This is the only thing that bugged me about the finale.
I watched the first couple of seasons and then lost interest but I’d still watch the occasional episode now and then. I did watch the last eight episodes or so and I’m happy with the ending now that I’ve read the last couple of pages of this thread. At first I didn’t like it but when people here said the story was all about setting the kids up to give Ted permission to date Robin it made sense to me. So I actually like the ending and think it worked.
I’m a little bit on the fence about the ending (a lot of what you guys are saying makes sense), but I do agree that Robin and Ted weren’t right for each other then, but they might be now. Ted’s got his kids and Robin didn’t have to have them, Robin’s got her career well under way and if Ted can’t deal with that, he wouldn’t start things up again - my regrets are the same as you guys. Barney’s growth was thrown out the window, and Tracy was too awesome to have such a small role.
I seriously don’t understand how people think Barney’s growth was thrown out the window. It was for about 3 minutes, then he dedicated himself to his daughter.
The only disappointing thing about this finale is how many of you have been disappointed by it. This was probably the best culmination and best planned out television show since Babylon 5 and it’s a shame so many of the fans can’t recognize how perfectly executed it was.
I think HIMYM’s finale–and by this I mean pretty much the entire season–was extremely well-planned and well-executed, from an artistic point of view. From a plotting vantage, the nearest there was to a major misstep was not having Robin’s little sister on the dais at the wedding. They clearly put an enormous amount of thought and planning into having all the events of the prior seasons lead up to the final revelation. On that score, well done.
But it wasn’t emotionally satisfying, at least not to me. Much of the prior eight years of the show had established Ted as an unlikable douchebag who in a just world would once a day be kicked in the the shin by a randomly passing midget. Much of this season seemed dedicating to undoing that–to rehabilitating Ted. And it worked. Having Victoria and what’s-her-name-from-Scrubs and the crazy blonde ex all call him out on the unhealthy nature of his obsession with Robin (Victoria in particular must have realized that she dodged a huge bullet), along with Ted twice letting go of Robin and being okay with it, along with his moving on to the Mother, all served to make him someone you could like again, someone who actually seemed like a decent, healthy human being. But the revelation that the Mother has been dead all this time (i.e., from Future!Ted’s POV) and that Ted is going back to Robin undercut all that. It makes you suspect that he was pining for Robin throughout his marriage, that part of him was only settling for Tracy (who, incidentally, was awesome and deserved more time on screen), that the whole universe was arranged to satisfy his frankly creepy “love” for Robin.
It was artistically well done, but emotionally repugnant.
Oh I agree it was well-planned and thought out. I just DO NOT LIKE what they planned and thought out and executed.
and I do think Barney’s emotional growth was thrown out the window. 31 women in 31 days? That’s not the Barney that was getting set to marry Robin this whole season.
Of course it’s not. It’s the Barney who feels that because his marriage failed with Robin it’s proof that he can’t have a real relationship with anyone. He’s gone back to his old ways because he thinks that’s all he can have. People regress when hit with an emotional blow like divorce.
I don’t really see this at all. Maybe it was a factor of the quick cut for the viewer, but 6 years for the people in the show, but I think Ted’s narration about loving Tracy perfectly encapsulated that he was fully and totally committed to Tracy, but then life got in the way and she died. He let go of Robin before she got married to Barney and that made him prepared to give everything to Tracy.
But now Tracy has been gone for 6 years and Ted is living in his stories, which is what Tracy never wanted for him, and here he is subconsciously (or consciously but sneaky) asking his kids if its ok for him to move on.
He got divorced and tried to revert to his pre-marriage ways. It happens, even in real life. And the real life reactions are exactly the same - ewww.
I did like the scene where Lilly or somebody was complaining about Robin missing a big event and Ted (I think) correctly pointed out the fact that the big event she was missing was the birth of her ex-husband’s love child.
Those who didn’t like the ending should start referring to the show as “Lilypad & Marshmallow”, a sitcom about college sweethearts who get marrried and live happily ever after.
People see different sides of people. Ted may not have seen the tender side of Barney, or really ever known what it was that attracted Robin to him.
I even have friends like that- a couple comes to mind where the male half was a far better person than the female half, and for the life of me, I can’t see why he ever married her. I can totally see why he’d want to jump in the sack with her, or even date her for a while, but marriage? Nope, not seeing why, and nor can I see why it wasn’t obvious that SHE wouldn’t be interested in the long-term nature of marriage either. But clearly they did before and when they got married.
And people exaggerate their friends for comic effect, and just to make them look better (or worse). You should hear some of the BS a good friend of mine says about me. For example, there was a point in college when as an RA in my dorm, I grabbed a guy by the front of his shirt and chewed him out rather quietly but menacingly for being a dumb ass in the hallways during finals.
20 years later, through multiple retellings, the story as my buddy tells it is that I lifted the guy off the ground by his shirt, chewed him out with a lot of profanity, shook him, and flung him down the hallway into a whimpering heap.
I think a lot of Ted’s stories about Barney were of the latter variety, and we never got to see the more normal Barney, except in brief flashes and fleeting glimpses.
This was probably the only truly sour note in the batch of minor quibbles I had with the finale (like Ted and the Wife not getting married).
I think everything did make sense though. Robin would naturally drift apart as she remained single and childless as their friends got married. I know I’m drifting apart already and I’m only 27.
The only thing I disagree with is that people are saying that the mother is the consolation prize. It seems like Robin’s the consolation prize. The mother was a much better fit with Ted and the two would have been much happier had she lived than Ted/Robin.
I don’t agree that Ted was pining for Robin throughout his marriage to The Mother. For my proof is the conversation between Lily and Marshall the day after the wedding in McLaren’s. Marshall says that Ted always does this, falls in love too hard too fast, but Lily is watching across the room as Ted talks to Tracy on the phone. “But never like this”, she says.
Through all of the flash forwards showing Ted and Tracy together, there is absolutely no sign that Ted is just putting in time, or feels resigned to his fate. He is truly in love with Tracy and wants no one else. It’s just that six years after she dies, he feels it’s time to maybe take a second (third?) look at the Canadian girl he met back in 2005 at the bar.
In hindsight, it’s obvious that Ted and Robin would end up together. The first episode didn’t have Ted meeting Tracy, or when he and his college girlfriend Karen were going hot and heavy, it was him meeting Robin. Someone said above (and I apologize for not finding the name of the poster again) that the viewers were fooled by Ted’s long rambling story (listing an “endless parade of skanks”, to quote daughter Penny from the ComicCon short for this last season) into forgetting that Robin is the woman who we first see Ted falling in love with.
And I so totally called the blue French Horn at the end sitting on the couch before we see him outside Robin’s apartment at the end.
The show lasted far too long and the finale seemed like a “cheat.”
By waiting so late to introduce the character who played the eponymous Mother, they never gave the audience a chance to care about her and thus her fate wasn’t of much interest when it was revealed.
I was never a fan of the series (my SO liked it) but I have seen enough episodes to realize that the payoff wasn’t worth the wait.
Am I the only one that loved that Ted and Tracy didn’t get married right away? The whole fricken series we saw nothing but whining from Ted about how every single woman he met could be “the one” and he truly planned to marry several of them, even getting left at the altar by a woman in love with another man. He was so desperate for the fairy tale wedding that I felt like his willingness to set that all aside and just be happy with the woman he loved showed a tremendous amount of growth on his part.