How I Met Your Mother: the latest show to fail in the search for a perfect ending
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Version 0 of 1. SPOILER alert: do not read this blogpost if you haven't seen the final episode of How I Met Your Mother. Of all the strange byproducts of television in the age of Netflix and binge-watching, perhaps the oddest is the effect it’s had on the series finale. Back in the days of Seinfeld and Friends (and even M*A*S*H), a finale was a way to give fans a way to say goodbye and to tug at the instant nostalgia the passing of the show creates. Now it’s about creating a legacy. Who is going to go back and buy the DVDs/download all the seasons/buy a subscription to a streaming service to watch five seasons of Lost when half of the voices on the internet think it’s a complete waste of time? Why do they think that? Because of the unsatisfying conclusion. And that’s the problem How I Met Your Mother faced Monday night when wrapping its nine-season run on CBS. If all of the episodes are available online (the first eight seasons are currently streaming on Netflix), who is going to watch them all if it turns out the mother was dead all along and the premise of this highest of high concept sitcoms was a ruse from the beginning? This wasn’t a show about Ted Mosby telling his kids how he met their mother; it was about him trying to ask out their aunt Robin, a woman who, through nine seasons, he has broken up with multiple times and who married his best friend. The genius of HIMYM was its intricate plotting, recurring jokes, and monkeying with linear time. Ted, as a narrator, has 20/20 hindsight, and details from other time periods could be woven in seamlessly to color the action. The show was always peppering us with clues about the big reveal of who the mother was. It turns out that it didn’t matter. We met her at the beginning of this final season and got acquainted with her over time only to have her yanked from us unceremoniously due to a vague “illness” that kills her (as the internet has been theorizing for weeks). In fact, this final episode calls the entire endeavor of this final season into question. It was set entirely over the weekend when Barney and Robin get married and Ted meets The Mother, but now none of that seems to matter. Within the first 20 minutes of the hour-long finale, Barney and Robin are divorced. All the other events of the final season are also undone: Ted is not moving to Chicago, Lily and Marshall jaunt off to Italy and return over the course of a commercial break. Everything we’ve invested all this year into caring about is yanked out from under us. It’s like the show said “legend … wait for it” and we’re all still poised waiting for the “ary” that never came. My favorite thing about HIMYM was that it went from being a show about being single and dating in your 20s to be about leaving your 20s behind and entering your 30s. But it wasn’t enough for the show to end with Barney and Robin married happily ever after, and Ted meeting his dream woman and going on to have children with her. The ultimate satisfaction would have been for all of us to see them grow up. Instead it ended with all of them growing old over the course of one episode. There’s Robin and Barney’s divorce, Marshall’s crappy job and eventual promotion, Robin fading from the group, Barney finally having a kid, The Mother getting sick in dying (it only gets a mention, not even enough time to grieve for this woman we spent nearly a decade waiting for). It all happens in a flash, like getting an email from someone you haven’t seen in 20 years and their recapping their life in a few sentences. All the action seemed so phoney and heightened because it was all so rushed. The finale wasn’t about wrapping up all the loose ends and giving us something satisfying; it was about getting us to a point – the point where Robin and Ted wind up together – that was determined in the show’s second season when the creators came up with the ending. That’s fine. I could live with that, but it’s the road they took to get there. Why spend all that time getting us involved in The Mother if only to snatch her and her yellow umbrella away at the last minute? Why spend an entire season getting us to root for Barney and Robin’s love only to crap all over it immediately? The show’s writers worked very hard for us to buy that Robin and Ted were over each other. Why reverse that decision at the 11th hour? This show wasn’t about meeting a mother at all. It was about two friends falling in love. And that’s a great story. That’s a worthy conclusion, but it’s not the one we were promised. In the show’s pilot we were told that Robin was not the mother, but here we are, in the series finale, being brought back to the blue horn all over again, somewhere we never wanted to be. Yes, she was not the mother, but she was the whole reason for the show after all. It reminds me of when we were told that everyone on Lost wasn’t dead, only to find out that, yup, they were all dead. And this is going to be a problem for the show going into the future. Just like it’s no fun watching The Sixth Sense knowing that what he sees are dead people, it will be no fun watching How I Met Your Mother knowing that he does meet the mother but, well, it doesn’t matter much anyway. (It also does not bode well for the already plagued pilot of spinoff How I Met Your Dad if people think that meeting the dad is irrelevant.) Sure, there were plenty of people who hated the ending of The Sopranos and Breaking Bad (and those that will hate the endings of Mad Men and Parks and Recreation, which haven’t even been conceived yet) but this finale seems to completely sour the show’s legacy – something that is not more important than ever. If the point of the story is not about meeting the mother at all, why would new audiences every spend the time trying to care? They’re going to wish they never met this in the first place. |