Zipper-IMO you’re the anomaly in our culture. Most people aspire to companionship and children. This show was not for you, IMNSHO.
For those that originally thought the finale should have been three episodes, apparently it was originally:
Hopefully, we’ll get a super-sized version of the finale on the DVD set.
Given a whole week of discussion, I’d say that the Finale was the perfect mix of good, bad and controversial. In a sense the ending is perfect… from a marketing point of view. If the ending had merely been good-perfect, no one would be talking about it anymore.
If you want the internet to explode, you gotta piss off people and give them something to bitch about.
Personally, I didn’t care for the ending.
So even though I’m a single person with married friends with kids, like 3 of the 5 main characters, I couldn’t possibly enjoy the show? Or because I don’t want kids like 2 of the 5 main characters, I can’t be a fan?
And where did I say I don’t want companionship? I’m not a goddamn anomaly.
Fuck right off you prick.
I think he’s confused why you think Robin was “pushed to the side for 15 years.” She was a world famous journalist who didn’t have any other relationships shown on screen, that doesn’t mean she didn’t have them. We’ve been shown time and again that Robin doesn’t make friends easily. Seeing it in the finale shouldn’t have been a shock.
Even in the Pit this would be inappropriate. Don’t do it again.
You are now saying the exact opposite of the post I responded to!
Marley, I reported it before seeing your mod note. Nevermind the report.
What the hell are you talking about?
I’m a 30-something with friends. This show is about 30-somethings (or I guess 20-something’s) with friends. What do you think this show is about that doesn’t apply to me?
My comment about Robin being tossed aside for 15 years was about how Ted tossed her aside while he went off and had his dream family and then came back to her. Being how the final episode encapsulated how Ted has always wanted Robin, I don’t see how that is off base.
Ted, Marshal, and Lily are 27 in the pilot and in their 30s for the majority of the show. Robin is 25 in the pilot. Barney’s age was never stated outright by the show, but various flashbacks show him to be in his early 30s in the pilot and nearing 40 by the finale.
You’re way off base. The finale showed that Ted fell head over heels in love with The Mother. In telling the kids this story, he was trying to open himself up to dating anyone again. The fact that the kids noticed that Ted and Robin flirt with each other a lot when their both unattached just requires that they’re breathing.
Ok so I am exactly the same age as all the people in the show. It’s a show about people my age and their friends. I am still not sure why this show was “not for me.”
The HIMYM Wikia says “Reflecting on their differing feelings about marriage, kids, and even how they weren’t able to move in together, they decide to break up.” So Ted and Robin break up because Ted wants kids and Robin doesn’t. So now Ted goes on to date other people and eventually meet the mother. Then they spend 8 seasons hinting about how Ted and Robin still are into each other.
If he wouldn’t have broken up with Robin he wouldn’t have fallen head over heels with the mother, he’d have still been with Robin. Yes he did want kids more than he wanted Robin. Robin wanted to avoid having kids more than she wanted to be with Ted. But it was Ted’s wanting to have kids that kept them apart for 15 years, and I stand by that assertion.
The finale is open to all sorts of interpretation and that is how I chose to interpret it. It’s fine to think of the whole thing as a beautiful destiny and that’s a valid interpretation, and I don’t knock it. But from my standpoint I saw it as Ted ignoring being with the love of his life because they disagreed on the children thing, and him coming back to her once he had what he wanted. Not saying that he would have left the wife for Robin but we’ll never know cuz she died.
It’s just my interpretation of 20 minutes of finale after watching 9 seasons of show. Don’t mean to ruffle your feathers.
“Tossed aside” doesn’t seem a fair characterisation. She married the man she wanted to be with, so Ted fell for someone else. Three years later she chose her career over her marriage, and Ted continued to be in love with someone else. For the next thirteen years she followed her career around the world and enjoyed success and fame. Six years after his wife died, Ted reached out to her to see if they could rekindle what they once had. That’s not being tossed aside - Robin spent her life fulfilling her dreams.
