Editor’s Note: When Jaime came to us with the idea for this post, I laughed and laughed and laughed some more. “You KNOW how I feel about the HIMYM finale, RIGHT?” It’s been two years and I am STILL angry. True to my word, I’ve never gone back and watched an old episode since the finale aired. (I never did get around to having a bonfire with my DVDs though.) I still quote it and reference it fairly often, but it is always with a sense of melancholy (“Ugh, remember when that show wasn’t dead to me?”). Needless to say, I was very curious about what Jaime would have to say regarding loving something that I personally find to be indefensible. I may vehemently disagree with him but he raises many points that are valid. YOU DO YOU JAIME. It’s the Head Over Feels philosophy after all. Thank you for your bravery in owning up to this. It actually made me want to watch the show again.
But I won’t. How can I watch something that no longer exists? 😉 -Kim
It’s been two years since the end of How I Met Your Mother, and I think it’s finally safe to admit it: I loved the finale. Whew! I said it.
Had I come out with this opinion when it first aired, I likely would have received a barrage of angry tweets—but hopefully some of the backlash fires have died down by now, and we can talk about where it worked, where it didn’t, why it was doomed from the get-go, and the idea that while it may not have been the ending that most fans wanted, it was the one that Ted’s story needed.
Why Most Series Finales Stink
Series finales are a dangerous TV tightrope for writers: they have to keep their balance between pleasing the fans and successfully completing their character and story arcs. If they lean too far in one direction, they fail, and either end up with a beloved, pandering mess that betrays the ethos of the entire series, or they end up with a tight storyline that leaves behind an angry mob of devoted watchers. Serving both the fans and the arcs is the trick; the stakes are high—there can only be one finale—and so are the expectations, particularly for shows that have been on for several years.
Every show approaches the conundrum a little differently:
Seinfeld gave fans what they wanted by using the final trial as a way of parading every guest star or catch phrase they’d ever used on the show; at the same time, the trial itself was the direct result of years of the gang’s horrible selfishness. The story demanded that there be consequences for their years of bad behavior, and landing them in jail was narratively perfect.
Parks and Rec dropped all pretenses about caring about serving the series-long storyline arcs when they jumped into the future. From a storytelling perspective, the show absolutely should have ended at the end of season 6 (because, you know, that ending was about the triumph of the entire Parks Department, and everyone within it); instead, it slogged on for another year, and ended with a finale where every character magically lived happily ever after in their own personal paradises. While it was easy to walk away from the series finale in a good mood, the last episode completely abandoned what made the show great: small moments of zaniness in the most mundane of settings.
The Community finale—one of my favorite half-hours of television ever, period—prioritized character arcs over fan service, but respectfully. By constantly asking questions throughout the episode, like Annie’s “If I were a character in a TV show, and I was in my sixth year of community college, at some point, wouldn’t the audience start to feel sorry for me?”, Dan Harmon and Chris McKenna wrote a closing that ultimately got us to want the characters to move on. Where they could have spent the time taking a victory lap through side characters and paintball—*cough, cough*, Community season 4 finale, I’m looking at you—they instead prioritized their character storylines in a way that openly explained why that was the best choice.
Now, on top of the challenge of writing a good series finale, ending a show becomes exponentially more difficult when the entire premise of the show is based on solving specific mysteries for viewers. LOST was based on the implicit promise that we would someday find out exactly what was happening on that damn island. The Fugitive finale set ratings records based on the promise that we would discover the truth about the one-armed man. Arrested Development kept viewers in suspense for three years, promising answers to questions like: was George Sr. innocent? And if so, then who was sabotaging the Bluth family? When fans have been watching one of these “I want answers, dammit” shows for years, the finale has far more gravity (and pressure upon it) than a typical TV show.
So in this context, the HIMYM finale was doomed from the start: forty minutes was never going to be enough time to do right by fans, provide character closure, and deliver the epic romance we’d been waiting nine years for.
Where the HIMYM Finale Worked…
But like I said, I think they gave us the ending Ted’s story needed, and actually did do right by the fans too—so let’s get into all of the reasons behind this opinion. (It’s OK to get a head start on writing angry response tweets if you want to start now.)
Ted’s entire narrative arc was based on a consistent pattern: his heart was constantly pulling him in directions that his head was unwilling to admit he wanted, and the most meaningful moments of the show were interactions of someone pointing out this hypocrisy to him. It started in season one: Ted was in a cab on his way to Robin’s, and his head was literally unable to cope with admitting his feelings for Robin, so he imagined Victoria there, explaining it to him. And while it wasn’t always about Robin—he did, after all, spend a season denying his feelings for Zoey—we did repeatedly see Ted acting on feelings he wasn’t willing to acknowledge, and the members of the gang took turns calling him out on it.
