First, I want to explain my absence, I was at Emerald City Comicon in Seattle! I saw a lot of cool cosplays, got some rad comics, and met Ron Perlman. I didn't watch any tv during this trip, but last night was the finale of How I Met Your Mother and I watched. Since there has been a ton of outrage and confusion about the end, I figured I'd throw my two cents on what I ended up coming away from it after my initial confusion.
Warning, the rest of this post will spoil pretty much anything about How I Met Your Mother, so if you haven't seen the last season or even the last episode, don't read this yet. Instead, wait until you have and come back.
Overall, I really, really liked Season 9. However, it had problems that became very apparent with the release of the finale. So in the finale we find out many things, the two biggest revelations being that The Mother (named Tracy) has been dead for six years at the time Ted is telling the story to his kids, and that Ted is in love with Robin and brings a blue french horn to her place and presumably they will live a happy rest of their lives together.
I was confused and a little mad initially after watching the end. On it's face, it seems like it's two series endings that had competed to be the one that won out. Ted being with Robin felt like an end that would have made sense up until this season, while the mother being dead was an end that people had been guessing for a long while but was really foreshadowed this season. During season 9 it did not feel like Ted and Robin could ever be together, which makes the end of them being together feel so forced and contrite to many fans. The real problem of the show though is the narrative framing constraints they gave themselves and how it affected storytelling.
In my opinion, the real problem with Season 9 is that it has to tell two different and conflicting stories, one for "Future Ted" in 2030 telling his kids the story and one for present day Ted. For "Future Ted" he's been telling this story about how every decision he made up until this point led him to their mother. The problem being however that the biggest problem present day Ted faces is getting over Robin, which he needs to do in order to meet the mother. So this season spends a good 2/3+ of it's Ted storylines dealing with Ted's unresolved issues with Robin and how he gets over them. In order to meet Tracy, Ted had to know that him and Robin could never be together. It's only once he resigns having feelings for her that he falls for Tracy. However, the reason "Future Ted" has been telling this story is really because he wanted to tell his kids how much he loved Robin, and that although he loved and cherished Tracy, she was gone and thought he could be happy with Robin.
The point of the end, in my opinion, was to show how everything changes, but some things are constant. In the begining of the show, we are shown many times that Robin and Ted couldn't work as a couple as they were. Ted wanted to meet "The One" and experience pure, true love, have kids and the dream relationship he always wanted. Robin did not want, nor could have kids, and wanted to be someone who was successful in their career and wanted to be responsible for her own success. Ted met "The One" and had kids, they're now teenagers. Robin came to realize once Ted was taken that he was the kind of guy she actually wanted, despite having rejected the idea for all those years. She also had a very successful career, and judging by the home and dogs, was back to living in New York, so she had somewhat settled down in her middle age. At the end, they've both experienced the things they wanted for themselves that had made them unable to be with each other.
The creators foreshadowed Ted's decision in the episode this season called How Your Mother Met Me, Tracy's origin story. We find out that on the same day as the first episode starts, Tracy loses her boyfriend Max to a car accident. She goes on to mention that he was "The One" for her, no matter what. After 5-6 years she starts dating a guy but she's just dating him to do so, she's not in love with him and still considers Max her one true love. After he proposes to her, she makes a speech to Max that even though she would always consider him "The One" he would want her to move on and be able to love someone else and have a good life with them. They will never replace him, but they could be happy together. Tracy was "The One" for Ted. You can tell from how he talks about her that he never stopped loving her, and still considers her "The One." However, she would have wanted him to be happy, and he's been alone 6 years since she died. His story shows non-stop that he always loved Robin and held out hope that they might one day be together. He knows now that she is not what he wanted or needed, but now that he got the thing he wanted, but can no longer have it, he can be happy with Robin. His kids are cool with Robin and can see how much they both love each other, and they are the ones encouraging him to go after her. They want to see their dad be happy because they know that as much as he loved their mother, she's gone. The kids also point out what most fans complained about all along, that Ted clearly loves Robin from the beginning of the show all the way until this season. If the show was truly about the story of how Ted met Tracy, it seems totally out of place and fans got real tired of it. Though it did get irritating the way it was told, it does make sense in context that the story of How I Met Your Mother isn't how Ted met Tracy, but instead that he wants to go after Robin and is telling his kids this story because he wants to emphazie how Tracy was his perfect opposite, in order to bring up the idea of him trying to rekindle his relationship with Robin.