Fair enough. I’m still stuck on the idea that they broke up in the first place, and danced around getting back together a hell of a lot before either of them got married/hooked up for serious (like right up to the minute before she got married), so a whole lot could have been different for both of them. And then in the end they were together anyway.
Odd, because my interpretation was that Robin was never serious about Ted and that Barney, for good or bad, was actually the love of her life.
I don’t telling people they’re wrong, bur day-umm lady, you’re wrong.
We’re told over and over again how much Ted loves The Mother. And this season, we got to see a lot of those things. Ted found The One. Robin is supposed to be The One After.
That’s a common Hollywood trope - having kids fixes you. There is no such thing as a childfree person in tv and movieland.
But it should be - people without kids make up something like a quarter of the population, with almost zero representation in popular culture (resulting in what is known as symbolic annihilation). Neither Barney nor Robin actually represented a childfree by choice person - Robin was barren, and Barney was “fixed” by having a child.
Great, you guys have gone and made me get on my soapbox again. 
I like the idea the show puts forth that there is more than one person for everyone, which is my own belief. I think there is a spectrum of compatibility, and Tracy and Robin are both very much on the good end of the spectrum for Ted.
The British couple writing team in Episodes seems to be happily and deliberately childfree, though the issue of children is never addressed directly. (My favorite comedy by a mile, currently.)
Could make for a good thread, I think.
I’m finally watching the first season through, and the show was about the drama quite early on. Quite a few episodes even end on downer notes, and have very few actual comedic bits–being more like comedic relief in a drama.
I’m actually starting to wonder if I’ve only mostly seen the more comedic episodes, as I was more of a casual watcher. If the first season is an indication of how the show normally goes, I think the mother’s death fits in perfectly. That everyone says there was a big tonal shift makes me think the show became more comedic as it went on. But, since the mother’s death was written in the first season, it makes perfect sense.
That’s also probably why it feels to some like the show was saying that Robin was the love of his life instead of the mom, because that does seem to be the point of the first season, at least. There’s been only one season to try and show that Ted loved Tracy, and quite a lot of that had to be spent without them knowing each other.
I’m personally not sure what they could have done to make it clear that Ted was just fulfilling his promise to Robin, that they would get together if they were still single at age 40 or whatever. But, apparently, they spent too much time making Robin the love of Ted’s life for that to work for some people.
And this is a problem that would only have been worse if the mother had not been shown.
Well I always saw it as being told over and over that Ted loves Robin. And Robin loves Ted. But just never at the same time.
I realize that Ted loves the mother but he didn’t even know her the whole series. So that was a lot of years of me thinking they love each other and just 20 mins of me seeing him loving the mother. And still he ends up with Robin. So clearly I am missing the point.
I’ll be honest tho - while I do watch it every week it is not one of those shows that I spend too much time thinking about. So I’m probably the last person you want to nitpick salient points with. If I’m only watching it with one eyeball while I crush candy, I am most definitely missing the deeper meaning.
I just popped in to give my impression of the ending, which I thought was fine, because all I’d been seeing all week was headlines about how amazingly disappointing or bad the ending was. So I thought another opinion would be useful. I shoulda kept my mouth shut lol
Anyway, I guess now I know what it was all about. I still think it was fine and I still think NPH had changed the most!
You sure do it a lot for something you don’t [like] to do. Her point stands. You do not have a monopoly on the “proper” interpretation of the show. Quite a lot of people think the point of the show was that Robin is the true love of Ted’s life. It may not be what the writers intended, but, when the supposed love of his life is barely in the story for 8 years and then mostly can’t actually interact with Ted in the last year, while Robin and Ted’s love for her features throughout, it’s hard not to get the idea that Robin is who Ted really loves.
The love of his life died offscreen. In TV, people tend die offscreen when they are unimportant. Then five minutes later, it was about Robin again. As the kids said, the whole point of the series has been about how great Robin is. It’s an uphill battle to convince people that the Mother is the more important person to Ted, and it just didn’t work for a lot of people. It doesn’t make them wrong.