Brian explains why the series finale of How I Met Your Mother Was So Bad.
Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of pop culture history that interests me that doesn’t quite fit into the other features.
SPOILERS FOR HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER, A SHOW THAT ENDED A DOZEN YEARS AGO
I have frequently gone on rants in comments sections about the end of How I Met Your Mother, and how much it ruined the show for me, a show that I had really liked up until the ending. But I realized that I didn’t have a central post for my main take on why the ending was so bad, so that I could just link people to it instead of repeating my thoughts over and over again, so this is that.
How I Met Your Mother was a sitcom about a man, Ted Mosby, telling his children in the year 2030 about how he met their mother, which is spread out over the years 2005-2013, which consist of the “real” story of the nine-season series.
The first two seasons of How I Met Your Mother were about Ted (Josh Radnor) and his romance with Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders), who we learned, in a twist, in the very first episode, would specifically NOT be the mother of the kids (the pilot ends with “And that’s how I met your Aunt Robin”). Radnor and Smulders had excellent chemistry, but they broke up in the really well-written second season finale (when the show’s creators, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, weren’t sure if the show would even be renewed for a third season).
At that point, the kids were already starting to age too much, so Bays and Thomas had the idea of having them film an ending at that point that would be used whenever the show ended. The kids would tell their dad, “That’s it? No, I don’t buy it. That is not the reason you made us listen to this. Let’s look at the facts here: You made us sit down and listen to this story about how you met mom, but mom is hardly in the story.”
“No. This is a story about how you’re totally in love with aunt Robin and you’re thinking about asking her out and you want to know if we’re ok with it. Come on, dad. Mom has been gone for six years now. It’s time.”
And then, in a cute callback to the pilot, Ted would reunite with Robin, and they ended up together in the year 2030.
Here’s why that ending, which doesn’t really sound that bad in a vacuum, was so bad.
First off, that ending would have been GREAT in Season 2, or Season 3, and maybe even Season 4, but the problem is that the show evolved way past that point. Again, it ran another SEVEN seasons after that ending was written. But Bays and Thomas, who were devoted TV fans themselves, knew that people often complained about how shows never seemed to have planned endings anymore, and without a plan, shows would sometimes get buried in the weeds by the time it came to a close (think The X-Files, for instance). So they felt that them having an ending filmed after Season 2 was a great twist.
And that was the problem, they became SO obsessed with how innovative they were by filming their ending after Season 2, that they began to write the show AROUND the twist, but in a bizarre way.
Since the creators knew that they had in their back pocket that Ted and Robin would be getting together in the end, they then spent those seven seasons insisting that Ted and Robin DIDN’T belong together. Every season would have a “Maybe Ted and Robin SHOULD be together….nah” moment, and they even a multiple season arc where Robin falls in love with another one of the main characters, Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris), and marries him earlier in the series finale…and then quickly divorce as we fast-forward in time.
Plus, at the end of Season 8, How I Met Your Mother cast the brilliant Cristin Milioti as the Mother, and spent Season 9 getting to know her through flashbacks and flashforwards leading up to the “official” first meeting in the series finale. By this point, way too much time had passed for the show to just do an abrupt “Okay, the mother is dead, but don’t worry, Ted and Robin are back together in the future!” plot. The show’s narrative had passed the point of the ending still working, but the creators stuck to it, and it didn’t work.
They thought that their twist was just SO clever that they went out of their way to protect it, but by making it so that it didn’t make sense any more, so that it could be a “surprise.” The show had moved on, but they were too stubborn to give up their ending that they had filmed, and thought was so clever (SEVEN YEARS EARLIER).
They spent nine years leading to Ted finally meeting the mother of his kids, and then quickly kill her off in the span of SECONDS (they even skipped a planned funeral scene) to then cut to the original ending. There is less than a MINUTE in time between “And that’s how I met your mother” to “Go get Aunt Robin, dad!” In fact, as you can see from the dialogue above, the first time we learn that the mother IS dead is AFTER the kids have already told Ted to go after Aunt Robin!
The original ending only worked because we DIDN’T know the mother. We WEREN’T invested in her. We were invested in Ted and Robin, the main couple of the first two seasons.
So killing off a woman we didn’t know, to get to the couple we had just spent so much time with made sense THEN, but it didn’t make sense after Robin and Barney spent SEASONS getting together and getting married (the entire final season was set at their wedding. They’re divorced before the halfway point of the finale), we spent a whole season learning about (and loving) Tracy in special spotlight episodes on her (via flashbacks and flashforwards), and, again, we had spent multiple episodes making it clear that Ted and Robin weren’t a thing.
And that, kids, is why the How I Met Your Mother finale was so bad.
I actually disagree with much of this, although I do think the finale had a problem with its execution.
I don’t think the writers spent seven seasons proving Ted and Robin didn’t belong together. I think they spent seven seasons showing us why they couldn’t be together then.
Ted had to keep coming back to Robin. He had to love her, lose her, hope again, and eventually watch her marry someone else. All of that was necessary because Ted needed to reach a point where he could genuinely let Robin go. Not because he stopped loving her, but because he needed to be ready to love someone else completely.
And that’s when he could finally meet Tracy.
Tracy wasn’t a consolation prize or a temporary stop on the way back to Robin. She was the love of Ted’s life during that chapter of his life. They built a family, shared a marriage, and had a life together that mattered enormously. None of that becomes less meaningful because she died or because Ted eventually found love again.
But here’s the part I think people miss: Robin had a life, too. She married Barney. That marriage failed. Her career took her places. She experienced her own disappointments, successes, and changes.
By 2030, Ted and Robin weren’t the same two people who couldn’t make things work in 2006. They had lived entire lives. They had loved other people, lost things they cared about, and become different versions of themselves.
And maybe those two people could finally make it work.
I actually think that’s a rather beautiful message about love. Sometimes the timing really is wrong. Sometimes you have to let someone go, not knowing whether your paths will ever come together again. And sometimes life surprises you.
My one criticism of the finale is that it needed a little more room to breathe. I would have loved to see a few moments of Ted and Robin showing up for each other after Tracy’s death. Not necessarily romantic moments, but moments demonstrating how their friendship had evolved and how they had become important parts of each other’s lives again.
That would have made the final scene feel less abrupt and much more satisfying.
But I don’t think the ending betrayed nine seasons of storytelling. I think it completed a story that was always about more than how Ted met the mother of his children.
It was about how life, love, loss, timing, and growing older change us.
And perhaps most importantly, it was about how finding love again doesn’t mean the love you lost mattered any less.
I think that’s a pretty wonderful ending. I just wish they’d taken a little more time getting us there.