Sometimes, watching this pattern play out was endearing—in “Home Wreckers,” it’s Marshall who knows that Ted is going to keep the house he bought, before Ted does. In “The Slutty Pumpkin Returns,” it’s cute to know that Ted is more into the idea of their romance than the reality. And other times, it was sad to watch how this flaw held him back. In “The Autumn of Break-Ups”, Victoria is more aware of Ted’s feelings for Robin than Ted is (technically for the second time). By the end of the series, it had almost become a trope: Ted has feelings / Ted acts on his feelings / Ted denies having said feelings / Ted’s actions cause conflict and leave him single, again / someone points out to Ted the feelings he was acting on.
So from the perspective of his character arc, what needed to happen was for Ted to one day admit his feelings in a way that led to happiness rather than conflict. For Ted to have learned any kind of lesson in the series, he needed to be placed in a situation where he could follow his heart before he denied it. The final version of the trope needed to be: Ted has feelings / Ted acts on his feelings / someone points out to Ted the feelings he was acting on / Ted admits said feelings / Ted’s admission leads to him being romantically happy.
And that’s what happened. In the final moments of the finale, it was his kids who were in the role of pointing out Ted’s hypocrisy to him—obviously the action of telling nine years of stories about Robin spoke to his feelings about Robin. And instead of denying it to the point of unhappiness, he finally admitted it, and acted on it. Finally—finale! finally!—Ted was saying to another character, “You’re right, I’ve been acting on feelings I haven’t admitted, so now it’s time to admit them and act on them even more.”
What’s more, ending it this way gave the kids a major function in the structure of the series. For nine years, they served as ornaments. Had the show ended any other way, there would have been no reason to include them at all—the show would have held up if you cut those parts out—but in the end, we saw why they were there all along. They were there to be the agents of closure on his arc.
…And Where It Didn’t.
So: that’s why it needed to end that way. But…the finale itself was far from perfect, and did a lot of disservice to anyone who wasn’t Ted. Let’s talk about that.
At the risk of sounding like an apologist, it’s important to point out here that there was never supposed to be a ninth season. The showrunners were caught off guard by the renewal, and the concept of capturing Barney and Robin’s wedding weekend in an entire season was an awkward solution to having to draw out the show for another year. Which is all to say that the finale inherited that bad decision, and in many cases, that ruined the chances at satisfying closures for anyone who wasn’t Ted.
Let’s focus on the finale’s biggest sin: Barney and Robin.
The most common outcry about the finale was that it was awkward to spend an entire year preparing for Barney and Robin’s wedding, if it was only going to last all of 15 minutes. And that’s fair.
For me, however, the issue here is one of pacing, rather than events. I had no issue accepting that Barney and Robin weren’t right together in the long-term: throughout season nine, each of them had cold feet so many times that I was actually surprised when they went through with the wedding. It didn’t surprise me when they started having problems, and it didn’t bother me when they split. What did bother me was that it happened so quickly in the finale; there was so much ground to cover that the few scenes we saw of their deterioration as a couple felt dismissive. Again—the finale was doomed by how much they needed to accomplish in 40 minutes, and it was left to reconcile the bad decision of season nine’s premise, but nonetheless, I can’t help but feel that there must have been a better way to split them up than the passing nod that we got.
Instead, we saw both Barney and Robin reset to their season one character arcs: he needed to get over womanizing, and she needed to find happiness by balancing her career and her personal life. And again, the pacing problem reared it’s ugly head—if more time had been spent on them re-learning these lessons, I would have bought in, but to get them from reset to fully realized growth in one episode was too much. (As a side note: they should have taken a lesson from You’re The Worst, which paused before the first season finale to travel back in time three years. As a plot device, this allowed the audience to better understand each character’s long-term arcs without disrupting the flow of the finale. Imagine how much better the HIMYM finale would have been had we gotten an entire episode to understand how Barney and Robin fell apart! Then we could have gotten rid of the ridiculously racist “Slapsgiving 3: Slappointment in Slapmarra.”)
