of the cast,
but it’s a choice that rings hollow given how quickly she was cast aside.
Tracy—and the show— deserved better.
“You picked a real winner, Mosby.”
“I did.”
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