The fact that Ted wasn't telling the story to just tell the story is what got most fans upset. They didn't want to hear that Ted was going back after Robin after finding out in a space of about 1 minute that the mother died and that she died six years beforehand. The season really kind of screwed itself by being about the two days leading up to Ted and Robin's wedding, only to have the finale be all the time after that. The problem was that they had to many cross-purpose reasons for storytelling that they corned themselves into doing. Season 8 was supposed to be the finale season, but they found out pretty early on that they would get one more season, which means that they had to stretch out the ending a whole 'nother season. Season 8 was good, but it felt like they were just prolonging the inevitable. Here with season 9, it feels like they had all the time after the wedding planned out, but for whatever reason couldn't think up a way to write those as whole episodes and instead focused on 22 of 24 episodes on the wedding and then the last 2 episodes on everything else. The problem with the wedding being the focus of the entire season is that in an early flash-forward to 3 years after the wedding in the finale we are shown that Barney and Robin can't make it work even though they love each other, and they get divorced. We are then shown important flash-forwards that establish that after the divorce Robin knows that her locket speech from episode 22 was right, Ted was "The One" for her. But, because of them spending 22 episodes showing Robin accepting Barney as the one she loves and Ted not being right for her and them both moving on, it's hard to then squish them knowing they are right for each other into the last two episodes, and seems contradictory. In reality, this season should have spent the first half of the season and no more on the wedding. Then every flash-forward we saw could have been it's own episode. Though people still would have been mad at the end I'm sure, it would have eased people into the way it ended instead of just going, "Hey remember how for the last 22 episodes we've estasblished Ted and Robin are totally wrong for each other and will never be together? Well in these last two episodes we're going to show that they were really meant to be together all along, they just had to experience some cruical life moments first for it to work."
I was not surprised at all that the mother turned out to be dead. Anyone who didn't think so hadn't paid attention enough throughout the last few seasons. Though I did help in having every hint pointed out to me through the HIMYM Reddit sub, it was still pretty obvious that she was not around. In one of the best episodes of last season, The Time Travelers, Ted spends the end of the episode telling the kids that although he loved his time spent with the mother, he wished he could have had more, and he makes a tearful speech about how she was so close and he never knew it, but it would be another 45 days until he meets her, and that he would have given anything to have spent those 45 days knowing her. It's very romantic, but not something that he would be that emotional about unless she was no longer around. In that end scene, Ted was literally on his knees in tears giving the speech. That was what sealed the deal for me, and was the real big clue. Other small ones included the way he used past tense throughout this season, like in How Your Mother Met Me, where he talks about how no matter how many songs Tracy sang that he heard, that first one was his favorite. The other big clue was an episode near the end, named Vesuvius, in which Tracy says in relation to current Ted and her planning their wedding, 'What Mother is going to miss her daughter's wedding?" And Ted gets real choked up and she tries to distract him with another story. It's clear that at that point they already know she is sick. If just taken at face value, it's a very confusing reaction to have, unless of course they know something we did not about.
Overall, I liked how the show ended. The show had this big habit of making deceiving twist endings. Throughout all 9 seasons, they pulled off multiple episodes where you thought the story was one way, and then they reveal in the end that there was actually a hidden purpose that was the actual reason the story elements happened. It's literally the same way they had Barney propose to Robin. It seemed that the show's favorite thing to do was give you all the pertinent information but mislead you into thinking it was meant for a different purpose. It turns out that that's how the actual story of How I Met Your Mother went. We were given all the information we needed to know that Robin and Ted were meant to be together in the end, but we were led to believe we were being told the story of how Ted met the Mother. While that was true, the real story was that Ted was telling the story of how Ted met the Mother in order to approach the idea of finally moving on and being able to be happy in a life without her. Once this is put into context it re-values everything we've seen so far, because all of the episodes now have a second meaning. Ted is at once telling the story of how his decisions led to him meeting Tracy, but they are also there to show how close him and Robin were and how it was always on his mind, especially now that Tracy is gone. He's bringing up to his kids how important and integral Robin was to him over all these years to justify why he wants to be with her. Though it's an offhanded comment, the kids mention to Ted that they've seen how Robin and Ted interact when she comes over to visit. Since Robin was pretty much absent during Ted's time with Tracy, it can be assumed that she would continue the tradition of "being there for the big moments" and rekindled their friendship once Tracy died. From the way the kids talk about it, Robin has visited more than on a blue moon, enough to see the history Ted and Robin have together before hearing this story confirming that.
The show tricked us, and I'm okay with it, it's a plot device that the creators loved doing, so it's totally in tone with the show. The biggest problem was just that the format of this season does not go well with having to both tell the story of how Ted got over Robin to fall in love with Tracy and how Ted has come to terms with losing Tracy and wants to move on and try again with Robin. In the end, How I Met Your Mother did everything I wanted it to, and it was a wonderful 9 year ride that I will love re-exploring when I rewatch the series from start to finish some time from now on.