And while Robin’s path in the finale on some level represents a step forward ideologically (I grew up in the era when Murphy Brown was allowed to be a news anchor, so long as each episode’s story constantly focused on her struggles with balancing a career with her desire to be a good mother), I didn’t see the need for her to explicitly be so unhappy and incomplete. While Robin was the primary agent for one of the big lessons of the show—friendships evolve, and they’re a lot more work after your 20s—it seemed cruel to paint a picture of Robin as being so empty. Isn’t it more likely that she would have found new friends while missing her old ones, rather than spending her life as a lonely spinster?
“Kids, This Was Never About Your Mother.”
In the end, I’m able to get over my disappointment about Barney and Robin, because the finale played one last card that made it brilliant. The finale placed the audience in Ted’s shoes—it pointed out to us that we were far more emotionally invested in the five main characters than we were in Ted’s relationship with Tracy.
The kids’ job was to say, “Look at your actions—your actions show that this was never about our mom, it was about Robin (and your three other friends, and incidentally, every woman you banged in your 20s).”
So we have to look at our own actions as the audience: tuning in each week, staying on board for nine years—we’d been acting more on the desire for closure for the five main characters than we were to learn about the mother. Like Ted, we may have insisted that we were watching to learn about the mother, but our commitment as viewers spoke to caring much more about the gang. And we got endings for each of them.
I spent a lot of time being frustrated with the finale, and every time I watch it, I still can’t help rolling my eyes through major portions of it. I get over this, partially, by watching the last three episodes at once–because episode 22, “The End of the Aisle,” is the start of the show’s goodbye, and Marshall and Lily renewing their vows is really the last proper scene they got together. (This makes me feel better about how little they’re featured in the last two episodes.) But as endings go, I got what (I didn’t know that) I really wanted: closure on the five main characters, and a realistic portrayal of how life goes on after an era of close friendship. How I Met Your Mother was always brilliant at grounding it’s silliness with emotional realism (I’ll never forget the death of Marshall’s father), and the last episode did that.
How do YOU feel about the HIMYM finale two years later? Still angry? Have you softened towards it? Did you ALWAYS like it? Let us know in the comments!
I’m so angry I can’t even compose angry tweets
Initial feel: This blog post is brilliant.
To be continued…
I read the whole thing and nope nope nope. Still hate it. I will judge you less for liking it, though. 😉
Same. -Kim
Basically, same.
Jaime.
I had no idea that you could write so fluidly. I agree with ya, and I do (and initially did) like the finale of HIMYM.
And for the record, I’m not kissing your butt, because you’re not my boss anymore.
You’ve expressed your opinion in a well-thought out way and I respect that. Now let me show you why you’re 100% wrong and the HIMYM finale is the worst thing ever. 😉
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head on what the Hell Craig and Carter were thinking when they planned and filmed that ending all those years ago. There is a certain logic to that ending, and I think you’ve captured the authors’ intentions better than anybody else trying to defend this finale that I’ve seen.
But logic and author intention only carry an author so far if they fail to take the audience along with them. Every author has intentions for how they want their audience to feel about the story they’re telling, and if a large portion (possibly even a majority) of the audience doesn’t respond the way the authors wanted them to, then the author bears some responsibility for that failure.
Believe it or not, I do think it could’ve been possible to end the series with the Mother dying and Ted ending up with Robin and still have it work. But the only way it could’ve worked would be as a bittersweet ending, with some happiness at two old flames reuniting, but also some sadness at the Mother’s death.
But look at that pre-filmed ending. Look at the smiles on those little bastards’ faces, at how bloody casual they are about dismissing their own mom, how we don’t learn about the Mother’s death until after the kids have been going on and on about how Dad totally has the hots for Aunt Robin and how totally in favor they are of that. The point is, C&C were not going for a bittersweet ending when they wrote and filmed this garbage all those years ago. Instead, they reveal that a supposedly good person that their main character, Ted, supposedly loved is dead and they wanted us to feel…happy about it. “YAY! Ted gets to end up with Robin after all! YYYYYAAAAAAAYYYYYYY!!!!!”
This pre-filmed ending always sucked. It sucked when they wrote and filmed it all those years ago, it would’ve sucked no matter what season the show ended on, it would’ve sucked even if C&C had stuck to the original plan of the Mother showing up only for the scene where Ted finally meets her. Because if that meeting scene worked even as faintly as well as it did in the Season 9 finale, the pre-filmed crap that followed it would still have gone over like a lead balloon. A good person that Ted definitely loved and C&C wanted us to be happy to learn she was dead.
You have a point that without this ending the kids would’ve been largely ornamental and unnecessary. They’d still have one function though. To let us know that Robin’s not their Mother and that by 2030, Robin’s not with Ted. And if that was the only function they had, I would’ve been perfectly OK with that. Because I never really cared that much about the kids. And now that I know the function they were meant to have, I care even less.
