“And that kids, is how we ruined the finale”

How I Met Your Mother subject to some serious criticism from long-time fans

CAUTION: if you have not seen the How I Met Your Mother finale, looked at any kind of social media, or you live under a rock but are eager to watch it, I am advised by the unofficial TV junkies rulebook to issue a spoiler alert when it concerns unwatched shows.

For the past nine years HIMYM fans, including yours truly, have been slowly picturing that dreadful day where we would no longer have any new episodes to look forward to because Ted will have finally finished recounting to his kids exactly how he met their mother. Aside from that, we have all been fantasizing and conjuring our ideal finale in our minds, hoping that the writers grant our deepest wishes or at least come very close.

The minute the screen went black, I was left feeling sad because it was over, as well as let down. The writers joined the ranks of other  television finales such as The Sopranos, Seinfeld and Dexter, all of which had the worst possible finales to ever grace our television screens.

After a surprisingly strong final season, the final episode managed to cram way too much into one time slot by spanning the next eleven years of the gang’s life, which is something they should have done over the span of their final season to give the fans more information and context about why all these tragic things happened in the finale.

Barney and Robin getting divorced was a crushing blow that nobody saw coming, given that the writers spent an entire season proving how perfect Barney and Robin were for each other. However, I was perfectly fine with the divorce because it provided a realistic perspective of life that most sitcoms fail to do because they insist on sticking to a Hollywood ending. Well, in the real world, you can’t have the good without the bad because life just doesn’t work that way.

This led to Barney’s character regressing into the same sleaze that he was in season one, losing all of his character development, which I thought was horrible. However, when he accidentally gets a girl pregnant, Barney ends up holding his daughter for the first time and makes a face that is too priceless to even explain. This at least showed fans that the one girl to finally rid Barney of his promiscuous ways was his very own daughter.

When Ted finally met the mother on that train platform, it turned into one of the sweetest moments in television history and solidified how perfect the mother was for Ted.

However, Ted only got to spend eleven years with his soulmate, because she got sick and passed away. After Ted finished telling his story to his kids, we learn that the mother’s actually been dead for six years. This was something that many fans completely despised due to the fact that they adored the mother and killing her off so quickly seemed selfish and made the entire series superfluous. Especially when the writers spun it so that Ted’s kids told him to get back aunt Robin because that’s who their dad loves, leading to Ted standing under Robin’s window with a blue french horn.

Personally, I thought the death of the mother was a beautiful thing. After they killed her and Ted ended up with Robin, I realized how uncertain life could be sometimes and that you should just live each day without regret, because a life of regret isn’t a life worth living. Also, the mother managed to give Ted the greatest gift possible, she gave her best eleven years to him and made sure that he wouldn’t be alone for the rest of his life by pairing him with the one person he never stopped loving.

No finale will ever truly meet our expectations because we set them too high, which always leads to disappointment. I applaud the creators of HIMYM providing a darker angle to the traditional sitcom finale, giving us something we will discuss for years and years to come. We’ll argue about our own takes on the finale and how we would’ve ended it, essentially making this show immortal. I think this what the creators wanted, a show to stand the test of time and never be forgotten. And lets face it, isn’t that what they hope to achieve in show business?

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