Blog, Writing
How I Met Your Mother ended its 9-season run, with a finale that many people found disappointing. *Spoiler alert*
I tend to get very emotional around series finales for shows I’m heavily invested in, but I’ll admit this one had me curled up in my chair for 10 minutes groaning and yelling, “Why!?” Like many other viewers, I was angry and felt a little duped. Why spend all of the past season on Barney and Robin, only to break them up within the first 20 minutes of the finale? And why keep harping on Ted and Robin not being right for each other, only to have them get together in the end? And doesn’t The Mother (Tracy) count for anything? Wasn’t she supposed to be Ted’s true love–yet he was clearly never completely over Robin, even while married.
But after a day of processing, and then rewatching the finale, I’ve come to the conclusion, with the help of my fiance, that this was the only ending that made sense for the show. Creators Craig Thomas and Carter Bays have had this ending sketched out since at least the beginning of season 2 of the show, and by keeping the end point in mind, they have been able to drop a lot of hints over the course of 208 episodes, that, thinking back, have double meanings.
For example, Tracy persuades Robin to attend her and Ted’s wedding, when they finally tie the knot after having two kids. She also insists on taking a picture of the original gang–Ted, Marshall, Lily, Barney, and Robin. By bringing them all together again, Tracy could be subtly showing that she’d be okay with Ted moving on after her death and pursuing Robin.
That’s not to say HIMYM always knew exactly who the mother would be. When the creators didn’t know if the show would be picked up for a full first season, the back-up plan was to have the mother be Victoria. And at the end of season 3, Stella became the back-up mother. But after Britney Spears made an appearance on the show, the ratings were high enough there was no longer a need for a back-up plan.
So Bays and Thomas got to play things out, and stick to the idea of killing off the mother and having Ted end up with Robin. At the beginning of season 2, one of the final scenes of the show was shot–a conversation between Ted’s two kids, who would have been too old by the time the series ended to do the scene later. According to Alan Sepinwall on Hitfix, Bays and Thomas were “victims of their own damn cleverness”:
What Bays said was this: “I feel like with great art, you have to create constraints for yourself. You look at The White Stripes, they only want to have a guitar and drums, so they have to make all their music around guitar and drums. We have to make all our comedy around what the narrator says.”
Sepinwall also said that the pilot had to be unpredictable enough to grab the attention of CBS, so it ended with the twist that Robin is Aunt Robin, and not The Mother.
In a 2006 interview with the Chicago Tribune, the worst thing that could have happened in the pilot was for Robin to be Ted’s The One. Last year, Bays said to Entertainment Weekly that “What always made the show interesting to us is that Ted meets the perfect woman, and it’s [still] not his final love story.”
With all that in mind, it made the most sense to have the show really be about Ted and Robin, with a twist. Why else would Ted keep mentioning to his kids how much he loved Robin? That doesn’t mean I’m not bothered by the fact that Barney regresses after a season or two of developing into a more mature character or that I agree with others the finale could have been stretched out all season so the storylines could be better fleshed out. But I can see the reason behind it. With Barney, though he refers to the mother of his child only as “Number 32” it may be more for us viewers to understand that he doesn’t end up in a relationship with her more than him being old Barney.
And though I know the show is about Ted’s journey, it’s not about him becoming the right person for Tracy. It’s his journey back to Robin.
In the end, they both got what they wanted. Robin built up her career and traveled the world, while Ted got to be a dad. We can only hope that whatever differences they may have had in the past, they can reconcile and have a happy future. And Lily will owe Marshall some bet money.
Now, I did promise in the headline I’d talk about what the writers did right with the show. I may not be a big fan of the ending, but HIMYM did a lot of innovative and interesting things while the show was on the air. The show is often cited as one of the most effective transmedia shows, between all the websites, books, and merchandise that was produced to accommodate it. But there’s more to it. Today’s culture is very much about multi-tasking, and there are many elements to HIMYM that allow viewers to enjoy the show while multi-tasking, but doing activities that make the show culturally relevant during and well after new episodes air.
I have a new book about HIMYM, and I hope you find it entertaining and useful. It’s about all the websites, books and other transmedia content created by the show that helped propel the show to success and build a loyal base of fans. You can buy a copy here. If you’re a fellow HIMYM fan, I hope you will enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed researching and writing this book.