Warning, the rest of this post will spoil pretty much anything about How I Met Your Mother, so if you haven't seen the last season or even the last episode, don't read this yet. Instead, wait until you have and come back.
Overall, I really, really liked Season 9. However, it had problems that became very apparent with the release of the finale. So in the finale we find out many things, the two biggest revelations being that The Mother (named Tracy) has been dead for six years at the time Ted is telling the story to his kids, and that Ted is in love with Robin and brings a blue french horn to her place and presumably they will live a happy rest of their lives together.
I was confused and a little mad initially after watching the end. On it's face, it seems like it's two series endings that had competed to be the one that won out. Ted being with Robin felt like an end that would have made sense up until this season, while the mother being dead was an end that people had been guessing for a long while but was really foreshadowed this season. During season 9 it did not feel like Ted and Robin could ever be together, which makes the end of them being together feel so forced and contrite to many fans. The real problem of the show though is the narrative framing constraints they gave themselves and how it affected storytelling.
In my opinion, the real problem with Season 9 is that it has to tell two different and conflicting stories, one for "Future Ted" in 2030 telling his kids the story and one for present day Ted. For "Future Ted" he's been telling this story about how every decision he made up until this point led him to their mother. The problem being however that the biggest problem present day Ted faces is getting over Robin, which he needs to do in order to meet the mother. So this season spends a good 2/3+ of it's Ted storylines dealing with Ted's unresolved issues with Robin and how he gets over them. In order to meet Tracy, Ted had to know that him and Robin could never be together. It's only once he resigns having feelings for her that he falls for Tracy. However, the reason "Future Ted" has been telling this story is really because he wanted to tell his kids how much he loved Robin, and that although he loved and cherished Tracy, she was gone and thought he could be happy with Robin.
The point of the end, in my opinion, was to show how everything changes, but some things are constant. In the begining of the show, we are shown many times that Robin and Ted couldn't work as a couple as they were. Ted wanted to meet "The One" and experience pure, true love, have kids and the dream relationship he always wanted. Robin did not want, nor could have kids, and wanted to be someone who was successful in their career and wanted to be responsible for her own success. Ted met "The One" and had kids, they're now teenagers. Robin came to realize once Ted was taken that he was the kind of guy she actually wanted, despite having rejected the idea for all those years. She also had a very successful career, and judging by the home and dogs, was back to living in New York, so she had somewhat settled down in her middle age. At the end, they've both experienced the things they wanted for themselves that had made them unable to be with each other.
The creators foreshadowed Ted's decision in the episode this season called How Your Mother Met Me, Tracy's origin story. We find out that on the same day as the first episode starts, Tracy loses her boyfriend Max to a car accident. She goes on to mention that he was "The One" for her, no matter what. After 5-6 years she starts dating a guy but she's just dating him to do so, she's not in love with him and still considers Max her one true love. After he proposes to her, she makes a speech to Max that even though she would always consider him "The One" he would want her to move on and be able to love someone else and have a good life with them. They will never replace him, but they could be happy together. Tracy was "The One" for Ted. You can tell from how he talks about her that he never stopped loving her, and still considers her "The One." However, she would have wanted him to be happy, and he's been alone 6 years since she died. His story shows non-stop that he always loved Robin and held out hope that they might one day be together. He knows now that she is not what he wanted or needed, but now that he got the thing he wanted, but can no longer have it, he can be happy with Robin. His kids are cool with Robin and can see how much they both love each other, and they are the ones encouraging him to go after her. They want to see their dad be happy because they know that as much as he loved their mother, she's gone. The kids also point out what most fans complained about all along, that Ted clearly loves Robin from the beginning of the show all the way until this season. If the show was truly about the story of how Ted met Tracy, it seems totally out of place and fans got real tired of it. Though it did get irritating the way it was told, it does make sense in context that the story of How I Met Your Mother isn't how Ted met Tracy, but instead that he wants to go after Robin and is telling his kids this story because he wants to emphazie how Tracy was his perfect opposite, in order to bring up the idea of him trying to rekindle his relationship with Robin.