In regards to your reaction to Barney and Robin’s Season 9 “cold feet” moments, congratulations, you reacted to them precisely the way C&C wanted us to react to them. I’m happy for you. Too bad so many of us had the opposite reaction. This seems like the opportunity to talk about C&C’s two major backfires in the later seasons: Ted’s feelings for Robin and Robin & Barney’s “cold feet”.
The pre-filmed crap straightjacketed C&C in more ways than one. With it in mind, it meant that Ted couldn’t meet the Mother until the end of the series. So with each new season, they had to keep coming up with excuses why Ted couldn’t meet the Mother yet. In Season 3, he’s with Stella (and if the show had ended at Season 3, Stella would’ve been the Mother and the finale would’ve been almost as bad as it was in Season 9). In Season 4, he has to get over Stella leaving him at the altar. In Season 5, there’s no reason he couldn’t meet the Mother that I can recall (I think C&C were running out of ideas at this point). In Season 6, we had the season-long Zoey filler that C&C were nice enough to let us know was filler right from the start.
For Season 7, C&C came up with a “brilliant” idea to sustain the show for the remaining three seasons. Have Ted realize he’s still in love with Robin! This will remind everyone of what a “great” pair they made in Season 2 and make us all wistful on how much we wish they could get back together only to be overjoyed by the ending! And boy, did this ever backfire!
When you bring up the same question over and over again, “Should Ted and Robin be together”, only to apparently answer, “No” every time, it becomes convincing. The dead end this recurring subplot kept reaching convinced many of us (if we weren’t convinced already) not only that Ted and Robin couldn’t be together, but that they SHOULDN’T be together. That romantically, they were all wrong for each other, completely incompatible, that they made a downright toxic pair. It was at it’s most convincing in “No Pressure”, where Ted asks Robin, “Do you love me,” and she answers with what sounds like complete honesty, “No.” No means no. It does NOT mean “Not yet” (God, Marshall’s bet was SO STUPID!) or, “I suppose I really was in love with you all along.” Ted’s “love” for Robin began to look disturbing and stalker like. It didn’t look like a desirable, but unobtainable goal, but an ugly obstacle keeping Ted from the real goal. And when the twist ending revealed it was the real goal, it still looked ugly and made Ted look ugly.
The second backfire is Barney and Robin’s “cold feet” moments in the ninth season. Conversely, when you bring up the same question over and over again, “Should Barney and Robin get married?”, only to have both parties answer, “Yes!” every time, that also becomes convincing. Every time they had cold feet, they warmed up. Even near the end, when C&C tried to give Robin cold feet to last the final few episodes, she still warmed up in time for the wedding. These moments did not (and do not) look like foreshadowing of their “inevitable” divorce, but as challenges they successfully overcame together, each time making them an even better and stronger couple than they were before.
You’re sort of right that for most of the show we were emotionally invested mainly in the five main characters. I was emotionally invested in both Ted and Robin, But that doesn’t mean I wanted them together. I didn’t, never did, still don’t, and probably never will. Fortunately, we didn’t have to like Ted and Robin as a couple to like the show. Unfortunately, we had to in order to like the finale. Here’s why so many of us preferred Robin to be with Barney instead of Ted.
Ted and Robin wanted different things in life. Ted wanted to find the One to settle down with and have his kids while they live Happily Ever After in their suburban home as Ted pursues his dream as a badass architect in New York City, his favorite city in the world. Robin wanted to see the world and have adventures and be an awesome badass. One thing Robin definitely didn’t want, was kids. Even after mourning the chance to change her mind, her mind had not been changed. She still didn’t want kids. Robin would have to change some essential things about herself if she was to settle down with Ted, because Ted would insist on those changes.
Contrary to what C&C forced Robin to say in “End of the Aisle”, her relationship with Barney made perfect sense in ways Robin and Ted never did. They were both adventuresome risk-takers with cynical outer shells that hid some surprising sentiment underneath. And unlike Ted, Barney fully appreciated and adored Robin for the awesome badass she already was, and never had any desire to change her. I believe contrary to the finale, that Barney would’ve had no problem traveling the globe with Robin because I don’t believe that Barney (or any of the other main cast except maybe Lily) loved NYC as much as Ted did. So when the finale tried to make not seeing much of NYC a problem in their marriage, like most of the finale I just didn’t buy it.
