SPOILERS I liked the 'how I met your mother ending'

[iseko]

DISCLAIMER: There is no way I can say what I want to say without putting everything in a massive spoiler box. For everyone who has not seen the ending and does not want spoilers. LEAVE NOW.

Now I know that normally, after two or three posts, someone says: do whatever you want. If you like it: good for you.
Yes, but not the point.

Spoiler: just in case

Ok so the ending has gotten a bit of hate. The mother ends up dying. The entire story was just some giant prelude to him getting with robin yada yada yada. All true. But for some reason that did not piss me off. Nor did it come of as lazy. The very first episode he meets robin. Then and there you pretty much knew this was going to be someone very important for him. During 9 seasons of HIMYM, ted has never really stopped trying to get with her. Which is kind of sad in its own way but again: not the point.

And what did he always do? Come up with some gigantic reasoning or story on why they should get back together. Every fricking time it was the same. He always thought they needed to end up together but it never worked out for... reasons (best way to sum it up).

So okay yes in the end he finds someone else who is also perfect, gets children then marries her (weird order). And then she dies. Not the most original of plot twists but life happens.

And then he starts telling the entire story to his kids of how he met their mother. But he doesn't start at barney's wedding. He doesn't start at college. He starts the day he met Robin. Why? Because he always does this! He always gives some asinine reason or long and convoluted story on why they should be together (as said before). So basically, him telling the story of how he met their mother as a pretext to why he should be with robin is typically Ted in my eyes.

Oh and the producers saying: "Robin isn't the mother" in the past is completely true. And I've also read: "why do the kids still call her aunt robin of Ted and Robin are married now? PLOT HOLE" Euh... they're not married? Not even together? Not when the show ends anyways.

So yes. I did like the ending.

Not... sure what I really hope to accomplish with this post. I was just wondering if there are glaring plot holes in my reasoning maybe. Or if even in light of this reasoning it is still a fuck you to the fans? Any thoughts?

Captcha: Nice job. Yes it is captcha, yes it is.

 

[lapan]

I didn't hate the ending itself, i hated how it made the entire last season pointless.

Drawing the wedding out over an entire season was already a bad idea, and at least half of the episodes weren't that funny. They gave the Mother, Barney and Robin a lot of character development, only to throw it all away in the first minutes of the last episode.

It would have been much better with a better last season leading up to it or if the mother wasn't made that likable.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

My girlfriend and I agree that the last episode felt like a full on season could have been (or should have been) a full on season. I thought it added a lot of great character stuff to Robin and, Barney's story but on the whole...

Spoiler

...It felt kind of like a slap in the face to be told, "Dad, it's OK. Mom died 6 years ago so go and get back together with Aunt Robin". The problem being how we were shown the Mother 'getting sick' minutes before the revelation that she's been dead and gone for 6 years worth of time in-universe. It makes sense for Ted and Robin to try getting together after that much time has passed since her divorce and his becoming a widower but in a narrative sense, it was kind of weird to be presented with massive information like that so abruptly.

I kind of liked the ending of How I Met Your Mother but not as much as I liked the ending to Futurama.

 

[Denny Crane]

I loved the ending, I thought it was a beautiful way to close the show.

 

[Trueflame]

You're not wrong, but I still thought the ending was pretty damn bad. But I thought all of this season was pretty bad, and the previous 2 were not in top form either.

But regardless, the reason I found it bad is because it essentially negated so much of the storyline. I have no problem with Barney and Robin breaking up (I'm not spoiler tagging anything, if people who care about HIMYM spoilers are dumb enough to enter a thread about the finale, it's their fault), or with the mother dying, but I have a huge problem with these huge moments happening entirely off-screen and just being thrown in at the last minute, on top of everything else that was going on. After a season of nearly pointless filler, I just have to wonder, why couldn't they change the pace, have the wedding conclude midseason and then have time to show some interaction between the newlyweds, between Ted and the Mother, and *show* rather than *tell* us what happened. That's the most basic rule of storytelling, and they broke it.

Furthermore, many of the themes and things shown were just rehashes of previous episodes, and ones that did it better. The bittersweet-ness of growing up, and friendships drifting apart was already covered, in far better fashion, in the Intervention episode, and this isn't the first time Ted has stolen the blue french horn for Robin. But I'd be okay with that particular return to the classics, if it weren't for the fact that Robin, the powerful and worldly reporter, was back living in the same apartment with 5 dogs, doing all the same things she had done all the way back in episode 1! Why did they regress her character entirely? Why did Barney not develop into a genuine human being, but instead fell back into his old ways, then had a sudden epiphany, and then fell into the opposite extreme of stern grandpa berating girls for showing too much ankle? It's all just poor writing, shows lack of effort and imagination. The finale, and the entire season, could have been much more, they could have rallied and ended HIMYM with a bang. Instead it fizzled out. I don't hate the ending, but I certainly don't love it, don't like it, and don't hold it in high regard. It was tolerable. It wrapped up the story and showed us how Ted got from point A to point B, and that was that. When I rewatch the series though, it will only be to see the first five or maybe six seasons though, and maybe a select scattering of episodes from season 7. The finale did nothing to redeem the rest of it, or to improve on what was once my favorite sitcom.

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

Count me among those who consider the finale an unmitigated disaster. In fact, I'd say it was one of the dumbest things I've ever seen on television in terms of narrative consistency.

They spent almost the entirety of season nine pounding a few things into our brains...

Barney and Robin were solid. Their relationship didn't make a lot of sense, but they had grown and changed sufficiently, as people, to make it work. Apparently. I mean they spent whole episodes tackling individual (and seemingly insurmountable) incompatibilities between these two characters, and the end result was always some beyond-saccharine declaration of eternal devotion. So no point doubting their relationship, right?

Ted was over Robin. He put himself through the goddamn ringer yet again with the locket fiasco, but he managed to "finally" let her go - even going so far as to shut Robin down when her wedding-day doubts about Barney manifested as (we thought, at the time) a mistaken belief she should be marrying Ted. His refusal to indulge in those feelings, especially as the opportunity presented itself in the 11th hour, seemed like a real turning point.

The Mom wasn't going to be some foot note on this show. She was, in fact, an amazing, funny, beautiful soul, and well worthy of Ted's inevitable love and devotion. Even given the impossible expectations after nine years of ridiculous build-up, Cristin Milioti completely knocked it out of the park as Tracy Mosby. She actually convinced us, in only a handful of episodes focusing on her and her story, that Ted would finally find happiness.

So what happened in the finale? All of the aforementioned developments were cast aside like garbage. Barney and Robin unceremoniously fell apart despite some dozen episodes explaining precisely why they wouldn't fall apart. The Mom ended up dying off screen, practically inconsequential to the larger story save as the vessel that delivered Ted's children. And Ted and Robin, probably 50-some years old, end up together at last... after the show went to frankly excessive lengths telling us they were done.

Personally, I rate it as worse than the finale of Lost. At least with Lost, we knew the show was ridiculous and a little stupid, so the ridiculous and stupid ending didn't exactly "disappoint". But HIMYM wasn't (until more recently) the sort of show that cast aside character development and narrative consistency for the sake of... what exactly? Why did it have to end the way it did when the show, as it existed, clearly called for something completely different? The writers wrote themselves into and out of much trickier (aka idiotic) situations than they'd created for themselves in the lead-up.