We finally saw how Ted finally met the mother of his kids. It was a really nice moment. A nice moment at the end of a very flawed episode of television.
(Spoilers ahead)
The problem with the HIMYM finale simply is that it came too late. If that was the finale of a hypothetical fifth or sixth season, it might have worked. I realize that it’s nearly impossible to turn down CBS when it offers you millions of dollars to continue making your series that peaks at over 10 million viewers a couple times a year. However, all that extra time ruined the story that Carter Bays and Craig Thomas wanted to tell.
It all goes back to the Ted and Stella storyline all the way from Seasons 3-4. Given the show’s established narrative structure, themes, conventions, etc., it was clear from that point on that the Mother wasn’t going to sneak up on us. If it wasn’t 100% obvious already, that plot thread confirmed that the moment of meeting the Mother wasn’t going to happen until the series finale. Stella got as far with Ted as anyone was ever going to without being the Mother.
Given that fact, every plot line involving Ted and a woman was going to feel hollow until we got the flashing neon sign that said, “HERE SHE IS”. The remainder of Season 4 after Ted got left at the altar and even into Season 5 was fine, as we got to see how Ted dealt with overcoming that big deal in his life. Season 5 is also when the Robin-Barney relationship first began, something that injected a lot of new energy to the show.
The opener of Season 6 is when HIMYM first teased Barney and Robin’s wedding. It wouldn’t reveal until that season's finale that it was Barney’s wedding, and it wouldn’t be until far later yet that we learned he was marrying Robin. Nevertheless, that episode is when the show began the end game. It aired on September 20, 2010; tonight was March 31, 2014.
That gap is too wide for the payoff to be satisfying. In Season 5 and really into Season 6, the show basically stopped being about Ted, the ostensible protagonist, and it became about Barney and Robin. It asked the viewers to get invested in Ted’s new crush Zoey, who clearly wasn’t going to be the titular Mother. It had to come up with things for Lily and Marshall to do, as there was no real dramatic tension in their relationship because a thousand flash forwards showed that they never would split up. Their marriage was in just as much mortal peril as Anakin Skywalker was in the Star Wars prequels.
From Season 6 through Season 8, the show basically just put things together in order to break them apart so it could put them back together again. It was marking time, just waiting for the last season to come to finally do the big reveal. Even someone who doesn’t overanalyze TV shows would have gotten the thought at some point: where is this going? Isn’t this supposed to be the story of how Ted met the kids’ mother? Why is it spending all this time on Barney and Robin? There eventually was an answer—Future Ted was still hung up on Robin—but it had to wait until after years of frustration set in to let us know.
So, the finale. It didn’t help its cause that it tried to fit about four episodes’ worth of story into one double-length episode. That made it feel rushed. It also took two storylines that were years in the making—Barney’s transformation from a womanizer into husband material and the Barney-Robin wedding that was the backdrop for every single episode this season—and wiped them away before the second commercial break. Years of buildup gone, just like that.
With Barney, I understand what Bays and Thomas were going for. They wanted him becoming a father to be the thing that finally turned him around. The problem is they had him make too much of that turnaround before getting married. It was an enormous letdown to see him go right back to being his old self when him wanting to be his old self isn’t even why he and Robin split up anyway.
Of course, the buildup for those things pales in comparison to the buildup of how Ted and the Mother would meet. That event is what the show ostensibly turned on, which is ostensibly what Ted’s life turned on. Turns out that Ted meeting a woman who, as far as any viewer could tell, was absolutely perfect for him, who he had a long relationship with, who he had two children with, was yet another speed bump on the way to him getting with Robin*.
Maybe they could have pulled that off if the series was shorter. Maybe. I don’t know. I do know it couldn't do it after nine years. The buildup for that moment ended up larger than I think the writers ever intended, as it’s evident now that the very title of the series was the first of so very many tongue-in-cheek misdirections. With a shorter run, it might have worked. After this much time, it never had a chance.
I think Bays and Thomas wanted the point when Ted holds up the blue French horn in the last shot to be a moment when the viewers shout, “Finally!” at their TV sets. Instead, that moment happened six episodes earlier in “Sunrise” when Ted let Robin go in a pretty embarrassing CGI sequence. After false start after fake out after aborted run after dead end conversation, we seemed to be past the Ted-Robin thing once and for all.
The show went to that well only to pull out an empty bucket too many times. We were all sick of the will-they-or-won’t-they with those two. The finale had enough to it with seeing the main characters’ developments over the years that it didn’t need one last left turn at the end. With about 12 fewer “either Ted or Robin wants it to work out between them but it’s just not going to happen” sequences, the last moment of the series might have been welcome. But at some point, you stop rooting for either Lucy or Charlie Brown and just want to stick a machete into the football.
Had the writers wanted to, they could have scrapped the planned ending and given us Ted and Tracy living happily ever after. It would have been a bit saccharine, but it wouldn’t have been infuriating. We got to know Tracy. She was great. She was just the right person for Ted, more so that Robin ever was.
I doubt Bays and Thomas ever seriously considered going with anything other than the ending they decided on when the conceived the show a decade ago. After all that time and commitment to it, they really couldn’t have done anything else. All that time was its enemy, though, and their big ending suffered greatly for it.
*Maybe! We still don’t know if things work out with them!
