WHAT THE DAMN HELL!!
(mostly cross-posted from my tumblr):
As someone who loved this show and was disappointed with most of the last season of How I Met Your Mother, but was hoping the end would be decent... this is actually one of the worst series finales I have ever watched. I’m so disappointed in Carter Bays and Craig Thomas for the way this was handled.
The funny thing about this is that I used to LOVE Ted and Robin. I really did. But I, even as someone who shipped them hardcore at one point, can’t enjoy this ending. As far as Ted and Robin themselves go, I bought their fallout and their breakup. It seemed clear cut enough. Then after the breakup they spend years establishing the fact that these two are over and done and there’s no going back from that. That they weren’t right for each other. That they want different things in a relationship and they couldn’t provide all of those things for each other. And Robin literally floated away for God’s sake!
Then they spend the same amount of years developing a relationship between Barney and Robin, have people fall in love with the idea of them being together or at least grow to accept it, and spend literally 98% of the last season focusing on their wedding… only to invalidate it all in the first 20 minutes of the final episode. Even some people who never liked Barney and Robin are calling BS on this. That really says something.
Bays and Thomas had to literally mess up canon, undo character development, and undermine the whole premise of the show for this ending. Barney reverted back to old caricature Barney and they decided to throw in a baby with a random woman with a number assigned as a poor attempt to fix it. Tracy, the Mother, seemed like a complete afterthought and plot device. That scene where Ted met her was so genuine, but now I can’t even enjoy it because they killed her off right after. To make matters worse, after that, the story ends; and literally one minute after it’s confirmed to the audience that Tracy dies, it turns completely into a ploy for Ted to go get back with Robin and to tie everything back to the pilot episode: logic be damned.
It’s like they didn’t bother to think that the characters would grow and change over the course of time when they first wrote that ending 9 years ago. The show and its characters really outlived that original model of closure. If it were like how it was originally planned - which was if the show was canceled at the end of season one, or if the show only ran 2 or 3 seasons, or if they hadn’t spent so much time establishing Ted/Robin as over and Barney/Robin as the ultimate couple, or if they didn’t try to cram all these major events through the course of one hour, I’d have probably bought it.
Also, as far as filming that ending with the kids, they could have easily filmed a more generic ending with them or multiple endings that weren’t so specific with Robin and Ted being endgame in case the show got canceled or whatever. Like, that’s not even a valid excuse.
I remember saying when I found out that the entire season would be about Barney and Robin’s wedding: “either this is gonna be epic, or it’s gonna be a huge mess.” As someone who treasured this show, I hate that it was the latter, and I certainly won’t be looking at this series finale, or hell, the final season as a whole, with graduation goggles.
The only way this finale could have sucked even more is if they destroyed Marshall and Lily. It would have been nice to see how Lily’s career ended up. No wait, scratch that. Because they probably would have screwed that up too.
As someone who loved this show and was disappointed with most of the last season of How I Met Your Mother, but was hoping the end would be decent... this is actually one of the worst series finales I have ever watched. I’m so disappointed in Carter Bays and Craig Thomas for the way this was handled.
The funny thing about this is that I used to LOVE Ted and Robin. I really did. But I, even as someone who shipped them hardcore at one point, can’t enjoy this ending. As far as Ted and Robin themselves go, I bought their fallout and their breakup. It seemed clear cut enough. Then after the breakup they spend years establishing the fact that these two are over and done and there’s no going back from that. That they weren’t right for each other. That they want different things in a relationship and they couldn’t provide all of those things for each other. And Robin literally floated away for God’s sake!
Then they spend the same amount of years developing a relationship between Barney and Robin, have people fall in love with the idea of them being together or at least grow to accept it, and spend literally 98% of the last season focusing on their wedding… only to invalidate it all in the first 20 minutes of the final episode. Even some people who never liked Barney and Robin are calling BS on this. That really says something.
Bays and Thomas had to literally mess up canon, undo character development, and undermine the whole premise of the show for this ending. Barney reverted back to old caricature Barney and they decided to throw in a baby with a random woman with a number assigned as a poor attempt to fix it. Tracy, the Mother, seemed like a complete afterthought and plot device. That scene where Ted met her was so genuine, but now I can’t even enjoy it because they killed her off right after. To make matters worse, after that, the story ends; and literally one minute after it’s confirmed to the audience that Tracy dies, it turns completely into a ploy for Ted to go get back with Robin and to tie everything back to the pilot episode: logic be damned.
It’s like they didn’t bother to think that the characters would grow and change over the course of time when they first wrote that ending 9 years ago. The show and its characters really outlived that original model of closure. If it were like how it was originally planned - which was if the show was canceled at the end of season one, or if the show only ran 2 or 3 seasons, or if they hadn’t spent so much time establishing Ted/Robin as over and Barney/Robin as the ultimate couple, or if they didn’t try to cram all these major events through the course of one hour, I’d have probably bought it.
Also, as far as filming that ending with the kids, they could have easily filmed a more generic ending with them or multiple endings that weren’t so specific with Robin and Ted being endgame in case the show got canceled or whatever. Like, that’s not even a valid excuse.
I remember saying when I found out that the entire season would be about Barney and Robin’s wedding: “either this is gonna be epic, or it’s gonna be a huge mess.” As someone who treasured this show, I hate that it was the latter, and I certainly won’t be looking at this series finale, or hell, the final season as a whole, with graduation goggles.
The only way this finale could have sucked even more is if they destroyed Marshall and Lily. It would have been nice to see how Lily’s career ended up. No wait, scratch that. Because they probably would have screwed that up too.