And now for what maybe an unpopular opinion: I loved the ninth season, warts and all. While I (obviously) have many regrets about HIMYM and how I enjoyed it immensely, I eagerly looked forward to every episode and until the finale, I was never disappointed. And, what’s definitely less unpopular, what I loved most about the season was Cristin Miliotti as the Mother.
This was one of the all time great unions of actor and role. Milliotti had the near impossible task to live up to eight years worth of hype and buildup and she surpassed it. She really came to life as this fun, hilarious, lovable, magnificent character. Jaime, you’re wrong. Many of us did get at least as emotionally invested, if not more so, in Ted’s relationship with Tracy as we did in the five main characters. Because, in just one season, Tracy became the sixth main character, as if she’d been there all along.
She also turned the daughter’s pre-filmed line, “Let’s look at the facts. You sat us down to tell us how you met our mother, but mom’s hardly in the story,” into no longer a fact, but a lie. Even though she wasn’t there till the ending, and she wasn’t in every episode of the last season, once she showed up, and every single time she showed up, she had a presence and magnetism that dwarfed all the other characters except the main cast, of which she was now definitely a part of. She was so much more than “hardly” in the story.
To me, the ninth season was not a mistake, but a golden opportunity for C&C to scrap the far bigger mistake of their pre-filmed ending. My sincerest, most realistic wish of what might have and should have been, is that while working on “The Lighthouse” and “Platonish”, those two great episodes that highlighted how awesome Barney and Robin were and how awesome Millioti was as the Mother, that C&C had had an epiphany and realized their pre-filmed ending didn’t work and scrapped it for something different. Something like the Downton Abbey finale, perhaps, where nobody died, and everybody was paired off and happy. It may not have been “great” or “realistic”, but it would’ve been so much more satisfying than this. Instead, they stuck to their pre-filmed ending that always sucked and placed at the end of a season that made it so much worse.
A beautiful, magnificent person we got to know and fall in love with, whom Ted truly loved because she was so more ideally suited to Ted than Robin ever was or ever could be (just like Barney was more ideally suited to Robin than Ted ever was or could ever hope to be), and C&C wanted us to be happy to learn she was dead.
Jaime, you gave a good, thoughtful defense, and I really do respect you for it. I just thought it earned a thoughtful rebuttal.
OH MY GOD THIS COMMENT IS AMAZING. Standing ovation to you, dear reader. I wholeheartedly agree. -Kim
Thank you so much, Kim! I appreciate it.
Do you know if there is any way to edit our comments? There are a couple of minor tweaks I’d like to make, but I can’t seem to find any way to edit.
BTW, weren’t you or Sage going to write a defense of the Lost series finale? Now there’s a finale with a vocal hatedom that deserves a good defense. And what with Doctor Who now having a yearlong hiatus, it’s the main thing I’m looking forward to on this terrific site.
Yes, I’m planning on doing my top episodes of Lost, probably over the summer (my rewatch butted right up to Fall TV last year and I just didn’t have time). The finale is on said list 😉
And sadly, I don’t think you can edit comments 🙁
I’m still Lost-resistant. I feel like I know too much to enjoy a full binge. –S
I appreciate how thoughtful the dialogue has been here (though I’m not surprised at all). I do fall into the camp that loathed the finale.
What sealed it for me was the “alternate ending” C&C released, seemingly to shut up the angry mob. They never did handle the criticism very well, and this was no exception – the way this came out reeked of “There, you got what you wanted, are you happy now??”
But the very existence of that alternate ending illustrates a huge flaw in their argument that they had to use that ending:
Scenes get deleted and replaced ALL THE TIME.
Maybe they needed to reshoot and an actor wasn’t available and they didn’t want to just slap a bad wig on someone. Or maybe the episode ran too long. Or maybe it didn’t test well. Whatever the reason, nearly everything filmed has scenes that didn’t make it to the screen.
Were those scenes wasted? Not necessarily. They might have worked at the time. But when the time came to lock down final cut, they didn’t. So the creators dropped them and moved on, until the box set came along and they got to put those scenes to use.
I get that C&C love that ending. I think they’re grievously wrong, but I get it. Still, just because they filmed it, doesn’t mean they had to use it. And they would have been far better off if they could’ve just done what they thought their show was about:
Moved on.
I loved the finale, because it showed that life doesn’t always go the way we expect it to, there are essentially no happy endings, only bittersweet ones. Life is but a journey of loss at the end, which i made beautiful by such moments. The finale tugged at my heartstrings. I practically cried for the entirety of Season 9.