So I haven’t watch HIMYM in real-time for a long while, and I won’t get to watch the last season until it hit Netflix. So far I’ve only seen half the first half of the second-to-last season too, though I could watch the remaining episodes of that season now.
But before I invest the time in watching the last season and a half, I want to know if things in fact worked out how I long predicted and hoped they would…until I gave up hope, that is. If it did not, I’m not sure I want to watch any further, I more or less gave up on it due to being sick of being teased with Ted and Robin’s relationship to no where. However, a remark on someone’s blog made me wonder if it all turned out close to how I thought it would early on.
Okay, big ol’ spoilers from here on out. The finale is sort of an epilogue.
Barney and Robin get married. Robin has cold feet on the day of the wedding and asks Ted to run off with her; he does not. Ted meets Tracy at the wedding, and they hit it off immediately. Barney and Robin remain married for about three years. After the divorce, Robin becomes estranged from the group, because she doesn’t like seeing her ex-husband hit on skanks, or seeing the man she thinks she should have ended up with happy with Tracy.
Lily and Marshall have a total of three kids. Marshall works a corporate job he hates for years to support his family. Eventually, he becomes a judge and then a New York state supreme court justice.
Barney goes for a “perfect month”, and knocks up #31. When his daughter is born, Barney is a changed man.
Ted and Tracy have a happy relationship. They postpone getting married when Tracy gets pregnant (they want a “perfect wedding”, which includes her fitting into her wedding dress). It becomes a running joke over the years how they’re “living in sin” rather than just getting married already. They eventually do get married (possibly after having their second kid together; I forget). Tracy rather suddenly gets sick and dies.
Fast forward to “present day”, with Ted telling the story to his teenaged kids (a number of years after Tracy’s death). They’ve pieced together that Ted is telling them this story to suss out how receptive they’d be to him giving it another go with Robin (after all, their mother is hardly in the story at all). They give Ted their blessing. Ted shows up outside Robin’s apartment with that blue French horn. The end.
Note of caution: Do NOT, for all that is good and holy, discuss the finale with people who watched in real-time. A significant % became attached to the Mother, not to mention Barney’s character development, and are PISSED it was flushed away in a matter of minutes!
To be fair, the mom had been dead for 5 years at the start of the story. Everyone had grieved. The kids were telling Ted that it was all right for him to move on.
The problem wasn’t the moving on, it was the moving back. Or at least the presentation of it. You can’t set up a multi-year arc where Ted finally, completely, for really Reals this time, lets Robin go, only to turn around in a single episode and say “Ted n Robin 4evah!”
You also can’t destroy the 4 year character development of Barney for the sake of arriving at the ending you’d settled upon 7 years ago when you wrapped up season 1.
Yes, it had been 15 years in-episode and people grow and change. But the viewers only got 42 minutes to digest it all and that simply wasn’t enough time to follow the journey in the manner that the show creators wished for us to.
Yea, I think the problem was the show kept getting renewed long past the plans of the show-runners. Had they ended in season five, Robin splitting up with Barney and eventually going back with a widowed Ted wouldn’t have been a bad way to leave things. And there’s even a nice symmetry, in that the Mother got togeather with Ted after her other soul-mate had died. Now Ted is moving on and still pursing love after the Mother dies.
But since they had to tread water for four more seasons, they decided to focus on 1) Barney growing as a person in order to be with Robin, and 2) Ted letting go of his on-again off again love triangle with Robin. And with four seasons to cover, they really ran both plot-points into the ground. So when they basically tossed both themes out the window in the finale, it felt really jarring.
That was the plan. But in the final season, they made her a little bit more of a significant character than they had originally intended. That’s why so many fans were disappointed or outraged at the ending. If she hadn’t been introduced until the last five minutes, nobody would have had time to get attached to her.
It’s from the pilot. Ted steals it from the restaurant where he had his first date with Robin and gives it to her. A season or two later they revisit that restaurant, are recognized, and have to give it back.
So I finally got to see the last episodes. I’m kind of surprised that people got attached to Tracy. She was kind of sweet, but there wasn’t a lot else to her character.
The actress has a TON of charisma. It’s why she is staring in “A to Z” now.
I saw it in real time and I thought the finale was just fine. Though the final season got pretty dragged out (some brilliant parts though were included, such as saying goodbye to all the minor recurring characters).