The fact that Ted wasn't telling the story to just tell the story is what got most fans upset. They didn't want to hear that Ted was going back after Robin after finding out in a space of about 1 minute that the mother died and that she died six years beforehand. The season really kind of screwed itself by being about the two days leading up to Ted and Robin's wedding, only to have the finale be all the time after that. The problem was that they had to many cross-purpose reasons for storytelling that they corned themselves into doing. Season 8 was supposed to be the finale season, but they found out pretty early on that they would get one more season, which means that they had to stretch out the ending a whole 'nother season. Season 8 was good, but it felt like they were just prolonging the inevitable. Here with season 9, it feels like they had all the time after the wedding planned out, but for whatever reason couldn't think up a way to write those as whole episodes and instead focused on 22 of 24 episodes on the wedding and then the last 2 episodes on everything else. The problem with the wedding being the focus of the entire season is that in an early flash-forward to 3 years after the wedding in the finale we are shown that Barney and Robin can't make it work even though they love each other, and they get divorced. We are then shown important flash-forwards that establish that after the divorce Robin knows that her locket speech from episode 22 was right, Ted was "The One" for her. But, because of them spending 22 episodes showing Robin accepting Barney as the one she loves and Ted not being right for her and them both moving on, it's hard to then squish them knowing they are right for each other into the last two episodes, and seems contradictory. In reality, this season should have spent the first half of the season and no more on the wedding. Then every flash-forward we saw could have been it's own episode. Though people still would have been mad at the end I'm sure, it would have eased people into the way it ended instead of just going, "Hey remember how for the last 22 episodes we've estasblished Ted and Robin are totally wrong for each other and will never be together? Well in these last two episodes we're going to show that they were really meant to be together all along, they just had to experience some cruical life moments first for it to work."
I was not surprised at all that the mother turned out to be dead. Anyone who didn't think so hadn't paid attention enough throughout the last few seasons. Though I did help in having every hint pointed out to me through the HIMYM Reddit sub, it was still pretty obvious that she was not around. In one of the best episodes of last season, The Time Travelers, Ted spends the end of the episode telling the kids that although he loved his time spent with the mother, he wished he could have had more, and he makes a tearful speech about how she was so close and he never knew it, but it would be another 45 days until he meets her, and that he would have given anything to have spent those 45 days knowing her. It's very romantic, but not something that he would be that emotional about unless she was no longer around. In that end scene, Ted was literally on his knees in tears giving the speech. That was what sealed the deal for me, and was the real big clue. Other small ones included the way he used past tense throughout this season, like in How Your Mother Met Me, where he talks about how no matter how many songs Tracy sang that he heard, that first one was his favorite. The other big clue was an episode near the end, named Vesuvius, in which Tracy says in relation to current Ted and her planning their wedding, 'What Mother is going to miss her daughter's wedding?" And Ted gets real choked up and she tries to distract him with another story. It's clear that at that point they already know she is sick. If just taken at face value, it's a very confusing reaction to have, unless of course they know something we did not about.
Overall, I liked how the show ended. The show had this big habit of making deceiving twist endings. Throughout all 9 seasons, they pulled off multiple episodes where you thought the story was one way, and then they reveal in the end that there was actually a hidden purpose that was the actual reason the story elements happened. It's literally the same way they had Barney propose to Robin. It seemed that the show's favorite thing to do was give you all the pertinent information but mislead you into thinking it was meant for a different purpose. It turns out that that's how the actual story of How I Met Your Mother went. We were given all the information we needed to know that Robin and Ted were meant to be together in the end, but we were led to believe we were being told the story of how Ted met the Mother. While that was true, the real story was that Ted was telling the story of how Ted met the Mother in order to approach the idea of finally moving on and being able to be happy in a life without her. Once this is put into context it re-values everything we've seen so far, because all of the episodes now have a second meaning. Ted is at once telling the story of how his decisions led to him meeting Tracy, but they are also there to show how close him and Robin were and how it was always on his mind, especially now that Tracy is gone. He's bringing up to his kids how important and integral Robin was to him over all these years to justify why he wants to be with her. Though it's an offhanded comment, the kids mention to Ted that they've seen how Robin and Ted interact when she comes over to visit. Since Robin was pretty much absent during Ted's time with Tracy, it can be assumed that she would continue the tradition of "being there for the big moments" and rekindled their friendship once Tracy died. From the way the kids talk about it, Robin has visited more than on a blue moon, enough to see the history Ted and Robin have together before hearing this story confirming that.
The show tricked us, and I'm okay with it, it's a plot device that the creators loved doing, so it's totally in tone with the show. The biggest problem was just that the format of this season does not go well with having to both tell the story of how Ted got over Robin to fall in love with Tracy and how Ted has come to terms with losing Tracy and wants to move on and try again with Robin. In the end, How I Met Your Mother did everything I wanted it to, and it was a wonderful 9 year ride that I will love re-exploring when I rewatch the series from start to finish some time from now on.
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