How I Met Your Mother Fail: My Problem with the Finale:
SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER OR THE FINALE, DON’T READ AHEAD.
Now before I write this, let me state a simple fact: I loved How I Met Your Mother and all the characters over the course of it’s nine
seasons. While the ninth and final season had it’s hiccups, I even loved the emotional core of the season. This post however is one writer’s
perspective on the finale, and why I felt it failed to conclude the series story properly.
There are a few problems I had with the finale as both a fan and as a writer. First off, let’s start with the fact that the final episode
felt like a forced plot. Spending an entire season building up this massive weekend affair for Robin and Barney’s wedding, plus spending
the whole last season showing Barney and Robin’s progression as characters to evolve to a loving, more committed place, would have been
a great payoff. However, to end the series with Robin choosing her career over a balance of work and love, and having Barney return to
womanizing after the divorce, only to get a woman pregnant and become a father, seems a huge disservice to the growth each character
had towards the end of the series.
Now let’s talk about Ted and The Mother. The entire series has been this huge build up of meeting the mother. Everyone has been looking
forward to learning the mother’s identity, and then we spent the entire last season meeting and falling in love with the mother character.
It seems to me that the entire series led up to this beautiful relationship building between Ted and the Mother, and then we finally get
this relationship, and then she’s taken away by an unknown disease. Then, to end the series, the kids tell Ted to go after their aunt
Robin. To me, this seems like one of the biggest slaps in the face the audience could get.
To me, this, coupled with little things in the finale like Robin leaving the group because of another burst of unresolved feelings for Ted,
or the group loosing touch with one another after going through everything they went through together, made the finale a bust. The biggest
takeaway from the finale was that Barney, Robin and Ted seemed to regress to their season 1 selves, completely taking away the growth each
character had throughout the series.
The only people that seemed to grow as people were Marshall and Lily, and yet their success was not enough to wash away the bad taste this finale left. As a writer, I felt let down by the utter lack to faithfulness to the characters. If I had
written the show, I either would have alluded to Robin’s conflicting feelings for Ted throughout the series more often, with the Barney
relationship being a mistaken hook up and nothing more, or I would have let the mother live, and let Barney and Robin stay together, and the
group, including the mother, would stay together as a close-knit group of friends. To me at least, the name of the game would be growth for
these characters, and this finale was more about a total regression.
What do you guys think? Let me know in the comments below whether or not you guys liked the finale, or if you agree with my view on it.